Renewed Growth of Discount Grocers Prompts Return Visit to Aldi

Discount grocers sales are booming again, with growth levels not seen since the recession of 2008. Aldi is up 21% in the last three months and Lidl not far behind at plus 16%. Their combined market share has reached an all time high of 6.1%. Kantar Worldpanel who monitor this data, say that unlike 2008, the growth is coming mostly from existing customers buying more, rather than new shoppers.
So I went back to Aldi after an absence of three years to look again at what it is that generates such customer loyalty.

Well, the main attraction remains rock bottom prices. At Aldi you can buy a kilo of British beef mince for £2.40 ( at least £4 everywhere else unless very high fat content), a kilo of Jersey Royals for 49p (Tesco’s best price for new potatoes is 69p), and nectarines for less than 18p each compared with 25p at Tesco.

Packaged goods prices are low too, certainly in comparison to the leading brands, with coffee at £1.69p for 100g compared with Nescafe at £2.40p, and jaffa cakes at just over 3p each versus McVities at 8p. Interestingly their jaffa cakes contained 11% orange juice compared with 8% for McVities.

Aldi seems to have improved the feel of shopping in its stores. There are nods to food trends with free range chicken and eggs on sale, and they stock alot of British food. The store was clean and bright and the staff cheerful and helpful.

Aldi’s pursuit of low prices has downsides. Fresh food has to be carefully selected – the strawberries were mouldy today and there was no date code on the potatoes. It stocks few brands you will have heard of, and the range remains limited to essentials.  Quality is not always great. The jaffa cakes were entirely acceptable, but the coffee tasteless.

There are irritations too. It is annoying to have to find a £1 coin to unlock the trolley, but the system ensures no one has to be paid to fetch trolleys back to the store. There are no baskets for doing a small shop, because that would require additional investment. There is no bag packing at the till because that would slow the cashier down. Instead the system requires the shopper to unload the trolley at one end of the belt, fling everything back into the trolley at the other end, and move to a different area to pack.

But having said all that, regular shoppers will have adapted to the system. They will know which products deliver the quality they want and which do not. We know that many people are budgeting more tightly than before, and thinking carefully about how much they spend and where.

Aldi seems to be offering what its loyal shoppers want.