We Attempted the Aldi Blind Box Giveaway. Here’s Our Take.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Like all posts on Aldi Reviewer, this piece is the opinion of its respective authors. Also like all posts, comments are welcome, although we ask readers to be mindful of our Community Guidelines.

During the last full week of June 2026, Aldi decided to do a giveaway. In this giveaway, a very limited number of mystery boxes — “blind boxes” — would be handed out each day, over the course of four days. Those boxes would go to whoever could jump onto a website fast enough and check out.

We saw warnings signs the moment Aldi announced the giveaway. It’s no secret that Aldi has a devoted cult fandom that is well known for showing up in big numbers. That cult has repeatedly swamped stores over the opportunity to claim a wine Advent calendar or any number of other viral sensations. Aldi superfans have also jumped at giveaways, including when they swarmed a website in September 2025 in hopes of scoring one of 1,000 free oversized shopping bags.

The free oversized bag giveaway, in particular, offered a preview of what might happen with the June 2026 blind box giveaway. While we didn’t cover the bag giveaway, plenty of people talked about it, and not for the better. One Reddit thread, for example, chronicled the various technical problems people faced queuing up for the free bags, while another thread showed screenshots of a troubled wait line.

None of that seemed to stop tons of people from descending upon aldiblindbox.com promptly at noon Eastern time on June 22, 2026, hoping to press buttons fast enough to get through to the Holy Grail that is an Aldi blind box. To be sure, this was an audacious giveaway: from the description, it sounds like these would be refrigerated boxes, since the press release hinted at meats and cheeses.

People had things to say about the first day of the blind box giveaway. On social media and Reddit, we saw the (unsurprising) accounts of shoppers frustrated by the process. Some people talked about people waiting for more than a half hour in a queue that ultimately led them to a screen saying the boxes had sold out. We got similar reactions in the comments of our own post previewing the giveaway.

Up to that point, we hadn’t attempted the giveaway ourselves. But on Thursday, June 25 — the last day of the giveaway — I decided to dive in, if only to see exactly what other shoppers were seeing.

Interestingly, about 40 minutes before the start of Thursday’s giveaway, Aldi announced on social media that it was adding a fifth day on Friday, June 26. The store said it was “dropping 5,000 MORE Blind Boxes. Why? Because when the fans get loud, we respond with an encore. The Encore Blind Boxes are available tomorrow (6/26) featuring a mix of products from all four of this week’s box drops.”

Meanwhile, at 11 a.m., I stepped into Thursday’s contest.

Thursday, July 26, 2026 – 11:00 a.m. – Captchas Everywhere

The first hurdle I had to leap was three different Captchas verifying I was a human. Apparently, identifying sloths was on today’s menu. That took a bit. It also made me wonder if smart bots out there had already leapt over these human detection screens before I’d even finished clicking.

11:00 – Into the Queue

Within, say, 30 seconds, I’d tapped my way past the Captcha and into the queue line. It first said it was calculating the time, then by 11:01 had given me an estimate. 7 minutes, it said.

From what I’d already seen elsewhere, I didn’t have much hope that I was going to actually get anything at the end of 7 minutes. But I stuck around.

11:07 – The End is Nigh. Or Is it?

At 11:07, the screen told me time was almost up. I readied myself for a new screen telling me I had failed.

That’s not what happened.

11:08 – The Timer Resets Itself

At 11:08, rather than a game over screen, I got a revised countdown timer of 16 minutes, which did nothing to make me more optimistic that this journey was going to end in anything other than defeat.

But hey, I stuck around.

Or, rather, I put my phone next to me and worked on other things while the timer ticked down.

11:23 – The (Second) Final Countdown

By 11:23 a.m., I was back down to the same screen I’d seen at 11:07 a.m. I have to admit at this point that I didn’t know what to expect next. Would I finally get a failure screen? Or would the clock reset again? I figured there was a 50/50 chance of each.

Notice I wasn’t including success as one of the options, because I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Not that I needed confirmation, but when I’d checked in on the site on a different device at 11:15, I got the message I would have expected: sold out.

Still, I was invested. So I watched. And waited.

11:24 – Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

No final screen, just a newly revised estimate of 12 minutes. After waits of 7 and then 16 minutes, I was now at an estimate somewhere in between. I put my phone aside and continued writing about an Aldi air filter.

11:35 – Third Time’s a Charm?

More than a half hour in, and for the third time I was staring at an estimate of around a minute. This time I was reasonably sure the next screen would be the final one, since a half hour seemed to be the time most people were reporting being told they were out.

11:36 – The Inevitable Conclusion

36 minutes after I first clicked the button to claim my prize on aldiblindbox.com, I was told I would not get a prize on aldiblindbox.com. Out of stock, it said.

Friday, July 26, 2026 – 11:00 a.m. – The Encore Box

Remember how Aldi said it heard its fans, so it was going to do an encore box day on Friday, 26, 2026? I figured I might as well see how that goes. So just before 11 a.m., I hopped on aldiblindbox.com again.

At 11 a.m. I refreshed. I was first greeted by a glitchy sold out box. When I refreshed the screen, it showed the claim button, which I clicked.

I won’t show all the screenshots of what happened next, because they looked more or less like what happened on Thursday. I clicked some sloth images to get through the Captcha, sat through about 5 minutes of waiting, then the screen refreshed to 17 minutes, then to 16, and then some other timers I lost track of before I finally got the rejection screen.

This round was worse, because in this case the queue didn’t time until nearly an hour had passed.

My Thoughts:

Any time you have a limited giveaway, you will have few winners and many losers. That’s the nature of the game, and that’s not something I have problems with here, even if some fans probably wish Aldi had given out more boxes.

Instead, our problem lies with the process, particularly the technical side. Based on past experience, we suspected the Aldi Blind Box Giveaway would have problems, especially with the crush of people trying to score them. I think other shoppers probably saw the problems coming, too. That doesn’t make it any less disappointing for us to see that it panned out that way.

No Aldi shopper should be left sitting in a queue for 56 minutes for a giveaway that had already sold out 54 minutes earlier. Fans also shouldn’t be dealing with queue timers that aren’t reliable. While I don’t begrudge a company for cultivating a fanbase and building hype by offering limited giveaways, I think it’s important for the company to make sure their process respects that fanbase and its time.

A lot of fans seem to agree, as they voiced their displeasure early and often on Aldi’s social media.

We’ll see what the company decides to do about it going forward.