As any longtime Aldi shopper will attest, the day an Aldi ad goes live is a fun day. That’s the day when Aldi shelves its latest round of Aldi Finds, all there for shoppers to look over and, more often than not, make plans to buy.
For many years, Aldi straddled two worlds in the way it handled the ad date. In some markets, Aldi put its new Aldi Finds on store shelves on a Sunday, while in other places, Aldi Finds hit shelves on a Wednesday. The reason? For many decades, local newspapers would set aside certain issues for weekly grocery circulars, with some papers opting for Sundays and some for Wednesdays. Aldi, seeking to compete with the local grocers, would be sure its circulars — and, thus, its ads — would be in customers’ hands on the same day the competition tried to do the same.
It appears, though that the question of “does your Aldi ad run on a Wednesday or a Sunday?” has finally come to an end. In the fall of 2023, Aldi quietly — and we mean very quietly — shifted most, if not all, of their stores to a Wednesday ad. We first noticed this ourselves in September. To get the best lead possible on the upcoming ad, we used to select Sunday ad market stores on Aldi’s website … but suddenly we no longer could find a Sunday ad. We nosed around on social media, where a number of shoppers reported their stores converting over.
The change appears all but complete now. If there are Sunday ad stores remaining, we don’t know about them. We figure this could coincide with the decline of print newspapers and print ads, and it may equally be about Aldi streamlining its logistics, as it’s probably easier to coordinate product launches when they all happen on the same day nationwide.
Still, we can’t help but feel a little sadness that Sunday ad stores appear to be going away. After all, it means we have to wait a little longer to see what surprises are coming up in Aldi’s next weekly ad.
The move gives a two day edge over most major supermarkets which change their ads every Friday.
I wondered what had happened! Suddenly it felt like there were no “previews” when I was scrolling my Instagram feed on a Sunday morning. Like you, I tried inputting some zip codes of places I knew were “Sunday stores,” to no avail. I thought maybe I was imagining things. Thanks for the update!
I miss my Aldi’s Sunday ads/new week. My favorite regional store starts the new week on Sunday and this made it easy to go to both of them (if needed) on Monday morning. To keep track of all in my area I now have Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Thankfully they are all near each other so getting the loss leaders or best options doesn’t use too much gas.