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When Will An Aldi Find That Is Out of Stock Be Back?

We get our share of emails (some of them more interesting than others), but some of the most common questions we hear are about Special Buys (or Aldi Finds)*. The questions go something like this:

The trend among these questions, as you might guess, is that people have gone to Aldi, can’t find an Aldi Find, and are wondering when their next opportunity will be to get that product.

First, the bad news: in most cases, you can’t expect to see the product again any time soon. While Aldi does stock certain products for stretches of time during the year — the grocer calls these Seasonal Favorites or Seasonal Items — anything that is an Aldi Find is stocked just once during the window it’s in the ad. In other words, a store might get, say, 10-15 of a specific item, and once it’s gone, that store isn’t going to stock any more in the near future. Even if the item is really popular, Aldi doesn’t restock those products.

How long will I have to wait?

Assuming the product is gone from the shelves, how long will it be before it comes back?

It depends on the product, but in our experience there are one of three possibilities:

Some Aldi Finds reappear more than once a year. There are some instances where certain limited-run products come back to Aldi after just a few months. This seems most common with certain food items as well as smaller products. For example, some regional or ethnic foods reappear a few times a year — or even once every couple of months — as do, on some occasions, specific car-related accessories.

Some Aldi Finds will see a variation on that product at some other time of the year. We see this happen from time to time. Perhaps Aldi will sell a deep fryer earlier in the year, then sell a mini-deep fryer later on. Or Aldi will sell a large slow cooker at one time of the year, and a smaller one later. Or maybe Aldi will sell a Belgian waffle maker at one point, and a traditional waffle maker at some other time. Or different types of flashlights, or stand mixers, or skillets, or Instant Pot clones, or lawn equipment … well, you get the idea. These aren’t identical products, but depending on your needs you might be able to find something similar to what you’re looking for.

Some Aldi Finds are strictly a once-a-year thing. In our experience, this is the most common category for limited-run items, especially the big stuff. Most ALDI Finds that we see happen during a specific time of the year, and once they leave the store, we don’t see them again until around the same time next year. Tents and other camping supplies, for example, appear in the late spring, swimming gear pops up in the summer, while Christmas lights show up in the late fall. Often, these annual products tend to reappear around the same time each year, although that’s not always true.

Some Aldi Finds never come back at all. We occasionally hear people complaining about how Aldi doesn’t listen to customers when it comes to what it stocks, but in our experience Aldi shows signs of listening to customers quite a bit, both through consumer feedback and also through sales numbers. Sometimes Aldi will listen to consumers and revamp a product for the next year, but other times the grocer will decide to pull the item from the rotation permanently. As an example: Aldi US used to sell both desktop and laptop computers, but we haven’t seen either of these products since 2016. (We also miss the Belmont Strawberry Piñata Cake.)

So if you’ve missed out on an Aldi product and you’re hoping to see it again, there’s a decent chance you will. But, as far as how long you’ll have to wait … well, that depends. You can always contact Aldi and ask.


* Different Aldi divisions in different countries use different terms to describe limited-run items. For the purposes of this article, we’ll use the U.S. term Aldi Find, but in other countries those products are called Special Buys or Specialbuys.

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7 Comments

  1. tried all purpose reliance cleaner spray–really liked it–will it be available in West Mifflin or Homestead Aldi stores–even cleaned my rings without spraying them. hoping you will have good news.

    1. That would be the Radiance cleaning spray. It arrived at my local Aldi stores in the Midwest earlier this year and has stuck around. I don’t know about other locations, though.

  2. is anyone really listening to customers requests? I know a lot of things are buyouts–but if such a good seller is marked Aldi product it would be beneficial to try and get it again–only to bring customers into stores for more shopping

  3. Will the battery for drill be back in soon i got the drill and charger but for the battery will they be back in store soon

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