Last year I wrote a feature on missing Aldi products, lamenting the absence of a few key Regular Buy items. A couple of people subsequently told me that they’d seen some of those items in their Aldi, although I had not. At the time, I wasn’t sure if perhaps they were mistaking a Regular Buy for a Special Buy.
Then, last summer, I traveled up to the greater Chicago area — not all that far from Aldi HQ in Batavia, IL, in fact — to visit family. Because the family was hosting a nice cookout, I did some shopping over at the local Aldi store.
It didn’t look like mine.
The Aldi, my relatives told me, had been only recently remodeled, and boy, did it look the part. It had a beautiful, clean look, with higher ceilings, brighter lights, and more picturesque walls. That’s all fine and good, of course, but the biggest change was an additional row over what I’d seen at the Aldi stores in my area.
That extra row accomplished two things. One, it gave the store a much less crowded feel. Sometimes Aldi products can be so crammed in — especially in the Special Buy section — that, for me at least, products feel like they’re practically on top of each other. At this larger-format store, things had a bit of space between them, making it easier to find what one needed.
And two: there were things at this Aldi that I’d never seen before. I had noted in my earlier piece that Aldi lacked adult vitamins … and here were Welby Adult Gummy Vitamins. I bemoaned the absence of Regular Buy mouthwash … and here I found Dentiguard Mouthwash. I even sighted steak fries in the Regular Buy section.
(No dental floss, though. Still waiting on that, assuming we still need it.)
So what does this all mean? It means that, as Aldi grows, they are beginning to build new larger stores and to increase the size of some of their existing stores. It’s still a limited inventory store, but some of their locations are less limited than they used to be.
