Aldi, a German supermarket that doesn't offer online shopping, rarely discounts, and never promotes, has become the fourth largest supermarket in the UK.
Anxiety next to the cash register
The cost-of-living crisis has plunged Britain's middle class into "middle-class poverty": they live in nice houses, drive nice new cars, can afford babysitters, have one or two children at home go to private schools, have an SMEG fridge in the kitchen, but just don't have the extra money to buy clothes, take a taxi or go to restaurants. Also, you can't save money on vacation, so you can only save money elsewhere.
In the eyes of today's consumers, shopping at Aldi is the right thing to do (Photo courtesy of TPG/alamy)
One way to save money is to buy groceries at the low-cost supermarket Aldi (known as ALDI in China). Aldi sells restaurant-style pre-made dishes and semi-finished dishes, which are delicious. According to a report published in January by Which?, the UK's largest consumer review website, Aldi is the cheapest supermarket in 2023. It wears this laurel crown year after year. Which?" picked 72 of the best-selling groceries, calculated the price of buying them, and found that at Aldi it was just £129.24, £20 less than Tesco and more than £40 less than the most expensive supermarket, Waitrose.
Aldi, which currently has 1,000 stores in the UK, mostly in wealthy towns and towns, has seen a 1 million growth in customer base in 2023 and has ambitions to open another 500 new stores this year, so that "every Briton can find an Aldi within the nearest distance". Last year, Aldi's full-year sales reached £17.5 billion, an increase of almost £2 billion on 2022 and a new record for Aldi in the UK for 33 years. Giles Hurley, CEO of Aldi UK and Ireland, believes that the pressure from the increased cost of living has caused consumers to betray the old British supermarkets where their families have been shopping for generations and turn to Aldi of German origin.
By all accounts, Aldi is not associated with "high fashion". The store is small, fluorescently lit, and has a stiff, rough look, with no background music, and most of the items are stacked on the shelves in cardboard or plastic boxes. The cashier has a performance appraisal, and has to scan the barcodes of 35~40 items per minute, and their average speed is recorded on the cash register computer, which the manager checks every night. As a result, there was not enough bagging area left at the end of the checkout counter, and the cashier shoved the checkout items over and immediately began to serve the next customer. The customer was "anxious about Aldi" and worried that he wasn't packing fast enough, so he scrambled to pay, put things in the cart, and pushed them out. Sir Philip Green, a British retail tycoon and former owner of the fashion brand Topshop, emphasizes the "shopping experience", but Aldi's cost budget does not have the empty "aesthetics" at all, and the core competitiveness is the preferential price and low price.
Stills from "Fresh".
There are also a small variety of products in the store, about 2,000 kinds, more than 90% of which are private labels, and there is only one choice for each category: a croissant, a smoked salmon, a bacon, and a mushroom meat sauce. Usually there are more than 40,000 kinds of goods on the shelves of large supermarkets, and even as many as 90,000 kinds of Tesco, each of which has several brands of similar products, and consumers can buy enough groceries for their homes at one time. Aldi leaves customers accustomed to shopping around confused, where did everything go, is there any other choice, and where is the pain of comparison and choice?
So, although Aldi entered the UK as early as 1990, by 2009 Aldi's market share was only 2%, and its clientele was basically students or cash-strapped people. Middle-class shoppers see it as a destination for "complementary" shopping, with the supermarket big four remaining at the top of their minds – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons.
The British have a distinctly snobbish eye for cheap shops. In 1991, a reporter for The Times reported on Aldi, describing its store as less than 200 square metres and with only 600 basic items, as a typical "face of an Eastern European grocery store in the '90s, featureless, slightly panicked, and in vain trying to find avocado or kiwi in the store".
Stills from "Modern Family".
In 2007, a lifestyle columnist wrote about her shopping experience at Aldi, saying that Aldi's similar products were indeed much cheaper than the Sainsbury supermarket she frequented, but the cheap and inferior canned meat, the tattered cardboard boxes on the shelves, the impatient clerks, and the disgusting atmosphere made people feel depressed and wondered if the money was worth saving. Theo Paphitis, a retail entrepreneur and judge of the BBC business investment reality show Dragon's Lair, once said, "I'd rather be blind with a needle than shop at Aldi."
Peter Jackson, a professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, said that British consumers' choice of supermarkets also reflects how they perceive their social class and status, and that Brits seem to want an environment where they are "surrounded by people who are similar to themselves" so that they feel comfortable together.
The same point was expressed by former British Prime Minister David Cameron. Mr. Cameron, who has always presented himself as an elite middle-class customer, is a regular customer of the high-end supermarket Waitrose, which he says is "very talkative and very easy to get along with" and is far "easier to deal with" than customers at other supermarkets. The remarks sparked controversy, with observers arguing that Cameron meant that Waitros' customers were more middle-class.
Aldi does not shop online, does not support home delivery, and customers must shop in-store in person (Photo courtesy of TPG/alamy)
Aldi supermarket with class characteristics eliminated
The turnaround occurred in 2008. This year, the global financial crisis broke out, and the inflation rate rose to more than 5%. The North Rock Bank was nationalized, Lehman Brothers collapsed, companies laid off employees, and people's wallets shrank. Hypermarkets have inflated prices in line with inflation and want to maintain high profit margins of 7%. Under multiple economic pressures, consumers who want to save money are forced to turn to low-cost supermarkets.
Going to Aldi is like going to church, it may not be fun, but it's the right thing to do. Consumers find themselves looking at cheap goods and are more willing to look at the good parts of the product to justify not buying expensive products. Since there is no difference in quality, why spend more money to buy the brand story of the product and pay for the company's marketing? At the same time, the consumer eliminates the embarrassment of buying a bargain and enjoys the joy of finding a bargain, turns around and walks into a cheap supermarket, and there is no turning back when he enters the door, and Tesco and Masha have become complementary stores that they only go to occasionally. In order to retain consumers, supermarkets such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer will mark "the same price as Aldi" on the price tags of some products, and Tesco has also launched its own discount chain Jack's.
Aldi has risen. With food prices in the UK rising at the fastest pace in 45 years over the past two years, Aldi became the fastest growing supermarket in the UK, overtaking Morrison to become the fourth largest supermarket in the UK last year, according to a report by Kantar, a market research and consulting firm.
According to Aldi, half of their customers now belong to the higher socioeconomic group. Part of the reason for the shift in customer base is that the British, who like to talk about class issues the most, have no class when it comes to food, and the basic diet of postmen and financiers is almost the same, eating cereal, bread, cheese, beer, ketchup, which allows Aldi to remove class characteristics from consumers.
Aldi itself has changed.
Stills from "Super Supermarket".
Today, you won't find the hopeless "Eastern European experience" in Aldi, but you'll find avocado and kiwi, and even French sourdough bread, Manuka honey, Italian prosecco and 36-day-old Angus sirloin steak. R&D followed the trend with caviar creams, protein bars and chia seeds, and Aldi diapers were the second most popular brand in the UK, behind Pampers. Bread and eggs were placed on the last shopping aisle, near the cash register. This way the bread and eggs are placed on top of all the items in the shopping cart and are not crushed, which is what Aldi's managers have concluded after carefully observing people's shopping behavior, which is rarely arranged in other large supermarkets. These are also impressive for people who look down on cheap supermarkets.
The service has changed. Earlier, customers had to rent a trolley with a deposit of £1 coin, or they had to shop with the cardboard boxes in the store, unable to write cheques or swipe their cards. After 2014, Aldi began offering shopping baskets and accepted credit card payments. The cashier will smile and chat with you, "I'm going to leave work soon, so I'm laughing all the time." Of course, the "Aldi scare" at the cash register is still there. But Aldi's barcodes are different. If it is a cube package, there will be 4 barcodes, 2 on the side and 2 on a larger flat surface. There are 3 barcodes on the butter box, 2 barcodes for 1 bag of vegetables, and a barcode on the canned food that wraps around the half of the jar. As a result, no matter what kind of gesture the cashier holds the product, he can quickly scan the code without having to find a barcode to delay time. The packing area behind the checkout counter is still small, so customers can put the checkout items back in the empty trolley, and outside the checkout counter is a whole wall of glass with a long sorting table where you can bask in the sun and transfer items to tote bags. This is Aldi's proud "Sunshine Packer".
Panic and rush are the shopping experiences Aldi has designed. When you calm down and sort out your shopping at the Sunshine Packing Area, you'll realize that the cost of this truckload is lower than you expected, and on the way home, you'll find that this shopping trip takes less time than going to other supermarkets. What's more, instead of enduring the panic and rush to save money, you realize that "saving money" makes shopping a pleasure in itself, what Aldi's management calls "the thrill at the checkout counter."
Stills from "Sleepless in the Supermarket".
We hate waste of any kind
You don't have to bring a shopping list with you to Aldi, because you never know what you'll see that will catch your eye. I can't help but want to buy items, especially those on the "middle aisle" for a limited time, and if you miss it today, you won't be able to buy it tomorrow.
The Aldi store faces the whole glass wall, and the other three walls are placed against the wall are vertical fresh-keeping cabinets, freezers and wine cabinets, which are clean and bright, and the passage is spacious, which makes people feel happy. Turning into the middle of the store, you immediately have the illusion of entering a dumping hypermarket: on both sides of the passage are three-tiered terraced shelves, on which are stacked cardboard boxes, the goods are thrown in the crates in an orderly manner, and they are not arranged according to the category at all, towels and hair dryers are placed next to the pasta, children's toys, cushions and bottled spices, air fryers, champagne glasses are placed together, and some product packaging boxes are torn open by customers, and slippers and underwear are turned into a mess - "middle passage" (Middle-aisle) is precisely the sales strategy invented by Aldi: after buying household necessities, saving so much money, you can give yourself some rewards, buy something that makes me happy, go to the middle aisle and enter the reward stage, and the shopping finally becomes, I was only going to go in and buy a bucket of milk, but I ended up carrying a paddle board out.
The "middle aisle" products are frequently changed, the quantity is limited, and the unpredictability of the product is reinforcing the impulse of customers. For example, French-style pesto rusk chips will be available in March, and a 2.5kg can of scented candles will cost only £25, saving £160 compared to the same Jo Malone candle. Someone bought the motor for the garage door in Aldi. Every year on Christmas Eve, Aldi sells a limited-edition plush toy, "Kevin Carrot", which is sold on eBay at a premium of 3 times. Some Kevin collectors buy every year, line up outside the store at 5 a.m., and then post photos on social media of her waiting to open the door with a steaming thermos mug. One year, there was a stampede in a panic shop, and an adult man snatched a carrot from a 4-year-old boy, causing the police to come.
Middle Passage merchandise that caused a stir included thermal underwear, which sold 300,000 units in a week, paddle boards, inflatable hot tubs, Lord of the Rings towels, and air fryers. At a time when the British didn't know what an air fryer was, Aldi was the first to sell it. Aldi introduced the traditional German Christmas bread Storon and popularized the dessert to the British. Aldi's fresh food is cheaper than almost all the big supermarket chains, and the profits on "middle channel" goods are more than double the profits of food, and it is up to the middle channel to recoup profits.
Stills from "It's Cheap, Maxima Supermarket".
"Carrot Kevin" sells once a year, but people's love for "Middle Passage" is year-round. The "middle aisle" is hung and printed with the slogan "Once there is no more, it is gone"; If you don't buy it today, you won't buy it tomorrow." It's just a daily commodity, but it creates a "scarcity" that only luxury goods have. So popular, why not sell more, sell longer?Aldi replied, this is to avoid overstocking, we hate any kind of waste.
Not wasting even makes Aldi a disruptor in the supermarket industry. Amazon and Uber have disrupted the book industry, the taxi industry, and with the power of the Internet and smartphones, Aldi seems to be unimpressed by new technologies. It does not create a customer database, does not issue loyalty cards, does not care about the various preferences of customers, does not care about the so-called loyalty, and does not provide e-commerce services and does not provide home delivery. According to statistics from British authorities, when it comes to online shopping, the British and Japanese are tied for second place, second only to South Koreans. Aldi ignores the need for online shopping and continues to be based on cost considerations. Every supermarket that has developed e-commerce services has found that the profits of fresh groceries are very low, the distribution costs are high, and it is difficult to make money from online sales, but it is a cost consumption that has to be consumed in order to retain customers. Andy Clarke, the former owner of Asda, once told the Sunday Times that if the big four supermarkets were given another chance, "they wouldn't have offered home delivery."