"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 17:40:24 on Tue, 27 Sep
2016, Neil Williams remarked:
What's better about Aldi than Tesco, if not the prices?
It's certainly not the range of products or length of checkout queues.

Simple price and price/quality ratio primarily, but also a smaller shop
meaning it doesn't take as long to complete a weekly shop.

You've never been in a Tesco Express, then?

A smaller range of products *can* be a good thing, provided it is very
well selected, which by and large it is.

Their product range is extremely unpredictable. Only yesterday I went in
to buy something they've had for sale for a few months, and they've
obviously churned their stock in that [soft drinks] aisle from "Summer" to
"Autumn" and it's no longer available.

They also never stock quite a few really basic things (sour cream is
something I think is on that list, and yet they sell lots of 'other'
Tex-Mex stuff).

The other thing they do, which is sort of clever but backfires, is packing
several varieties of the same thing in one tray.

So they'll have a pile of mixed trays of cottage cheese, cottage cheese
with pineapple and cottage cheese with something else [chives maybe], and
people have gone through picking out all the plain cottage cheese, leaving
a sorry pile of all those other sorts that no-one [especially me] wants.

Of course, their non-food takes these features to extremes, with much of
the stock being for sale for only a few weeks a year, and bins full of
clothing that within a day or two are entirely the unpopular sizes no-one
wants.

It is clear from the piles in the vacuum packed pasta selection that I am
not the only person who doesn't like gnocchi.

You have to go back 4 or 5 times to be lucky enough to find one or two of
the tortellini selection amongst the 100+ packs of gnocchi. (or
alternatively they are short dated - on one occasion shorter than the date
on the equivalent item in the fresh pasta selection, because they had kept
all the new packs hidden out the back waiting for the million over-purchased
packs of gnocchi to sell.)

Quite how Aldi cannot learn from this and realise that they need to order
from their suppliers in 40-40-20 ratio rather than 33-33-33 defeats me. I
thought they prided themselves on their management ability

tim