The trauma of getting lost in my local Aldi
ILIVE in Ashbourne and every week the wife and I go shopping in Aldi. Unlike some husbands, I’ve never really disliked our weekly shopping trip. We’ve become very efficient at it over the years – we know what we need and we know where everything is, and we can dust it off in 20 minutes.
We follow a set route around the shop, scooping up our regular items, and eventually end up at the tills with a trolley brimming over with our weekly essentials, plus, obviously, a few items we don’t strictly need from that notorious middle aisle.
Every now and then we go away for the weekend, and as we head back home from our travels we usually call into the nearest Aldi to get ourselves stocked up for the week ahead. And it’s always horribly, horribly confusing.
Say we’ve gone to Yorkshire, for example; if we’re driving back through the Pennines we might stop off at the Aldi in Glossop. Everything in this store is exactly the same as the stuff we buy each week in Ashbourne, but it’s in a slightly different place. And it’s enough to send you loopy.
As you walk in, everything seems familiar. Same trollies, same doorway, same posters, same flooring – but then you notice the Super Six shelves are not where they’re supposed to be, or the Foodto-go fridge is in the wrong place.
And as you find your way from product to product, working through the same weekly list, in otherwise familiar surroundings, things get weirder and weirder as you arrive at a dairy aisle when you were expecting to find cold meats. Or you suddenly happen upon tinned goods, when you were hoping for a bar of fruit and nut chocolate.
You come out feeling bewildered, confused, and mentally drained. And, nine times out of 10, you’ll have forgotten something because it wasn’t in the place you expected it to be and you’ve nonchalantly waltzed straight past it.
My wife and I have come to the conclusion that we could shop efficiently in our local Aldi even if we were half asleep, as we’re just plotting the same course, past the same shelves, automatically grabbing what we need as a force of habit.
But a few weeks ago everything changed. The Ashbourne store had a refit. And it’s essentially ruined our weekends.
Our first venture into this brave new world started off OK. The Super Six range had moved slightly, but it was still in a sensible place, and the Food to Go fridge was in the same place, so we felt like we’d got off lightly and we’d be OK. How wrong we were.
We grabbed the usual array of fruit and veg, but it dawned on us we’d only found half of what we
needed for a Sunday roast. The rest of it was nowhere to be seen. And then we moved on to what used to be an extended veg aisle but is now, inexplicably, the dairy fridges.
Cold meats is now set up where bread used to be, bread is now in the crisps section, booze has replaced pizza and pastry items, and we still haven’t fully worked out where tinned goods and sauces are. We did find the rest of the veg, incidentally. It was in the space usually taken up by dog food. Don’t get me started on where the dog food has ended up.
The baking aisle is in the same place, mercifully, but eggs are now nowhere to be seen. And, of course, the sacred middle aisle is still in the middle, but while that’s fine if you unexpectedly get the urge to buy a stepladder, it’s not going to help me find the ingredients for a stir fry.
It’s utter chaos in our local Aldi at the moment. People are just wandering around looking lost, confused and tired. Last weekend we managed to bump into the same woman five times. She actually apologised for our repeated encounters, confessing through almost teary eyes that she’d been in there for nearly an hour trying to find things.
I think she felt a bit less embarrassed when we told her it had taken us almost as long to fill our trolley, and we asked her if she happened to find the Dijon mustard on her 17th lap of the store could she send up some sort of distress flare because we’d really been struggling.
Of course, we will get used to the new layout, eventually. And one day we’ll be able to walk around Aldi without having to suffer the sight of grown men almost in tears because they only came in for some chicken gravy but ended up trudging the aisles aimlessly for three hours.
If you’re reading this, Aldi, please take note: Your new layout looks smart and has doubtless improved many things, but next time please offer detailed maps at the door. Because spending 20 minutes hunting down toilet roll is not how I want to spend my Saturday morning.