We have always had good produce at Aldi, and any time it wasn’t, it was something that they could not have known about. Several years ago, we got a watermelon from Aldi and it was literally mush inside, like someone had taken a blender to the insides of the watermelon. Maybe, it had somehow been frozen in transport or something. Anyway, we sent Aldi and email (at least I think that was how we contacted them. they sent me a letter with a $10 gift card and instructions to get another free watermelon as well. I have gotten really bad produce from walmart, and if I email them about it, they take the cost off the order and refund it, but they have never done anything else.
I got a canned response from ALDI, sent at 8:30AM their time. I'll wait to see what the lettuce people have to say before deciding if I'll respond to ALDI. Their not having an expiry date on the same product that others stores include is overtly deceitful. That's not a bad idea. In a world of fast food and convenience items, if that makes sure you put a healthy salad on the table, it's the smart thing to do. I have a vacuum seal machine. I pre-make my salads and keep them in a 1 gallon vacuum container, where they [generally] stay fresh for a week or more, depending on the starting quality of the lettuce.
I've changed a lot of habits since it's just me. Food is a different process than it was when I was feeding a family. It took me awhile to get used to those changes. I don't like eating out often anymore. It may be just me but the restaurants don't seem as good as they once did. However, I am going out with family on Sunday. It took an hour for everyone to agree where to go and they ended up picking the same old place. We don't have Aldi here but we do have lots of grocery stores and restaurants. I don't especially like the idea of living in a city but the availability and choice on food is great. There is also a Whole Foods but it has never appealed to me and a variety of small ethnic markets but I usually don't go to those either. Yvonne, I don't buy produce or meat from Walmart but the prices are better on pantry items, pet stuff and paper goods, etc. John, I like your idea of sealing up produce to keep it fresh but it wouldn't really be worth it to me now when fresh is so close and everything is only for one person. Besides my big salad-a-week, I buy fresh veggies like baby carrots, tomatoes, sometimes celery, cucumbers, Valencia onions and other things to eat raw that are more nutritious than lettuce. I just get a few at a time and something different the next time.
@Vada Bloom I go to Charlottesville once a week to shop because the produce at my Walmart and Food Lion are horribly lacking. The local places are a 16-18 mile round trip. Charlottesville is a 52 mile round trip. (But there is no traffic here, and most of the roads are 55MPH.) I just made my second trip to Charlottesville this week because I had to throw away the lettuce I got there on Wednesday, and I can't survive without my salads. This is the downside to country living. It's much different than living outside of DC where I had 4 well-stocked grocery stores less than a mile from home...but I ain't moving back.
Since writing the OP for this thread, our Save-A-Lot has closed, so now Hannaford is the only choice. That's okay with me because I didn't like Save-A-Lot anyhow.
You need to report to the Aerogarden thread. For a relatively small investment you could have fresh-picked lettuce all the time.
We do about half our shopping in Aldi , their meat is good as is their nice fresh veggies , then I usually go to Woolworths if they have items on special , like my English breakfast tea bags ( usually half price ) as well as about once a month I’ll buy a freshly cooked chicken , I don’t buy a chicken if it’s been sitting in the warmer for longer than 1/2 hour ( they have a time stamped on the barcode/ sticker ) Then we go to Drakes which is in a different town , that store comes under a group of independently owned group of shops ..unlike WW and Coles When away mainly shop at Coles to collect flybuys points ( we don’t have a Coles where we live )
I took a look, and your ALDI is the same as ours, Kate. There are 2 ALDI chains, each run by a son of the woman who began the business and each with their own market. The produce sold by ALDI in the states is questionable, and is the subject of many internet articles. Lots of folks here are hesitant to buy it because of poor quality and a short shelf-life (meaning it's on the verge of being spoiled when purchased.) I think they can sell cheap because they purchase marginal quality here (although @Yvonne Smith has not had an issue.) And with the case of that lettuce, I'm sure they told the vendor to stop putting an expiry date on it so that they would not have to pull them from the shelf when it was past its prime. That makes me angry. I sent them an email that my lettuce was rotted because they censor the expiry dates, and all they did was reply with a copy of their return policy.
We’ve lived here 18 years and all we had when we moved here was a dirty looking run down Woolworths and a tiny Drakes store, so for the first 5 years we did prob 90% of our fresh food shopping in Adelaide, Aldi opened in Adelaide near Costco about 3 years before they built/ opened the one here ( I tried to look it up and the council had a bit saying they approved Aldi being built in late 2018 )….. id love to see a Coles built here . I’ve never had an issue with anything I’ve bought from Aldi We now have an extended WW ..it’s still grotty ….Drakes in the town near us ( that’s was called Foodland originally ) Drakes in the town 20 km from us where we mainly shop , as it’s only 7 km from WW and Aldi . All other main shops like hardware / garden shops / cheap,as chips / reject shops / clothing/ furniture are in same town WW and Aldi it’s refereed to as the shopping hub of the area @John Brunner
My country is growing, and has a sizeable business district off of the interstate right near the border of another county. Other than Walmart and a couple of Food Lions, there are no grocery stores...and those two are lower quality. People here have been clamoring for another grocery store to come here, but it seems that the numbers don't work for the businesses. I can imagine customers from my county and parts of 4 others shopping there, but I imagine they know more than I do.
This is the Churchill centre where we do 99% of our food shopping in Adelaide , it’s right next to Costco https://www.realcommercial.com.au/f...-400-churchill-road-kilburn-sa-5084-502937526 The video here on the link gives one a good idea of the shops …. we also get our BP scripts here where we greeted by the chemist as soon as we walk in the door , DH went in there by himself last Friday after seeing our GP , and right away our chemist said “Where's K” ?? he’s a good as a doctor IMO , I went into the chemist one day with a side effect of the new BP pills ( I had swollen legs ) and without hesitation he phoned my GP cause he was concerned . Where the Churchill centre is , it was where the old stinky trains were stored / repaired, some very old huge stone railway buildings are still standing . The area shops are not very old I’d say as a rough guess maybe 8 ~ 9 years , Costco actually opened a few months before the CC cause we joined Costco about 6 months before it opened ( anyone that joined was allowed to go into the warehouse to have a look ) but we couldn’t buy anything till the offical opening @John Brunner
That's interesting because when I think of Woolworths, that store is very familiar to me, and probably to most people in the United States because F.W. Woolworth was one of the first five-and-dime stores here. Opened in 1913, it went out of business in 1993. It appears that it didn't close entirely because some of its subsidiaries and interests bearing the same name survive in other countries, including Woolworths Supermarkets in Australia and New Zealand, operating as a separate company but with historical ties to F.W. Woolworth.
I was thinking along the same lines. My dad managed G.C. Murphy stores his entire career, and all those old-school retail places were kind of a community. The managers all knew each other. (Murphy's was founded in 1906, and their last store shut down in 1989.) I was surprised to see Kate post about Woolworth's. I had no idea that vestiges of it were left.
I clearly remember my first introduction to Woolies as most Aussies call it , in the town where I lived I would have been about 15 years old ( I did all the food shopping ️ on my push bike ) We shopped at the corner store ….OMG I left my home town in 1971 and I can still picture the corner store in Ryan street . Many would go to the corner store to get the daily paper , that came out about 4 pm every day , if it was late for some reason many would just stand outside the store and wait for it to be delivered, then they’d be like a mob of vultures getting their copy of the Barrier Miner ……oh and there was a Morning paper called the barrier daily truth Before that we only had corner shops and Coles in “town” but they didn’t sell food items it was mainly clothing / homewares and small electric drills / spanners . clothing was not on hangers everything was on about 4 foot high island cupboards