[PaulRobinson]

In the UK I prefer Lidl to Aldi for reasons I can't quite fathom, and the pricing is within pennies of each other. Interestingly many of the middle-of-the-road supermarkets like Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrison's and Tesco now price match a ton of their own brand essentials to Aldi as loss leaders to try and get people in store. It's not quite enough to make it the default shop though.

What's kind of interesting is that in some sectors (wine, whisky, bakery), Lidl has started to win quality/tasting awards against premium retailers like Waitrose and M&S Food. But the prices are still down on the floor in comparison.

The only downside is the range can be limiting. Want to buy some fresh tarragon? Maybe some pods for your coffee machine? You're going to have to head elsewhere.

[willyt]

I used to use tesco delivery for my big food shop in London. They were hopeless though always late, leaving other peoples shopping and they did mad substituting like tinned spaghetti instead of spaghetti where pasta shells would make more sense. I would buy £150 of stuff at a time and once I put the same order into Ocado which was the online shop for Waitrose, the poshest British supermarket chain. It was about £2 more on a £150 order and the delivery was cheaper. They turned up on time, there were no substitutions. I noticed that although there was a much larger selection of luxury items in waitrose, basic ingredients (pasta, flour, carrots, potatoes, tinned tomatoes, meat, fish) cost pretty much the same in all uk supermarkets, apart from Lidl/Aldi who are sometimes slightly cheaper. Waitrose makes money by tempting us to upgrade on basic items. Lidl makes money by selling us weird stuff in the middle of the store that we don’t need and by being more efficient with the number of staff in stores.

[yourusername]

>In the UK I prefer Lidl to Aldi for reasons I can't quite fathom

Maybe it is how the stores look? In NL Lidl looks like a normal supermarket that just happens to be cheap. Aldi is like someone went out of their way to make a supermarket as ugly and uncomfortable a shopping experience as possible.

[phatfish]

Maybe you have the "other" Aldi (Nord) in NL? In the UK the Aldi stores are quite nice. Far less pallets dropped on the shop floor and most of it on shelves. They are generally smaller shops and VERY busy though, which is all that is stopping me from using them regularly.

I think they reached the point in the UK that everyone willing to put up with chaos in store was already shopping there, so they had to start competing with the traditional supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsburys.

[notahacker]

In the UK there's barely any difference in presentation: both are relatively basic in layout and choice compared with the majority supermarket chains and even the logos and "middle aisle" full of assorted discounted toys and electronics concept are very similar to each other. Lidl is generally a little bit bigger and the clear winner if you consider freshly baked bread a hallmark of supermarket quality though...

[bowsamic]

Yeah it’s very different here. There is no concept of price matching and the better supermarkets have quality that scales reliably with price