My Single Mom Life

Do any of you shop at or know about Aldi stores?
The closest store to me is going to be in St. Petersburg, which is far too far to go to save money on groceries.
The cost of gas would eat up the grocery savings, but they (St. Pete) will be having a grand opening on October 27th.
I checked the list, and so far Sarasota is NOT on the grand opening list for stores in Florida.
I want one here! You hear me Aldi! Come to Sarasota!

I am going to keep my eye on that site and watch for Sarasota to make the list, and when it does, I'll be up, showered, and heading on over like mover NYC style to save myself some major money on groceries.
Fast and ready to hustle.

If you haven't heard about Aldi stores, check out the site, read up on this.
It's kind of like a Sam's Club, all of the shelves are loaded with the actual boxes the products are delivered in, just cut open so you can get an item out, they have their own Aldi select brands which are cheaper than the major name national brand grocery products.
Most of their select brands cost up to 50% less than the national name brand products.
Why?
Because all the fruits and vegetables are locally grown, the dairy products all come from local dairy farmers, same with eggs, and pretty much every other fresh product like meat and poultry.
All of their canned and boxed food items are all private label, and they only carry the top 1,300 most frequently bought grocery items which is just one of the ways they help the consumer save money.

Another way they help save you money is by not having baggers or bags.
You can bring your own bags or take empty boxes from the shelves, and bag your own groceries.
But they do have bags for you if you didn't bring any.
They have environmentally friendly paper bags for .5 cents, environmentally friendly plastic bags for .10cents, and insulated bags for frozen food for .99cents.
By not having baggers, their employee payroll costs stay low, and so that's another savings passed onto the consumer.

They take cash, debit cards, and EBT cards.
They do not accept checks or credit cards.
If they aren't getting bad checks, they don't have to pass those costs on to the shopper.
By not having credit cards, there's no slow down while people sign slips, and no processing fees from the credit card companies.
And because they have their own brands, there's no coupons for the cashiers to have to scan in and then bag up, and then cash out at the end of the night.
No time consuming-payroll- hours-wasting steps to do.

They also have a cart rental fee of .25cents.
This is so the employees don't have to fetch the carts from the lot.
You put a quarter in the cart's special coin box, that releases the cart for you to use, and when you're done, you simply take the cart back to the cart corral, attach the chain, and you get your quarter back.
They are also open for more limited hours.
9am to 7 or 8pm Monday through Saturday, and 12 to 5 on Sundays.
Being open during non-peak shopping hours adds to the employee labor costs, which then gets added to the cost of your grocery items.

I seriously want one of these Aldi stores in Sarasota.
I would shop there all of the time if it saved me more money on food than I am now.
Maybe when the one in St. Pete opens up, I'll find a way up there to check it out, and if it seriously rocks, I'll start a petition or something to get them to build one here.
I know that Sarasota is a pretty well-to-do community, but we do have a lot of poor sections of town, and a lot of middle class people too.
I'm sure that if an Aldi store opened up here, it would be busy all the time once word got out about how much money people were saving on groceries, especially now in our economic disaster time that Wall Street and banks created.

If you have ever shopped at an Aldi, is it as great as it sounds?
How are their select brands compared to the national name brands?