> Aldi's gain is our collective loss, the widespread embrace of an insincere "good enough", either because our budgets are truly crunched, or because we don't l

> Aldi's gain is our collective loss, the widespread embrace of an insincere "good enough", either because our budgets are truly crunched, or because we don't let ourselves value our mundane maintenance desires. Maybe as a German I have another view. Maybe I don't know the stores in other countries enough. But in Germany all of the big and nice retail chains were forced to introduce non-brand/own-brand discount product lines so that their customers don't flee to the discounters. And whenever I am at one of them I find myself searching the big aisles for exactly those products. Because most of the time, those products are exactly as good (as in exactly the same product with a different label) for a lower price. And they use many tricks to make buying the more expensive version more comfortable for those that don't care about their money. This is why I as a customer prefer the real deal. If I feel that I need to pay extra for higher quality products, then I want some guarantees, such as the label saying something like local or organic. And surprise: discounters know that and offer a lot of organic products. But I don't need a choice of one and the same product just with differently "valued" brands. But also from reading the article there are some takeaways, that could make you reconsider your position: 1. They don't waste employees on unloading boxes of products when their customers are perfectly capable of taking something out of a box. I didn't even notice this difference before reading the article and it never bothered me as a customer. Or waste employees on collecting stray shopping carts from the parking lot. Still they don't waste my time: I spend much less time buying the same than in bigger shops, where I have to search longer and walk more, because they try to force me to see everything they want to sell me. 2. Apparently they pay their employees relatively good, but don't need as many as their competitors. They do everything that is possible to make the stores as efficient as possible to make that happen. In my view this is retail heading the same direction almost all professions did: become more efficient, value the people doing it more and free up the rest to do something else.