Why Most Aldi Stores Sell Produce This Way

Aldi is a favorite stop for groceries at a great price. It's not for nothing that it has been dubbed the cheapest grocery store in America. Of course, in exchange for the shopping cart savings that we expect from an Aldi trip, there are some downsides to contend with as well. Aldi shopping carts require a quarter to use, which can be downright infuriating if you don't normally carry loose change. The stores tend to carry mostly private-label brands, which may mean that your preferred product isn't on the shelf. And it seems that, in recent years, the chain has stopped stocking much loose produce.

Good luck sourcing a single lemon, onion, or bell pepper at Aldi; you are more likely to find these fruits and veggies bagged up in packages containing multiple units. According to anecdotal info on Reddit, apples, avocados, and Roma tomatoes seem to be a few of the items exempt from this selling strategy.

Why on earth might Aldi prefer to sell bagged produce? Some have theorized that, similar to the reason Aldi cashiers sit in chairs at the register, bagged produce helps keep lines short. Cashiers can move more quickly if the store eliminates the need to fiddle with weighing items or searching for product codes. There's a competing but equally likely theory that Aldi stocks bagged produce to keep store employees from having to constantly sift through bins to remove old or rotten items. After all, Aldi employs all sorts of strategies to keep prices low, like not playing background music for shoppers, so pre-bagged produce may be part of the same strategy.

Even without delving into quality issues, selling pre-portioned servings of produce can be a hassle for shoppers who maybe live on their own or have just a small family. While a single onion might be needed for a particular recipe, paying for a whole sack of the alliums can be wasteful if you can't use them up before they spoil. Also, there are certain ingredients, like lemons and limes, that don't always lend themselves well to bulk buying. You might be interested in one lemon for quartering and squeezing over broiled fish at your family dinner, but a mesh bag containing six or seven can be an albatross unless you really like fresh-squeezed lemonade.

There's also the fact that, across the web, Aldi's produce doesn't earn high marks for freshness or durability. Customers have complained that fruits and veggies spoil quickly, taste "off," or aren't as juicy or colorful as produce from other stores. Pre-selecting produce for a customer can be an issue, because it takes away the consumer's ability to hand-select their own and reject undesirable items. Instead, they have to pick through bagged assortments and hope that the products inside are all up to par ... which, coming from Aldi, might be tricky. If the bag is easy to see through and you can use up everything inside, feel free to take advantage of Aldi's great prices and buy bagged produce. Otherwise, you might want to source these groceries elsewhere.