Hi HN, Inspired by the recent discussion on traderjoesprices.com, and sites such as mccheapest.com, here is a map of how much does it cost to shop (this week's promo items) at Aldi
There are 4.215 Aldi stores in Germany, 1.997 of those from Aldi Süd who also operates the US stores. Add to that 960 Aldi Süd stores in the UK, 530 in Austria, and a couple more in the other neighboring countries, and I think it's completely fair to be surprised if an aldi price map focuses completely on the US.
There is a big discussion in the EU for some products that are far more expensive in some countries over others. If someone who do this for Aldi in Europe, they would see that some "more expensive" countries, are selling the very same products at lower prices than some of the "more cheap" ones.
And that will piss people off, and politicians everywhere don't liked pissed-off people.
"Aldi" is actually split across two different companies that operate in different regions of the world: Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. In the US, Aldi Süd operates the Aldi stores, whereas Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe's.
I think the problem there is that Aldi and Trader Joe's stores are in the same territory, should we be looking at localized warfare? :D . I like both, but Trader Joe's is always ridiculously crowded. They could add two more here and still be "crowded" but not "oh-my-god I can't go into that mess". I think they're leaving money laying on the table with this choice. I've lived in 3 cities and it was always the same, too much for those of us who get anxious when every time you stop to pick up something for more than two seconds, you have someone looking over your shoulder at the same thing.
For a long time there was only 1 NYC Trader Joes, in Union Square, and it was a madhouse. Fortunately they do tend to expand, it just takes a while. Off-peak hours like weekday mornings help too.
Don't forget there are two Aldi (Aldie?) the yellow South and the Blue North and they both have a different international footprint just to complicate things
I popped into an Aldi in Portugal ~6 months ago, and I noticed they had some Trader Joe's products on the shelves. Unsurprisingly, Aldi Portugal is owned by Aldi Nord.
As an American, I can understand the European internet user’s chagrin at our seeming total cultural ubiquity. It seems like almost every piece of media is about American concerns unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Just the other day the US news were all ablaze about how the Super Bowl was the biggest viewed program on television since Apollo 11. Except of course, the Eurovision Song Contest is way bigger.
How is anyone supposed to divine that a general English statement about a European MNC was restricted to just America?
It’s like me saying “McDonalds has stopped selling hamburgers” and expecting you to magically understand that this statement is about Indian McD’s and not American McDs.
Aldi was pretty ubiquitous in the rural Midwestern United States around where I grew up in the 1990s. We didn't associate it at all with Germany or Europe, and I had no idea about the company's origins until I read about it on Wikipedia many years later.
If you are the creator, the problem is more the title. You could write something like "Aldi Price Map in the US". Your current title is a good example of US defaultism and I happens way often (even in social studies where the scientist should be just embarrassed for that).
There is a link to raw data (a big json). Aldi is Hofer in Austria. Prices are probably the same in all their stores? Not sure something similar exists for Germany.
I don't get this criticism at all. Somebody created something for free to scratch their itch, and they're likely from the US, why would they bother with anything else? If it's so important to you, you can always scratch your own itch, I doubt the author of the project would mind help.
It’s not just the US. Im an American working remotely for a European grocery delivery platform, and one of the key feature requests from partners in UK and France is location-specific pricing. Presumably price discrimination for those in wealthier neighborhoods.
> price discrimination for those in wealthier neighborhoods.
In the case of this Aldi price map, they are doing regional pricing - it would seem that every store in an area has the same price regardless of neighborhood wealth for the individual store. So you get naval oranges in Los Angeles at $1.89, $2.39 in Chicago, and $2.99 in New York City (and Houston).
The difference probably has a lot to do with the cost structure for operating the distribution network. If you switch to the organic pasta sauce, it appears that the price is the same $1.99 everywhere except Los Angeles, where it is $2.19. Their oranges are likely coming from California and their pasta sauce is coming from somewhere east of the Mississippi.
It's not necessarily wealth that governs price changes, but access. Anyone with a car and 'enough' money for gas can go to the store across town if it's cheaper, but if a store is isolated enough by geography or neighborhood income level, you'll likely see higher prices.
Case in point: the Kroger in Oxford Ohio (where Miami of Ohio's campus is located) has had remarkably higher prices than other Krogers in the area for as long as I've known. Oxford is 'close' to Cincinnati, but there's enough corn and soybean fields between the two to make the trip a pain.
Ah I didn't realize cashback was US and Canada only. Purchasing over $6000/year will cover the fee, which isn't cheap if you don't do much shopping there. The rewards site has a table with reward estimates: https://www.costco.com/executive-rewards.html
In the US, the standard Costco membership does not offer cash back, the premium membership does. If you don't have the auto-renewal set up, they'll tell you which version is a better deal based on your purchase history from the prior year.
At Aldi Nord in Germany, the "Trader Joe's" products are just the usual cheap garbage with a label slapped on it. It's nothing like the interesting stuff you get in the US.
You really don’t want to go down this road. I have no problem starting a movement to get Americans to call them “LEGO’s” and you won’t be able to even suggest it’s wrong because it’ll just be a contraction of “LEGO parts,” “LEGO bricks,” and “LEGO sets.” (But feel free to lambast us over punctuation and quotation marks.)
How long do you thing that they will turn the already-plural "data" into the hyper-plural "datas"? Or has this already happened, I am too afraid to check.
Data is a mass/uncountable noun now (like meat) rather than a countable noun (like coin/coins). Turning it countable involves a helper noun like data point / data points.
"Datum?" Almost nobody uses that in the vernacular.
Eh, devils advocate: when a word becomes more of a loan word than just a usage of its proper origin, doesn’t it make sense to follow the new languages patterns?
Different grammatical situation of course but similar in spirit is “latte.” It just means milk in Italian and so in Italy you’d always say cafe latte. But in the states everyone knows it as the coffee drink (Starbucks probably to blame).
Same with salsa—just means sauce in Spanish—but it’s become an English word in the states at this point and taken a different meaning.
I've seen (older) German texts where "Jesus" is declined as in Latin, eg "the apostles Jesu" (=of Jesus, genitive) or "We saw Jesum" (=accusative). Somewhat jarring. As you say - when do you stop?
LEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.
IIUC, that seems to be saying "don't write sentences in this structure" rather than "here's how it would look if you did write it". (Though it would seem strange for a manual to dictate the grammar for its own name.)
Following the example of Big Mac sandwiches (not Big Macs) I believe you'd write McDonald's restaurants' (not McDonald's'). I.E. always keep the trademarked word as-is, add sandwich or other nouns where needed to make the grammar work.
I think the confusion in this thread and elsewhere makes it clear why companies release brand guides.
Yeah, but companies don't get to decide how language is used. Apple can try all they want to demand that people say shit like "Use iPad to do it" or "Experience iPad" but that's just what they want and they can't stop people using English without their toxic marketing BS. Saying "Use an iPad to do it" is completely acceptable language and more in line with existing language no-matter what Apple marketing says.
It is a regular, but not universal, occurrence for people to elide the extra possessive 's when the word already ends in s.
For example, although adding a possessive suffix 's to the nane "Jordan" would result in "Jordan's," adding it to "James" could result in "James'". There's an apostrophe written at the end, but it's pronounced the same way as "James."
I said it's not universal because I still know people who would say "James's" (with an extra syllable at the end) in everyday speech anyway. I don't know to what extent this varies by dialect.
It's also elided when a plural already ends in s (and I think this is universal, but I haven't looked it up). For example, "the doctor's computer" (the computer of one doctor) sounds the same as "the doctors' computers" (the computers owned by the doctors). The apostrophe is written on the other side of the s, but it also sounds the same. Note that not all plurals end in s, e.g. man/men, woman/women, goose/geese, etc., and in these cases you still add the s, e.g. "the geese's beaks".
Interesting side note: Aldi is not called Aldi in Austria (it's "Hofer" there, which blew my mind as a kid since the logo is the same), because the Aldi trademark belonged to "Adel Lebensmittel Diskont" there.
Hm. Been at the Aldi-Äquator in the 90ies, which is the division between Aldi-North and South in Germany. So one could pick 'branches' from the overlap there, and compare. Which was really different at the time.
Anyway, I remember the talks about that fear of being marked poor. It was all a load of BS as you could see from the parked cars, and style of clothing of shoppers.
Similar to BILD.de perceived as trash-tabloid, nonetheless having the largest circulation.
That's interesting, because the customers at Aldi here in Germany are basically a cross-section of the population, but tend to be middle/higher middle class. Especially after the update to most of their shops during the last 7-8 years [0], most Aldis look really nice inside. This combined with the huge advantage that shopping at Aldi is really efficient (the stores are not large, for most items, you have only a single option to select from which usually has an excellent quality, and the cashiers are arguably the fastest in the industry) makes Aldi very attractive for people who could easily afford shopping at a non-discounter. Sure, I enjoy the occasional hour-long visit to a large supermarket with the family on a weekend, but after work? I want my shopping done in 10 minutes max without selecting from 30 brands of pasta and go home.
At least in larger cities, the average Lidl often looks a bit run-down and grimy, and the customers tend to be lower class (that's not the case in rural areas, however). I always found that interesting, because prices / quality are basically equivalent (although I tend to prefer Aldi products). I live near the border to France, and the situation there appears to be similar.
At least a few years ago, however, Aldis in Switzerland also looked very run-down (though not as run-down as Denner) with distinctly lower-class customers and a much larger focus on selling alcohol than in Germany.
Dutch here, worked a few years in Germany. I can attest to the difference in esteem of the Aldi/Lidl in de and nl. But you already agree: German shops just look run down as a matter of course. Rewe and Edeka the least probably?
However (I've lived some years in FR and PL too), nothing beats Dutch supermarkets in terms of shopping-speed. Nowhere. If you think (German) Aldi is fast, you should try a Dutch shop (preferably in the city around rush hour so you can see it shines under pressure). As a low anchor, you can try the same in France (any brand, but Lidl too) ;) This includes stock: Dutch supermarkets are rarely out of something, but in Germany this is par for the course (or I am extremely unlucky?)
Also, and this is actually quite true for the Netherlands as well, there is a quality problem. It can be good, but it rarely is great. The French (and Belgians) really have that beat, at the cost of speed. Only fresh veg and bread is where Lidl shines, and I love them for it.
From a Dutch perspective :) You should see what foam they consider bread. One of the things I miss from France :) Lidl has a batard that is really quite good, unsurpassed by any Dutch bread.
You haven't had bad bread if you've never had Dutch bread. That includes virtually any 'bakery' (those are mostly chains who also rebake). Dutch bread is barely baked, and barely bread. Really, moulding shite and baking it is superior.
Do not get in a bad-bread-pissing contest: Dutch will win it every time.
I disagree to both to the single option to select from, and the excellent quality. For Aldi-North that is. Sampling for about 2 to 3 times a year there, since about 2014. Before that I lived there.
Acronyms under most English style guides should be written in lowercase with the first letter capitalized. Only initialisms should be in all caps, which Aldi is definitely not.
I almost always see most acronyms (not brands with an acronym origin like Aldi) in all caps, and always considered it an odd quirk of the BBC that they did not.
Editors will make exceptions to general style guidelines when they think it leads to better clarity when reading. For instance, most newspapers will write iPhone with a lower case 'i', despite that being incorrect for a proper noun, because people are used to seeing it that way.
I can't read the link but we've the same thing in Ireland. I've always assumed it stemed from shops being family owned. e.g. We have a stationary store that was originally called Eason and Sons which when said quickly sounds like Easons.
There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me
> Actually it's 'Aldis', because we're talking about more than one.
Just to clarify why this is wrong. First we are not talking about more than one, there is only one "Aldi" company.
We don't use Aldi's (notice the use of the ' for possessive after a single noun) in this case even though every company name is a proper noun which would follow this rule. It's not used because the Price Map is not belonging to Aldi, it is a price map "FOR" Aldi.
We are talking about multiple Aldi stores. I don't know if Aldi US is one company, or a franchise, or something in between. But I'm pretty certain they have more than one store.
Would it not be better and more insightful to take an aggregate price of 50 items (picked from various categories) at each Aldi store and create a map like this to understand how Aldis in different regions have different pricing and the difference etc?
I am saying this because currently, some items like 'Navel Orange' are cheaper on the West Coast vs the East whereas items like 'Veggie Burger' are cheaper on the East Coast compared to the West Coast.
Denmark sadly just got a whole lot easier to add. Aldi gave up and closed their last stores before Christmas. Apparently losing 1 billion DKK every year is just bad business.
Wow, that's surprising! I live at the German/Danish border (Flensburg) and didn't know this. Have you got any idea, why?
Close at the border we have a lot of shops where people from Denmark (and even Norway and Sweden) travel to to go shopping, because it is so much cheaper here. But thinking about it, I have never seen/overheard Danes in an Aldi - and I wonder why?
They closed because they lost money for 40+ years straight, or close to it. Aldi never really adapted their stores to Danish habits in the same way that Lidl has. The design of their stores always made you feel like you traveled back in time to the 70s or early 80s. They did to modernize in the later years, but it was simply to late. The stores still smelt weird though.
It may also be partly due to Aldi reluctance to carry brands beyond their own. For some items Danes don't care, but if you then can't get the brand name cereal or ketchup, then you have to go somewhere else anyway. The Danish supermarket space is insanely competitive, in regards to price, so Aldi just didn't have much of an advantage over local discount stores anyway, at least not enough that you'd bother splitting your shopping between two stores.
I believe they lost €125m+ per year in the final years, loses that need to be covered by Aldi Nord in Germany. In the end they just didn't want to keep losing money. REMA1000, from Norway, bought a large number of the stores. Not sure why, they look nothing like REMAs own stores, and in some places they are literally across the street from an existing store.
In Germany we have two Aldis, Aldi South and Aldi North. I am pretty sure that within the region they cover prices for each product is the same everywhere.
To be fair, Aldi products in the US vary by state. There likely is less variance than in Europe. I think in the US the local differences are largely based on what foods they are able to get locally for an attractive price.
I'm not entirely sure on that but I have no data to back it up, just personal experience. The south (GA, SC, FL, etc) has the Port of Savannah which is the 3rd busiest in the US (right behind Los Angeles and New York). Yet we have some of the most expensive food items, especially in Atlanta which is a massive nationwide distribution hub due to our railways and highways.
EDIT: Makes sense for fruits and vegetables mainly, due to California's agriculture. But shelf-stable and prepackaged goods still maintain a very high price even over in the South.
Would make sense. Aldi tends to operate on a fixed margin.
In the past that used to be around 2-3%, which is why, until 2014, they wouldn't accept credit or US debit cards, as the fees were higher than their margin and they couldn't pass those on to customers.
On the contrary, a successful business will eat some costs in order to generate more profit. That's the definition of a loss leader.
When Publix sells a rotisserie chicken for $8, they're taking a loss on every one. If people only came to Publix for the chicken, they'd go bankrupt in a month. Hence they aren't passing on the cost. They hope people will buy other items too, which have higher margins, and make up the difference of lost profit - and they are right.
When Publix lets me see inside the market because they have the lights on, lets me not shiver because they have the heat on, or lets me use a shopping basket without charging for it, they're also "eat[ing] some costs in order to generate more profit".
Surely GP's text should be ever-so-slightly charitably read to mean overall/aggregated costs, not that each and every individual cost is passed on.
In the context of the comment I replied to, I meant all businesses pass on all costs in aggregate.
But the commenter I replied to then clarified they meant the business does not evenly spread the transportation costs equally amongst all customers nationwide.
Right, they're all part of the same concept. The business doesn't necessarily pass costs on to a customer. They may be intending to make a profit, and thus may recoup costs in other ways than what the consumer is directly paying for. "Eventually making enough money to keep the lights on" is a different concept than "recouping all costs".
Other examples:
- "Free" online services aren't paid for by users, so the business eats the cost of the service. But they hope to recoup the cost from advertisers or from selling data. The users are customers, and the advertisers are customers, but only some of the customers are subsidizing the business, hence the cost is only passed to some of the customers.
- Another example of the above: 40% of the profit for Neiman Marcus comes from 2% of the customers. The brunt of the cost of the business is not getting passed on to 98% of customers.
- Tech darlings (Uber, etc) lose money hand over fist for years, sometimes decades, never recouping their cost.
- Some businesses/industries are heavily subsidized. The customer sees a low price, and the business's costs are actually "passed on" to a tax-paying polity, who are often not the customer.
- A business may write down costs (due to a loss), paying the difference out of pocket, without passing on this write-down to customers.
So a business can spend more money than it makes, it can spend someone else's money [not needing to recoup said cost], it can literally just pay a cost out of pocket without any expectation of return, and it can spend a lot of money to make very little in profit.
Well, the Aldi online shopping site [1] is using an API [2], but it is probably not intended to be used publicly. You could try exploring it to see if you can query prices directly.
So...Will get my Navel Oranges in Whichita, will do a quick jump to Mount Pleasant for Kiwis and get me the Spaghetti in Farfield...A Python script retrieving current Airline rates and implementing Minimum Spanning Tree should help optimize next week's shopping...
You could do this for YouTube views. "How I fed my family of twelve for ten dollars a week*", popping by various cities to get the best prices on unprocessed food ingredients, to serve them up some gruel, totally ignoring the travel costs.
Flying a thousand miles to pick up a pack of dried lentils, then another thousand miles to get a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes and then some more miles to pick up a bag of flour - that would have made great content a few years ago. This would be legitimate because the revenue from the 'content' would have paid for the flying.
I'm loving the grocery store price map/compare stuff lately.
Oh how I wish it was easier to collect that data and watch items.
Especially at Costco, Whole Foods, Publix.
Most vegetable/fruit prices seems cheaper on the west coast. I assume because most are produced and in California and don't have the added transportation costs?
Up here north of the border, food (along with everything else) on the west coast in BC tends to be slightly more expensive than it is in e.g. Ontario. This is an interesting site, would love a Cannuck version.
It'd be interesting to evaluate this because unlike iPhone, fruit can trivially be substituted. In other words: the margins on them are what capitalism predicts: essentially nothing. This even goes for the aldi store as a whole.
It does not apply to specialist medicine, and only to a very limited extent to Apple products. So Apple can "enshittify": extract the maximum the market is willing to bear. They can steer demand. Aldi cannot.
I love maps like these, the McDonald's (1) or Taco Bell one (2).
That said, these don't seem to cover things most people really buy - meat particularly, and fresh veggies. Or paper products. Have you considered adding more items?
Neat tool to start asking questions about food systems. The variations of prices are affected by many different things, from where it's made, to how it's transported, where it's stored intermediately, how much vertical integration is involved, the costs of retail in different locations, etc.
French Green Beans and Washington Granny Smith Apples are good ones to compare. West coast: only bottom-end prices. East coast: only top-end prices. These are two items you could grow on either coast, need temperature control for shipping, can be seasonal depending on the source. You could find them locally on either coast, so they're probably not shipping them from one coast to the other (or are they?). Price fluctuation might be just regional retail costs or supply/demand. Or it could be they're shipping them cross-country just to simplify logistics and marking up the price accordingly.
Simply Nature Organic Pasta is all over the place. Could be regional price fluctuations, could be logistics, maybe demand.
Yes, I can't read this either. Also, consider using a sequential color scale, rather than diverging. A diverging color scale should be reserved for datasets with a neutral value or natural midpoint. For example, if you were displaying growth, zero would be the midpoint, to quickly differentiate between positive/negative growth.
There is no meaningful midpoint here. A sequential scale from light to dark would be easier to read.
Yes, as a red/green color blind person this is mostly useless to me because the scale goes from red/green, through greenish yellow, back to red/green. Expensive and cheap look the same.
I like Aldi Süd (the one you Americans have and also the one in the UK) but here in Hamburg and also in France it is Aldi Nord and it's really quite awful (more like Netto and Penny, both of which I hate). Thankfully we also have Lidl which is closer to Aldi Süd but honestly I'm a bit soured on Discounters in general recently. I still use them for some things but often they're more expensive than my local greengrocers for veg and often of very questionable quality, especially the fruit and veg, but also the Vollkorn bread and even the cheese are very hit and miss.
Here in Germany the situation is different to the US though, we often don't just go to one shop, we usually mix and match between 2 or 3 different shops even in one shopping trip. Though I guess if you had a Kaufland nearby you could probably just manage with one shop
I live almost exactly on the "Aldi Äquator" (Aldi equator - this is a real thing), near to where the Albrecht brothers lived. People here go purposefully to Aldi South instead of Aldi North even if they happen to live just north of the equator. The whole shopping experience is much worse.
Honestly, I prefer going to Aldi Nord. It's a cleaner, more focused shopping experience, while Aldi Süd and Lidl tends to have too much distracting fluff.
Fair enough. I "go" shopping because of all the interesting and distracting stuff. If I want a clean / focused shopping experience I order from home, even if it's a little bit more expensive.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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...
Penny and Netto are the Resterampe (Bargain Basement) of Rewe and Edeka.
That aside, if you like Lidl, why not go to Kaufland, which is the Luxus-Lidl of the Schwarz-Gruppe?
I mentioned Kaufland, as I said, if I were near Kaufland I would go, but there are not many Kaufland in Hamburg. On my way back from work there is a Budni, a Lidl, an Aldi (that I never go to), a Rewe, and a Denn's Biomarkt, so they are the convenient options. Also, Globus isn't really near us, but I visited it and it sucks! I hate it. Way too big aisles super spaced out for no reason. I much prefered the Real that was there. I have to admit that EDEKA at St. Pauli is amazing though. Sometimes I go out of my way just to go there.
I'm an immigrant from the UK though, this is all new to me. As others pointed out, most supermarkets are basically comparable in the UK. In Germany the variety between different supermarkets is crazy. Even between different Bio markts the quality difference can be extreme.
Huh. If only you knew the difference in the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, and Pasadena right next to LA :-) It's insane! Because of the involved distances in Colorado, and the variety of quality. In case of metropolitan LA it's just the scale, like in the movie Idiocracy :-)
I haven't been to that Globus in a while, have just been there shortly after it openend in the summer, and 2 times after that. It really reminded me of my childhood, because then there was another Globus elsewhere, where I went, and it was always fun because there was stuff to sample. Like there was in this new one. Instant flashback! While the sortiment isn't that overwhelming, it tops Kauflands and probably most Rewe easily, Edeka not so sure. What they do have though, is freshly pressed pomegrenade juice. Where else do you get that? Oh, not to forget, also a large (real) bakery IN STORE where you can look into, which is always busy, and gives the outside air a really nice smell at 4AM in the morning. Which is very rare nowadays.
>Here in Germany the situation is different to the US though, we often don't just go to one shop
What would give you the indication that the situation is different in the US? In any given week I shop at Aldi (Favorite), Trader Joes, HEB, Whole Foods, Costco and Wal-Mart.
I'm consistently shocked by which stores have the best prices AND best quality produce.
Apologies, I had assumed from my visits to the US that it was like the UK and France where it's common to only go to one single shop. When I lived in the UK most people I know bought literally everything from one giant supermarket and never felt the need to go anywhere else. For example, every Sunday we would do one giant shop at Sainsbury's and that was our week's shopping done. Can't really do that in Germany because all of the shops are shut on Sunday, so you have to shop on Saturday, but more likely here you are just doing multiple little shops throughout the week
Of course but there are still general trends, such as the one I stated about the UK and France. For example, in London and Paris people probably don't shop like I said, but generally they do. I expected Americans, being primarily car oriented and shops being spread far apart, would stick to giant hypermarkets. That said, I have learnt that making any kind of generalisation about America is sure to bring a response that America is actually infinitely varied, so I completely retract any comment I ever made about the US
Every price map like this should serve as a reminder that competition works. You can see prices are lower in areas where there is competition for a particular product and higher where there isn't any competition.
I would love to see something like this but for all supermarkets around the world with prices in local currencies adjusted.
i.e.
Where is the cheapest place in the world to buy a banana?
Where is the most expensive place in the world to buy a banana?
Now the 'banana' -- could be any food item, it doesn't matter.
A future tool like this could be able to help future societies predict which areas of the world are in economic ascent and which are in economic decline (cheaper prices = economic ascent, expensive prices = approaching potential future economic peak and/or approaching potential future economic decline, etc.)
As someone from the Netherlands, I was surprised how expensive the local supermarkets in the US are (and also that they don't include taxes in the price labels). I still remember that over 10 years ago, one banana and one granola bar cost me over 10 dollar (nowadays it's probably a lot more). I almost cancelled the purchase at the checkout, but I didn't want to look like a cheapskate.
The nearest K-mart would be 1.5 miles out of town and of course everyone would take the car to go there to buy groceries in bulk.
> Or this was a convenience store at a very lucrative location (i.e. tourist trap)?
Seriously. What's interesting is that in the big cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) if you go to the neighborhoods where people actually live, grocery prices for fresh items are usually lower than in suburban or rural parts of the US. High sales volume overcomes the high real estate and labor costs.
What an odd selection of items to compare. Presumably representative of the authors diet - by my gander some sort of pescatarian.
Almost nothing on this list I ever buy, other than some of the produce. Why not some staples for the rest of us like milk, butter, bread, sugar. Heck, basically any pizza without cauliflower crust.
It's a common misconception that the OpenStreetMap project provides free map tile resources for use by others. The focus of the project is the map data.
What is the misconception? That paged you linked to says that map tiles are free for use with a few reasonable restrictions:
Clearly display license attribution, normally in the bottom-right corner of the map.
Do not actively or passively encourage copyright infringement.
Recommended: Do not hardcode any URL to tile.openstreetmap.org as doing so will limit your ability to react if the service is disrupted or blocked. In particular, switching should be possible without requiring a software update.
Recommended: add a link to https://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap to allow your users to report and fix problems in our data.
Recommended: a contact email on your web page or app store page. If we cannot find contact information we will be unable to do anything except block if an issue arises.
Of course, there is no Service Level Agreement:
Although our map tiles are generally very reliable, their availability to others is on a best effort basis and we offer no SLA or guarantees.
But that seems quite reasonable for donated resources.
Pretty sure I am not paying anything or using any API key :) Open Street Map basemap was too colorful and contrast with my color scheme was not very good in many parts of the map
Hey ayocado, I have some experience with self-managed/self-hosted base maps. There are some modern tools that make the setup pretty easy (e.g. Protomaps, MapLibre) and you can still use a minimalist style similar to the CARTO one you have now.
If you're interested in switching over, feel free to shoot me an email and I can try to help!
Here are some demos [1][2] I've made without using any third-party map services. All open source! [3]
From what I can find, CARTO does not have a free map tile server. In other words, while it technically works, I think it's against their terms of service. They probably don't care if you're small, so I wouldn't worry about legal threats, but at some point the tile server might check the referer and break your app.
This reminded me of when I was in the north east. The produce there is terrible compared to what I can get in southern california. We're really spoiled here. Excellent and cheap produce year round.
This is hardly unique to USA, the supermarkets here in the Netherlands also offer sliced mushrooms. I never buy them, but find it hard to judge if well off people want to spend an extra 90 cents to not have to spend 3 minutes cutting them.
I've heard sliced stuff is something desirable for people with some disabilities but I am pretty sure most people who buy these kind of stuff don't suffer from any of them.
I am pretty sure vegetables/fruits will get bad and loose their vitamins faster too if sliced.
Also it is a waste of packaging for nothing. I'd rather have someone standing in the vegetable area of the shop to slice stuff for the handful of people with disabilities than have them already packaged.
I looked up the price difference locally on Instacart. $1.65 for 8 oz mushrooms, $1.75 for 8 oz sliced. The "sliced" version is labeled a "best seller".
I can’t believe a Big Mac has a different cost at individual stores. I’m not in the US.. I don’t think it’s like that here in Australia but someone will probably prove me wrong :D
Plotted using Leaflet. A python script creates separate HTML file for every product that has a price differential across stores (many products do not have any price difference across the country). Hosted as a static site.
For those disappointed about limitations of the data, I assume it's because aldi.us has a minimal web presence that comes down to pretty much only weekly fliers when it comes to food pricing data (locally at least).
When I was in college (within the last 10 years), Aldi was a god send. We could get a load of whole wheat bread for 70 cents. A one pound bag of pretzels was like a dollar. A dozen bagels was $1.25. A pound of turkey lunch meat was $3. I had a semester where my food spend averages $23 dollars a week, all thanks to Aldi's insane prices (I let it go up a bit after that).
While everyone has been affected by food price increases, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Aldi is still notably cheaper for a lot of things about two weeks ago. The bad part is now when I see a can of beans for $1.50, it seems like a rip off since it's about _twice_ as much as the Aldi equivalent. The ingredients are the same: beans and salt.
I love Aldi for their raw efficiency that they generally take up. I know quite a few people who hate the structure of an Aldi, but I absolutely love it.
Some years ago, the UK had a great website comparing online prices between supermarkets called MySupermarket[0]. They went closed down, but it genuinely saved me lots of money. IIRC, it even compared the prices with delivery fees.
I was sad they closed down, but a few companies have popped up since, but I've not been able to try them to see if they come close to how good it was. Heck, at the time I thought about creating an alternative, but wasn't sure where to start, so didn't end up trying.
Anyway, point is, we need more of this sort of comparison sites for things to keep things competitively priced, and to ensure people don't pay more for the same things.
