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.
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.
