After years of precarity, the weekly ritual of queuing for obscure bargains allowed me to embrace my inner bargain hunter. But savings in one area come with costs in others.
August 2020. I’d been locked down with the rest of Melbourne in my tiny western suburbs flat for the best part of five months with my partner, my elderly dog and a new COVID-kitten. Only allowed to leave the house for essential work, caregiving, exercise or food, a highlight of my weekly schedule became checking out the Aldi ‘mystery aisle’.
For the uninitiated, a brief explainer. Aldi has twice-weekly specials that drop in every Wednesday and Saturday. Plonked into the middle aisle of the store, these specials can be anything from fancy-looking European designed blenders to discounted hemp sheets to literal kitchen sinks. When you purchase something at Aldi, every checkout operator has to offer you a catalogue so that you can pore over the items that will be arriving the following week.
My trips to Aldi became a shining light in my otherwise dull week as I perused all sorts of crazy crap on my ‘essential’ supermarket trips. Over those dreary weeks of lockdown, I brightened up my days with a shiny camping axe, which I was sure I would use just as soon as we were allowed to pitch a tent again. I obtained a not-much-coveted stripy adult-sized towel poncho (because why should kids get all the fun), and sparkly gel pens. Sometimes I was disappointed to find that pandemic struck global supply chains meant that something in the catalogue hadn’t made it to the store—I missed out on travel Monopoly, but that just all added to the mystery of that magical aisle: you really had to get down there to see what you might find.
Growing up, my Mum and I only ever bought things that were on special, so much that it didn’t really occur to me that not everyone else did the same. When I went to university, I experienced culture shock when my friends opened their fridges at home and brought our riches of fresh strawberries and cheeses for us to eat, none of which bore black and white discount stickers stuck to the side of them. When they had to do something like go camping, they thought nothing at all of asking to borrow a friend’s tent. Posed with the same problem, I’d immediately go out and buy a new tent, too ashamed to appear to be in need of charity after a childhood spent in op shops and Centrelink queues. The sacred middle aisle became not just a fun distraction, but a place where I was relieved to drop the pretence that I wasn’t hardwired to hunt for a bargain after years of precarity.
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I also felt smug that I was stepping away from the Coles and Woolworths duopoly after a lifetime of dependency. Together, they control over 70 per cent of the Australian grocery market, one of the most concentrated in the world. They’ve also got a bad reputation for engaging in wage theft and squeezing primary producers like dairy farmers to breaking point. For these and many other reasons, Coles and Woolworths both get an F on the Ethical Consumer Groups shopping guide, while Aldi gets a comparatively respectable C. Just like Coles and Woolworths, Aldi has also been accused of engaging in dodgy employment practices, including wage theft, slave-like conditions for subcontractors and forcing drivers to work dangerously long hours. On the other hand, it’s hard to resist middle class staples like triple cream brie brought to the masses at an affordable price.
The sacred middle aisle became not just a fun distraction, but a place where I was relieved to drop the pretence that I wasn’t hardwired to hunt for a bargain.
The first Aldi opened in Sydney in 2001, and there’s now over 500 stores dotted in every state and territory except for Tassie and the Northern Territory. While they might not be the big fish in Australia, they are a global retail giant, running over 10,000 stores across Europe, China and the United States. The middle mystery aisle has long been a central feature of Aldi’s playbook after they released an affordable Commodore 64 computer to excited German shoppers in 1987. It sold out in a few hours, and created a buzz around what discounted electronic item punters might find next. The mystery aisle now operates as giant lucky dip for adults, acting on the same pleasure-seeking pathways that gambling and social media does today. The mystery aisle has turned me into a giant lab rat, weaving in and out of the supermarket aisles hoping to find a bargain, picking up all manner of things along the way.
I’m embarrassed to think of the way my eyes light up at the random assortment of goods arranged haphazardly in cardboard boxes, or sometimes still on the pallets they arrived in. Aldi’s deliberate inattention to the display makes me feel as though they aren’t even trying to convince me to buy anything, because at these prices, they know I’m hooked. It doesn’t really matter in the end what I bought, the feeling that I’d saved a lot of money was a pleasure in itself.
The shopping experience wasn’t entirely without drawbacks. When I came home with a merino wool jumper, slippers and more Tupperware, my increasingly frustrated partner asked me if I really thought we could accommodate more things in our 40 square foot apartment. Each item was so small that I really couldn’t take that on as a serious concern. She begged me not to buy an eight litre potjie pot—a cast iron, three-legged stew pot from South Africa—which she argued was too large and impractical for either camping or home use. While I was dejected, when I picked it up to show her how easily transportable it was in its natty wooden carry case, I could see she had a point.
It doesn’t really matter in the end what I bought, the feeling that I’d saved a lot of money was a pleasure in itself.
I left the potjie pot, but continued to gather with my fellow bargain hunters each Wednesday morning, standing in silent communion as we eagerly assessed each new product. After years spent trying to fit in with middle class friends and neighbours, it was a relief to be among ordinary, working class people who did not hide their desire for a bargain. While my friends’ bank balances probably aren’t wildly dissimilar to mine, I could spot the economic ease in which they lived their lives miles away. When they decided to purchase something, they carefully research the options, commit to getting the best quality product with the highest environmental and safety rating. Cost was a secondary factor. Wanting so much to get past my psychological scars of childhood poverty, I did my best to copy them, only to find myself splurging on the first item I was shown by a member of staff when I went into a store, just to appear breezy and carefree.
But my love affair is faltering. When I moved house recently, I was confronted with the sheer number of items that I simply didn’t need, and had to ask myself what the cost of my mystery shopping trips really was.
First, there was the cost of paying two strong, fit young people to move my boxes of unnecessary items from one house to the next. There was the time and emotional energy spent by my partner and I, as she pleaded with me to put perfectly good items that I’d only recently bought in a box for the op shop. Then there were the human costs to consider.
In 2015, we learnt that prawns sold by Coles, Woolworths and Aldi were sourced from a Thai a company which was found to have engaged in child labour, workplace brutality and human trafficking. Last year, Aldi acknowledged in its Modern Slavery Statement that its textiles, shoes, housewares, electronics and toy supply chains were all ‘vulnerable to modern slavery’. Oh no, I thought. That’s the mystery aisle.
The environmental cost is probably the biggest evil behind a bargain.
But the environmental cost is probably the biggest evil behind a bargain. The things that lure shoppers in—the bizarre, unexpected items and the low cost—also make it highly likely that we will leave with things we don’t actually need. Things that weren’t on our list and aren’t necessary or even sought by us. Things that have a high likelihood of sitting in a cupboard or an apartment storage cage after being used once, only to end up in hard rubbish in a few years. I shudder to think about how much of the Pacific Ocean’s trash vortex came from the Aldi specials catalogue.
I still wake up on Saturday morning, craving a trip to the mystery aisle. I know that I don’t need a discounted milk frother, a hammer drill or a caravan cover, no matter how attractive the price tag is. It’s hard to overcome an addiction, but as they say, the first step is to acknowledge that you’ve got one.
