Aldi carts, quarters, and their brand

Pay attention to what your customers like or think about when they interact with your brand.

I just noticed this ALDI bag in a stack of things that my wife left me to carry out to the car. When you go to ALDI, something that makes it different than every other grocery store is the carts.

American grocery stores have giant parking lots and have grocery carts that are equally huge strung all over the place. When I grew up, I lived two blocks from a grocery store and there were always at least two grocery carts dumped over in the woods across from my house. Maybe more. We climbed on them and played on them and sometimes raced them. (This was in 1987 before any evidence would be caught on social.)

But not at ALDI.

At ALDI you have to take quarter – cash money – and stick it in the cart to unlock a chain and release it. That means that after you’re done shopping, you have to return the cart at the front of the store to get your quarter back. It actually costs you 25 cents of your cash to leave the cart in the parking lot.

The way this works in reality is you usually meet somebody in the parking lot with an empty cart and you hand them your quarter and you take their cart from them and then you take it in and do your shopping only to bring it back out and to sell it to somebody else in the parking lot for their quarter.

You get some human interaction. You get some community warm fuzzies. If you are particularly generous, you tell them to keep their quarter. “You can just have it.” And now you’ve shown some benevolence in giving away a “free” cart!

It’s only on a slow day that you actually get the cart all the way back to the store, push the chain in to pop out the quarter, and get your quarter back.

So when ALDI designs its reusable shopping bags, they pulled an actual feature of their culture and made it part of the graphic pattern on the bag.

I don’t think anything at all they costs 25 cents except for the shopping cart.

And who in the world would want to be reminded that they are spending money

When they are shopping?

But ALDI flips it.

The quarter is no longer a piece of money but it is your cart key – even better – it is your little moment of shared experience with another shopper where you get to help them out and be the helpful hero!

That is part of the ethos culture of shopping at ALDI and they have emblazoned it proudly on their reusable shopping bags