Aldi’s and tigers and bears (oh my!)

I’m an Aldi’s regular and work out at Planet Fitness. This tells you all you need to know about whether or not my books are currently blowing up the bestseller charts. Just you wait! Photo courtesy of LoopNet.

Aldi is not my favorite chain supermarket. I’m glad it sells reasonably priced stuff, but several suboptimal features coalesce into a shopping experience I don’t love.

One Aldi feature that’s not my favorite is the wafer-thin shopping bags you have to pay extra for if you forget to bring your reusable bags from home, or you don’t wanna lose your place in line to run out to the car to grab them where they’re chillin in the trunk. If you don’t double bag it, Aldi’s ones are likely to tear all the way down to the bottom, and sometimes that happens if you even look at them funny.

Another suboptimal feature is the damp, flimsy produce boxes that are unsuitable for carrying groceries because they have big holes in the bottom, yet Aldi’s still offers them to carry groceries if you don’t wanna buy their flimsy bags. 

The actual produce is shaky, and word on road is that Aldi sells the produce that Trader Joe’s rejects. This hits hard for me given that I stopped rockin with TJ’s because their produce gave me tummy aches.

The aisles outside the produce section foreshadow more intestinal misadventures, as most Aldi food is highly processed and comes loaded with preservatives, sugar, sodium, and fat.

This would explain why Aldi’s lacks two-ply toilet paper purchasing options outside of 36-roll mega jumbo packages. Our modest duplex lacks bathroom storage, so many weeks we’re a one-ply household because that’s the only kind of TP Aldi’s sells in four packs. It shares a texture not unlike the fine grit sandpaper my son used to streamline his pinewood derby-winning car when he was in Cub Scouts. Perhaps not coincidentally, we don’t have many houseguests on one-ply days who return for repeat visits.

I live in Minnesota, the land of winter, but the inside of every Aldi’s everywhere feels like it’s New Year’s Eve here in Minneapolis: always cold as hell. Even when I lived in the heart of the Sonoran desert, I’d bundle up in layers on hot summer scorchers for Aldi’s runs.

For these reasons and others, I’d prefer that Aldi’s wasn’t my go-to supermarket. Yet it is. I’m a loyal Aldi shopper because these days, it’s the only place around to buy reasonably priced groceries. To be fair, I like some of their stuff, like the watermelons, the Hawaiian trail mix, whole wheat tortillas, and flaxseed pitas. And my kids, bless their hearts, enjoy most of the frozen trash Aldi’s sells that I serve them while shedding a single Denzel Washington from Glory tear. 

Our Aldi’s is conveniently located next door to our gym, Planet Fitness, the Aldi’s of chain gyms. Like Aldi’s, you get what you pay for at Planet Fitness.

I’ve observed that Aldi’s and Planet Fitness, both mega-budget joints, are often situated close together, perhaps by design. Some Aldi’s/Planet Fitness combos hit harder than others, and the level of experience you get at one usually tracks that of the other. 

The ones in our stomps don’t crack my GOAT conversation list. The George Washington of my Mount Aldiplanetfitmore is in Grand Forks, Nebraska, where the hummus options at the Aldi run deeper than the 2004 NBA Champion Detroit Pistons bench, and the Planet Fitness was on and popping like a Studio 54-era discotheque. 

The combo near us is no Grand Forks, but it has everything we need, and the staff at both places are great and always down to throw priceless smiles our way. 

Recently, my wife and I were shopping at our Aldi’s when the subzero Fahrenheit temperature outside made the subzero Celsius temperature inside feel like a sauna.

As we were checking out, I started to feel anxiety about the number one part of the Aldi shopping experience that I don’t love: the part where you can only extract a shopping cart by inserting a quarter into a small receptacle in the upper right-hand corner of the cart that detaches it from the cart in front of it. The system sounds shaky because it is, and it sometimes acts funky when you try to return your cart to get your quarter back. Especially on subzero Fahrenheit days when you have poor hand circulation, your fingers get numb, and you can’t properly pull off the Aldi’s quarter back ca$h money dance.

I’m not good at that dance, and thinking about doing it started to trigger a case of the grumpys. Then it hit me that our ancient ancestors operated on the same hardware we do and often had to deal with way harsher conditions, especially in ice age times. And when they were out of food, they couldn’t just hit one of the Aldi’s that I like to cap on. They couldn’t even conceive of the concept of Aldi’s, except for maybe the cold-as-hell part.

At some point in prehistoric human history, a new mother in a cave told her mate in the dead of winter that they were out of food and her baby was hungry. We come from the stock of humans that walked out of that cave into the cold and came home with megafauna like saber tooth tigers for supper to feed the family.

I told that one to my wife’s dad, and he said he had a similar experience back in his hunting days when he overcame half-frostbitten hands when it was Aldi-level cold on a hunt in Northern Minnesota to bring down a big buck. That made me remember my blurp about hunting and how I didn’t love the experience because the killing part made me cry. I may come from stock that brought home the bear, but I’m grateful I’ve got decent enough cash money dance moves to shop at Aldi’s, even though I don’t love it.

I cap on Aldi’s and Planet Fitness, but I thank the universe every single time I get to whip out my debit card to procure food to feed my family and use fitness equipment to train my body instead of tussling with bears and saber tooth tigers. 

While I’m grateful to have Aldi and Planet Fitness in my life, sometimes I still miss the frou frou gourmet groceries and fancy fitness centers I enjoyed during my lawyer days. But we still shop at our local co-op, especially on weeks when the number of books I sell exceeds the average high temperature.

Currently, we do most of our co-op shopping during the winter months. 

It’s been a cold December week, and Human Justice just broke into the top 1,000 on the Mixed-Brother Memoir (Lawyers and Judges) bestseller chart, so I’m gonna whip out the debit card and slay some extra earthy granola and portabellashaki mushrooms on my co-op discount.

But I’m gonna get in one more Aldi’s run first to cop a four-pack of one-ply.