Aldi is generally thought to have a squeaky-clean image, but the German grocery chain has experienced
its fair share of drama.
From bogus products, to labor issues, and even murder, here are the biggest scandals
that Aldi has found itself wrapped up in over the years.
So here's a rather strange set of implications regarding the bargain-priced seafood you buy
at not just Aldi, but Walmart as well.
It could be funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
That's right, your fish sticks could lead to a nuclear war.
No need to head to the bomb shelter just yet, though, as it's a little more complicated
than you might expect.
Like so many other things Americans buy, a lot of our seafood comes from China.
In order to cut costs, Chinese seafood processing plants employ a number of North Korean workers
who, in turn, hand over as much as 70 percent of their earnings to the North Korean government.
Thus, the seafood that is sold to Aldi and Walmart and then bought by Americans could
be, in a bizarre way, inadvertently subsidizing North Korea's funds for their missile development
program.
It's actually a federal crime for products made by North Koreans to be imported to the
United States, but that doesn't mean it's not happening simply because of the sheer
amount of fish generically packaged and shipped out.
It's estimated North Korea could be bringing in as much as $500 million a year by loaning
its workers to China.
Besides possibly aiding North Korea's missile program, the North Korean workers labor in
what has been called "modern day slavery" conditions.
Even though Aldi isn't the only one associated with these products, the controversy definitely
doesn't make them look good.
Protests have even been staged outside of Aldi supermarkets calling it the, quote, "ultimate
betrayal of American trust."
Regardless of cows and horses both being hoofed animals, people generally tend to shy away
from eating the latter.
So when customers were misled into believing the frozen food they were buying contained
100 percent beef, when in fact it was actually part or all horse meat, well… people weren't
happy.
Back in 2013, news broke that Aldi's frozen meat lasagna and spaghetti bolognese contained
horse meat and not just a little bit of horse meat either.
Tests were done on the products that revealed the impostor beef was between 30 and 100 percent
horse.
It turned out that while Aldi was under the impression it was buying its beef from suppliers
in France, that wasn't the case.
The company eventually learned some of that bogus meat came from Romania.
An Aldi spokesperson had this to say:
"This is completely unacceptable and like other affected companies, we feel angry and
let down by our supplier.
If the label says beef, our customers expect it to be beef."
To be clear, the scandal only impacted stores in the EU, and none of the mislabeled meat
ever made it into American stores.
And to be completely fair, Aldi wasn't the only one caught selling horsemeat.
UK grocery giants Tesco and Lidl also had the product on their shelves.
It was served by hospital and school caterer Compass Group, and even Nestle recalled their
beef ready-made meals.
DNA tests came back positive for horse in countries from the UK to Norway to Germany,
making it a problem on a massive scale.
“(chomp)”
Aldi employees have complained about grueling work conditions before, but it's a whole other
ballgame to claim that your employment with the company was basically slave labor.
In 2017, two Korean nationals claimed that while working at an Aldi supermarket in Australia,
they were, quote, "treated like slaves," and were paid little to nothing of the money they
had worked for.
The labor-hire firm they were hired through provided transportation costs, which was taken
out of the men's pay, but they claimed that the $5,000 owed to each of them was never
paid out.
The man from the firm — who they knew as "Jimmy" — had promised them their money,
then disappeared.
The claim was ultimately thrown out, because the pair couldn't prove they actually had
a direct relationship with the firm.
As for Aldi's role in the scandal, the company largely denied the claims but said an investigation
was being done and that it, quote, "takes all allegations of misconduct relating to
our contractors seriously…"
It's not just store employees who have made claims of being mistreated by Aldi, but the
workers who make its products as well.
The company came under fire in 2017 after allegations that the Bangladeshi workers who
made some of the clothing sold in the supermarket chain were being paid, quote, "poverty wages."
A representative for Aldi said its suppliers were required to abide by, quote, "national
laws and Aldi's social standards in production."
Is that an appropriate response, or should they do a little more to make sure their products
are responsibly sourced?
Of all the things on the list of reasons that might cause a customer to never return to
a specific business location, witnessing a murder is probably pretty high up there.
Shoppers at an Aldi store in North Yorkshire, England were unfortunately the witnesses to
a brutal and undoubtedly bloody crime that took place just four days before Christmas
in 2017.
Jodie Willsher, described by one of the store's managing directors as a, quote, "much-loved
and popular colleague," was a single mother and employee with Aldi when Neville Hord entered
the store and stabbed her to death in front of customers.
Hord was bitter over his breakup with Willsher's mother and blamed Jodie for the split.
He had reportedly planned the attack for weeks, accumulating knives, an ax, and a crossbow
with the full intention of carrying out the public execution to cause "the maximum pain,
horror, shock, and trauma."
He was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison.
While the murder was clearly no fault of Aldi's, horrific crimes are never good for business
and such a thing could easily leave shoppers with an uneasy feeling and send them looking
for a new grocery store.
While social media may have opened up a new frontier for how brands reach their customers
and market products, it has some major drawbacks, too.
Any new product that a brand rolls out these days is at the judgement of social media and
hoo-boy, does social media ever judge harshly.
And?
No one's afraid to speak up.
In May 2019, Aldi announced that some of its stores in Great Britain would be carrying
square-shaped sausage patties, tweeting,
"Breakfast just became a whole lot easier…
Will you be trying our Sausedge?"
It's more practical than the cylinder shaped sausages, which have a tendency to roll off
the plate or out of a breakfast sandwich, and don't quite fill out a sandwich as well
as you might like.
The grocery store chain even decided to call them "sausedges" to be cute.
Harmless enough, right?
Nope.
Social media immediately jumped on Aldi and said the company was taking credit for Scotland's
square Lorne sausages.
Some angry folks even derided the company for cultural appropriation, because they take
their sausages very, very seriously.
Maybe Aldi should just stick to boring round sausages from now on.
It's not just Aldi's square sausages that have backfired on them, but their Australia
Day celebratory T-shirts as well.
In 2014, Aldi decided to do what brands around the world do anytime a country has a national
holiday coming up capitalize on it.
The grocery store chain advertised a series of T-shirts that would be available in its
Australian stores that correlated with Australia Day.
One T-shirt in particular did not sit especially well with Twitter, though, and it wasn't long
before folks were calling Aldi's shirt racist and demanding that it be removed from shelves.
The shirt in question read, quote, "Australia Est. 1788."
Critics of Aldi argued that the shirt ignored the Indigenous population who had inhabited
the continent long before the Brits showed up.
Like so many other squabbles on social media though, some argued the outburst was nothing
more than a PC overreaction.
But it's worth noting that Australia Day is massively polarizing, with tens of thousands
of people gathering every year to protest the celebration of a completely controversial
British invasion and the subsequent suppression of the indigenous peoples.
Unsurprisingly, Aldi removed the shirt.
A wage theft lawsuit is never good for an employer's reputation and can potentially
cost millions of dollars to clean up.
Central New York Aldi employees prompted a nationwide lawsuit when they accused the grocery
store chain of unpaid wages in 2016 and took legal action to ensure they got the money
they felt Aldi owed them.
The lawsuit brought against Aldi by store managers claimed that they were doing much
of the same tasks as hourly store employees, but those employees were getting overtime
pay.
Meanwhile, the store managers were working 60 to 70 hours a week and getting an average
salary of $80,000 without overtime pay.
News of the lawsuit spread throughout Aldi's American workforce and around 360 employees
eventually signed on as clients.
While Aldi had initially argued that it didn't have to pay its managers overtime, it's sorta
difficult for a company to ignore 360 disgruntled employees and a heck of a lot of bad publicity,
and in 2019 Aldi agreed to a settlement.
In total, Aldi settled the lawsuit for a hefty $9.8 million with some store managers receiving
up to $20,000 in back pay.
That's some serious overtime pay and a lesson that Aldi likely won't soon forget.
Keeping an eye on employee performance is one thing, but secretly installing hidden
video cameras in staff locker rooms is over the line.
In 2013, news broke that a store detective who was hired by Aldi to keep an eye out for
shoplifters was also ordered by store supervisors to spy on Aldi staff.
The store detective who stayed anonymous had this to say:
"I had to say if an employee was working too slowly, engaged in an affair, and reveal other
private details such as their financial situation."
Aldi didn't confess to the spying, but somewhat sidestepped its denial of the allegations.
While the company said such spying was never ordered, a corporate consultant for Aldi said
it was, quote, "not implausible" that individual supervisors at a store had carried out the
spying tactics on employees.
Unfortunately, this claim wasn't the only instance of Aldi supervisors secretly spying
on people.
A year earlier, a report surfaced that at some Aldi stores in Germany, managers were
using video cameras not only to monitor workers, but to peek up the dresses of female shoppers.
The company said that such practices were forbidden and that, quote, "appropriate disciplinary
consequences" would be carried out.
Finally, Aldi isn't the only grocery chain hit by scandals.
Another is…
Aldi?
Yes, there are actually two Aldi chains, and the other one which is known in Europe as
Aldi North also made the news in a very unusual way.
Drug cartels will use any means necessary to hide their illegal cargo and it's actually
not that uncommon for food shipments to be used for smuggling.
But Aldi North seems to have particularly bad luck in getting shipments clearly meant
for a very different destination, and has ended up with bananas that have been used
in drug trafficking on not one, not two, but at least three occasions.
In 2014, the company learned that 140 kilos was hidden within its stock of bananas.
Then, in 2015, the same thing happened again when bananas packed with approximately $6
million worth were shipped to 14 different Aldi North supermarkets around Berlin.
At the time, the 386-kilo stash was the largest amount seized in any single operation in the
city.
That shipment was small potatoes, however, to what would show up on Aldi North's loading
dock in 2019.
Six Aldi North stores in Rostock, Germany discovered in April 2019 that their bananas
contained nearly half a ton with a value of almost $28 million.
It was understandably a headache for the company, and an Aldi North spokesperson confirmed that
the banana shipment that came from Latin America affected the logistics center and numerous
store branches though further details were not provided.
While Aldi North didn't confirm what it planned to do with the bananas, it's probably safe
to assume they weren't sold at a discounted price to the public.
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