Aldi is known for their super low prices, but there's one place they cost more than
others, and that's their shopping carts.
Why does Aldi make you pay a quarter just to use a cart?
To answer that, let's rewind and start at the beginning.
After Aldi announced their major push into the U.S. grocery market in 2017, many more
people came to know and love this discount grocer that European families have counted
on for years.
But there was also a little culture shock thanks to their unusual shopping cart rules.
See, if you want to use one, you'll need to put in a quarter.
Then, when you return your cart to the corral, you get your deposit back.
So you don't actually have to pay to use the cart.
But what, exactly, is the point of inconveniencing customers like this?
It's pretty simple, actually: when people return their own carts, Aldi doesn't need
to pay someone to spend hours each day going around the parking lot collecting the stray
carts like you see at almost every other grocery store.
"Bring the cart back, and your quarter pops out.
So, saves them some money, and it's pretty easy."
"Yeah, so they don't have to pay someone to be out in the parking lot, dragging all the
carts back in."
And it also helps prevent parking lot mishaps.
Have you ever come out from grocery shopping to find a cart sitting against your car, which
is now sporting a nice new dent?
That just doesn't happen at Aldi.
Of course, a quarter isn't much money.
So why does almost everyone return their own cart anyway?
According to Bryant University management professor Michael Roberto, it probably has
something to do with simple human psychology.
According to him, it's a combination of the budget-mindedness of Aldi shoppers, and the
fact that the general public is just unwilling to pay for something we feel should be free,
like the use of a cart.
It's the principle of the thing!
That weird bit of human psychology has created what some Aldi shoppers call their "cart etiquette."
Say you've loaded up your car and are about to take your cart back.
It's perfectly normal at most grocery stores for another customer to offer to take the
cart off your hands, it'll save you from walking all the way back up to the store, after all.
But at Aldi, they'll usually have their quarter in hand, and they'll trade you their quarter
for your cart.
It's just proper!
One thing that their return policy doesn't do is prevent theft.
And according to NBC News, shopping cart theft is a huge problem across the retail industry.
Each cart costs stores anywhere from $75 to $250, and some stores have had such massive
losses they're putting measures in place to stop it, especially since so many stolen carts
just end up dumped in random places for no reason.
"I'd often wondered how those things ended up in canals."
Some even have perimeter controls that lock the cart's wheels if they cross property lines,
but studies have shown that cart rental systems like Aldi's aren't an effective deterrent
when it comes to people who just want to wander off with a cart.
Apparently, people are willing to pay a quarter for a cart they can keep, even if it's completely
against the law.
"You see the stuff down here?
You see this?
Okay, somebody is stealing carts.
I'm losing 25 a week to a thief!"
Still, not everyone loves the rent-a-cart system, especially since it can be confusing
to new shoppers.
Which brings us to the real bottom line behind the Aldi shopping carts, which is simple old
fashioned culture shock.
Aldi, of course, is a European chain.
And over in Europe, coin-release carts are perfectly normal.
But they also aren't really used very much.
That's because European refrigerators are traditionally much smaller than their American
counterparts.
In fact, fridges that we would consider to be standard sized are sold by retailers like
John Lewis as "American-style" appliances.
Because of this, the shopping pattern for many Europeans is different from Americans.
Instead of making one big trip to the store every so often and coming home with a huge
load of groceries, many European shoppers instead make frequent, smaller trips to the
store to buy food for the next couple of days.
As a result, their loads are much smaller, meaning that many European Aldi customers
don't need or use the carts, so dropping a coin in the slot is no inconvenience at all;
they simply avoid the carts entirely.
Who knew a simple shopping cart could be so complicated?!
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