Aldi bargains

[tabbypurr]

Seen the other day:

1/4" 1200w plunge router 9.99. Soldering station 200-400C 9.99.

NT

[Theo]

Bargain?

[David Williams]

Are these Special Buys that have become Reduced Price items when Aldi needed to clear them from the store? If so, it's possibly a local or regional thing.

Just now, searching the Aldi web site showed only a 500W Palm Router at £24.99.

[tabbypurr]

They're reduced items. If they have them here, I expect some other stores w ill too.

NT

[Brian Gaff]

Sounds a little cheap to me.

Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

Depnds if the store sold all the stock they had or not. The one I normally go to won't have any. It's closed for a fortnight, the second time this year. At least I found out about this closure before driving the 20+ miles to it...

[alan_m]

I assume the closure is to expand the store.

Around my way they managed to extend an existing building by an aisle's worth of space in a couple of weeks.

On the other hand, my local Lidl in Southend has been revamped by a idiot team of designers who have managed to create a bottleneck[1] just after the entrance and have positioned the card reading machines at the checkout in a location that prohibits easy access to items that have been scanned and need packing.

[1] Their bread ovens now block 2/3rds of an aisle leaving the width of a trolley for customers to pass. Any customer sorting fruit/veg from the shelf opposite blacks access to the rest of the store for other customers. I wonder what the risk form says about placing hot ovens in the "customer" floor space where little unsupervised hands have very easy access

[tabbypurr]

from my experience of not many Aldi stores the competence of store managers does seem in short supply. They all have an ongoing problem of goods with no price marked, and have failed to ever solve it. Said managers get 24k a year last time I looked.

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

Interesting to know, however Maryport is the other side of Cumbria to us 60 miles away and 1 1/2 hours.

[alan_m]

The management at a Aldi/Lidl store does make a massive difference to the customers experience and I've seen the difference in the local 3 stores between good and bad management.

It's much the same with pubs. In an area where there is more than one local pub where one has lots of custom and the other 100 metres down the road is struggling and 99% of the time the management in the latter will be poor. However, what I've seen over the past 40 years as a pub goer is that it often takes new management a couple of years to build a busy loyal trade which can be completely lost within two weeks with new or temporary management.