Pet peeve of mine: it's 'Aldi' not 'Aldi's'
https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-...
Pet peeve of mine: it's 'Aldi' not 'Aldi's'
https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-...
How naive of me to ecpect anything else than an us-only map when this is about a german supermarket chain with most of its stores in europe...
Well I did search for any available data for Germany but nothing available easily :|
To be fair, this was more of a tongue in cheek response and not really directed at you or your project directly.
For me Aldi is just such a european thing that I was genuinely surprised by this.
Maybe I read too much reddit and I've been primed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)]
But I read this as another anti-American comment which seems to be very fashionable recently.
As an American, I can understand the European internet user’s chagrin at our seeming total cultural ubiquity. It seems like almost every piece of media is about American concerns unless explicitly stated otherwise.
I don't understand. YC is an American company in English. Why are visitors so surprised when most of the content is US based?
Also Merica' #1 ... jk :)
Content in English means it’s fair for all those who speak English. Unless you want a build a wall across the internet to keep rest of us out.
It is absolutely not true that just because a message is in English it has the intended audience of all English speakers.
How is anyone supposed to divine that a general English statement about a European MNC was restricted to just America?
It’s like me saying “McDonalds has stopped selling hamburgers” and expecting you to magically understand that this statement is about Indian McD’s and not American McDs.
If the location is not explicitly stated the default is the US. That's the Internet.
Just the other day the US news were all ablaze about how the Super Bowl was the biggest viewed program on television since Apollo 11. Except of course, the Eurovision Song Contest is way bigger.
Don't forget there are two Aldi (Aldie?) the yellow South and the Blue North and they both have a different international footprint just to complicate things
Aldi North is called Trader Joe's in the USA.
It's not the same. Aldi Nord just owns Trader Joe's
https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-and-trader-joes-are-they-t...
I popped into an Aldi in Portugal ~6 months ago, and I noticed they had some Trader Joe's products on the shelves. Unsurprisingly, Aldi Portugal is owned by Aldi Nord.
Yep. I shop at a building with an Aldi on the 1st floor and a Trader Joes on the 2nd floor. It's wonderful.
In Austria, Aldi (South) is called Hofer.
there are even memes about this. Like this tactical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zacwvs/supermarket...
Aldi was pretty ubiquitous in the rural Midwestern United States around where I grew up in the 1990s. We didn't associate it at all with Germany or Europe, and I had no idea about the company's origins until I read about it on Wikipedia many years later.
It is pretty big in US as well :)
At least for Austria theree seems to be this: https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
There is a link to raw data (a big json). Aldi is Hofer in Austria. Prices are probably the same in all their stores? Not sure something similar exists for Germany.
If you are the creator, the problem is more the title. You could write something like "Aldi Price Map in the US". Your current title is a good example of US defaultism and I happens way often (even in social studies where the scientist should be just embarrassed for that).
Thanks for making this. Is there data provided for iodized table salt?
There are 2,356 Aldi stores in the US right now and it's probably growing. They've been expanding massively here for the past 10-15 years or longer.
"Aldi" is actually split across two different companies that operate in different regions of the world: Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. In the US, Aldi Süd operates the Aldi stores, whereas Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe's.
Reminds me of how the world was divided into a Spanish and Portuguese hemisphere in 1494 ;)
I think the problem there is that Aldi and Trader Joe's stores are in the same territory, should we be looking at localized warfare? :D . I like both, but Trader Joe's is always ridiculously crowded. They could add two more here and still be "crowded" but not "oh-my-god I can't go into that mess". I think they're leaving money laying on the table with this choice. I've lived in 3 cities and it was always the same, too much for those of us who get anxious when every time you stop to pick up something for more than two seconds, you have someone looking over your shoulder at the same thing.
For a long time there was only 1 NYC Trader Joes, in Union Square, and it was a madhouse. Fortunately they do tend to expand, it just takes a while. Off-peak hours like weekday mornings help too.
Aldi Nord and Süd are not competing and have significant corporations in supply chain and marketing
Is LIDL related to the group at all? I've been seeing them pop up too
They're a competitor.
No, Lidl is part of another group that also owns Kaufland.
There are 4.215 Aldi stores in Germany, 1.997 of those from Aldi Süd who also operates the US stores. Add to that 960 Aldi Süd stores in the UK, 530 in Austria, and a couple more in the other neighboring countries, and I think it's completely fair to be surprised if an aldi price map focuses completely on the US.
There is a big discussion in the EU for some products that are far more expensive in some countries over others. If someone who do this for Aldi in Europe, they would see that some "more expensive" countries, are selling the very same products at lower prices than some of the "more cheap" ones.
And that will piss people off, and politicians everywhere don't liked pissed-off people.
They've been expanding massively here for the past 10-15 years or longer.
Yup, in my state they basically bought out ALL of the old Bed Bath and Beyond leases and are converting them to Aldi supermarkets.
What the hell, my brand new Aldi is an old BBB too! (split in half)
They're now the third largest chain in the USA.
Aldi (and Lidl) are okay. But I wish Europe had Trader Joe's (owned by Aldi) and Costco.
We have Costco in Sweden, it's terrible, I'd never pay for a membership to be able to shop...
I've always found the cashback rewards to cover the membership cost, YMMV though. I also live for the hot dogs
They don't have a cashback program here.
In the US, the standard Costco membership does not offer cash back, the premium membership does. If you don't have the auto-renewal set up, they'll tell you which version is a better deal based on your purchase history from the prior year.
Ah I didn't realize cashback was US and Canada only. Purchasing over $6000/year will cover the fee, which isn't cheap if you don't do much shopping there. The rewards site has a table with reward estimates: https://www.costco.com/executive-rewards.html
There are some Trader Joe's products in my local Aldi in Poland.
At Aldi Nord in Germany, the "Trader Joe's" products are just the usual cheap garbage with a label slapped on it. It's nothing like the interesting stuff you get in the US.
We have Costco the last time I checked, at lest in the UK and Spain.
Lidl expanding into the US makes my european wife very happy.
Aldi is big in Australia too, around 600 stores across the country.
We have fixed prices across the country though (Australia that is). Interesting that its so varied in the US, completely different model.
It’s not just the US. Im an American working remotely for a European grocery delivery platform, and one of the key feature requests from partners in UK and France is location-specific pricing. Presumably price discrimination for those in wealthier neighborhoods.
It's not necessarily wealth that governs price changes, but access. Anyone with a car and 'enough' money for gas can go to the store across town if it's cheaper, but if a store is isolated enough by geography or neighborhood income level, you'll likely see higher prices.
Case in point: the Kroger in Oxford Ohio (where Miami of Ohio's campus is located) has had remarkably higher prices than other Krogers in the area for as long as I've known. Oxford is 'close' to Cincinnati, but there's enough corn and soybean fields between the two to make the trip a pain.
And that’s why dollar store and similar shops are huge in rural poor America
price discrimination for those in wealthier neighborhoods.
In the case of this Aldi price map, they are doing regional pricing - it would seem that every store in an area has the same price regardless of neighborhood wealth for the individual store. So you get naval oranges in Los Angeles at $1.89, $2.39 in Chicago, and $2.99 in New York City (and Houston).
The difference probably has a lot to do with the cost structure for operating the distribution network. If you switch to the organic pasta sauce, it appears that the price is the same $1.99 everywhere except Los Angeles, where it is $2.19. Their oranges are likely coming from California and their pasta sauce is coming from somewhere east of the Mississippi.
I don't get this criticism at all. Somebody created something for free to scratch their itch, and they're likely from the US, why would they bother with anything else? If it's so important to you, you can always scratch your own itch, I doubt the author of the project would mind help.
I don’t see anything indicating criticism in op’s comment, seems more like an expression of surprise.
It's US centric and US-only but the title doesn't say so, especially for the brand that's not usually associated with the US
Did the TLD provide any clues? I would Germans would prefer a .de domain.
message the author and create the european map? create the map you want to see in the world
I feel like there’s a few countries missing :)
Intersting to see how the prices relate just in the US though.
Oops, yes it covers US only. Could not find easily available data for European countries :)
There's also Aldi in Australia and China
Also I'm not quite sure about the grammar of "Aldi's"
I will check if I can find data for Australia or China. Fixed the grammar :)
Where did you find the data source for the USA?
It'd be amazing to see this data mapped across time, as it'd be a relatively good indicator of grocery inflation.
I would be also interested in the data source. I work in european food retail business and I am not aware of any data sources like this.
Would be great for Australia, we have a supermarket monopoly, divided by two major chains, then Aldi's supermarkets and Foodland's supermarkets.
Lots of complaints about this. While the store is called "Aldi", surely the prices are Aldi's...
:)
Aldi products in Europe vary by country, so harder to compare. I'm also not sure if the prices vary within countries.
In the UK, it looks like only Scotland gets its own version of the leaflet, but the prices seem to be the same: https://www.aldi.co.uk/c/specialbuys/leaflet
This is probably because the promotion of Alcohol is restricted in Scotland, but not the rest of the UK.
They also carry nicer beef and salmon that they don't sell in England
To be fair, Aldi products in the US vary by state. There likely is less variance than in Europe. I think in the US the local differences are largely based on what foods they are able to get locally for an attractive price.
Denmark sadly just got a whole lot easier to add. Aldi gave up and closed their last stores before Christmas. Apparently losing 1 billion DKK every year is just bad business.
Wow, that's surprising! I live at the German/Danish border (Flensburg) and didn't know this. Have you got any idea, why?
Close at the border we have a lot of shops where people from Denmark (and even Norway and Sweden) travel to to go shopping, because it is so much cheaper here. But thinking about it, I have never seen/overheard Danes in an Aldi - and I wonder why?
They closed because they lost money for 40+ years straight, or close to it. Aldi never really adapted their stores to Danish habits in the same way that Lidl has. The design of their stores always made you feel like you traveled back in time to the 70s or early 80s. They did to modernize in the later years, but it was simply to late. The stores still smelt weird though.
It may also be partly due to Aldi reluctance to carry brands beyond their own. For some items Danes don't care, but if you then can't get the brand name cereal or ketchup, then you have to go somewhere else anyway. The Danish supermarket space is insanely competitive, in regards to price, so Aldi just didn't have much of an advantage over local discount stores anyway, at least not enough that you'd bother splitting your shopping between two stores.
I believe they lost €125m+ per year in the final years, loses that need to be covered by Aldi Nord in Germany. In the end they just didn't want to keep losing money. REMA1000, from Norway, bought a large number of the stores. Not sure why, they look nothing like REMAs own stores, and in some places they are literally across the street from an existing store.
In Germany we have two Aldis, Aldi South and Aldi North. I am pretty sure that within the region they cover prices for each product is the same everywhere.
Yeah, Aldi in the US is Aldi South, Trader Joe's is a subsidiary of Aldi North.
You and me both. I'm in Europe (Aldi Süd) and have been looking for something like that for years.
At least for Germany this launched last year: https://www.mein-aldi.de/
But I've heard that it has not the whole collection of items available as the physical stores.
I like Aldi Süd (the one you Americans have and also the one in the UK) but here in Hamburg and also in France it is Aldi Nord and it's really quite awful (more like Netto and Penny, both of which I hate). Thankfully we also have Lidl which is closer to Aldi Süd but honestly I'm a bit soured on Discounters in general recently. I still use them for some things but often they're more expensive than my local greengrocers for veg and often of very questionable quality, especially the fruit and veg, but also the Vollkorn bread and even the cheese are very hit and miss.
Here in Germany the situation is different to the US though, we often don't just go to one shop, we usually mix and match between 2 or 3 different shops even in one shopping trip. Though I guess if you had a Kaufland nearby you could probably just manage with one shop
In the UK I prefer Lidl to Aldi for reasons I can't quite fathom, and the pricing is within pennies of each other. Interestingly many of the middle-of-the-road supermarkets like Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrison's and Tesco now price match a ton of their own brand essentials to Aldi as loss leaders to try and get people in store. It's not quite enough to make it the default shop though.
What's kind of interesting is that in some sectors (wine, whisky, bakery), Lidl has started to win quality/tasting awards against premium retailers like Waitrose and M&S Food. But the prices are still down on the floor in comparison.
The only downside is the range can be limiting. Want to buy some fresh tarragon? Maybe some pods for your coffee machine? You're going to have to head elsewhere.
In the UK I prefer Lidl to Aldi for reasons I can't quite fathom
Maybe it is how the stores look? In NL Lidl looks like a normal supermarket that just happens to be cheap. Aldi is like someone went out of their way to make a supermarket as ugly and uncomfortable a shopping experience as possible.
Maybe you have the "other" Aldi (Nord) in NL? In the UK the Aldi stores are quite nice. Far less pallets dropped on the shop floor and most of it on shelves. They are generally smaller shops and VERY busy though, which is all that is stopping me from using them regularly.
I think they reached the point in the UK that everyone willing to put up with chaos in store was already shopping there, so they had to start competing with the traditional supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsburys.
In the UK there's barely any difference in presentation: both are relatively basic in layout and choice compared with the majority supermarket chains and even the logos and "middle aisle" full of assorted discounted toys and electronics concept are very similar to each other. Lidl is generally a little bit bigger and the clear winner if you consider freshly baked bread a hallmark of supermarket quality though...
I used to use tesco delivery for my big food shop in London. They were hopeless though always late, leaving other peoples shopping and they did mad substituting like tinned spaghetti instead of spaghetti where pasta shells would make more sense. I would buy £150 of stuff at a time and once I put the same order into Ocado which was the online shop for Waitrose, the poshest British supermarket chain. It was about £2 more on a £150 order and the delivery was cheaper. They turned up on time, there were no substitutions. I noticed that although there was a much larger selection of luxury items in waitrose, basic ingredients (pasta, flour, carrots, potatoes, tinned tomatoes, meat, fish) cost pretty much the same in all uk supermarkets, apart from Lidl/Aldi who are sometimes slightly cheaper. Waitrose makes money by tempting us to upgrade on basic items. Lidl makes money by selling us weird stuff in the middle of the store that we don’t need and by being more efficient with the number of staff in stores.
Yeah it’s very different here. There is no concept of price matching and the better supermarkets have quality that scales reliably with price
Here in Germany the situation is different to the US though, we often don't just go to one shop
What would give you the indication that the situation is different in the US? In any given week I shop at Aldi (Favorite), Trader Joes, HEB, Whole Foods, Costco and Wal-Mart.
I'm consistently shocked by which stores have the best prices AND best quality produce.
Apologies, I had assumed from my visits to the US that it was like the UK and France where it's common to only go to one single shop. When I lived in the UK most people I know bought literally everything from one giant supermarket and never felt the need to go anywhere else. For example, every Sunday we would do one giant shop at Sainsbury's and that was our week's shopping done. Can't really do that in Germany because all of the shops are shut on Sunday, so you have to shop on Saturday, but more likely here you are just doing multiple little shops throughout the week
The USA is a _big_ country. You’ll find both these style of shopping, each more common in some areas than others.
Of course but there are still general trends, such as the one I stated about the UK and France. For example, in London and Paris people probably don't shop like I said, but generally they do. I expected Americans, being primarily car oriented and shops being spread far apart, would stick to giant hypermarkets. That said, I have learnt that making any kind of generalisation about America is sure to bring a response that America is actually infinitely varied, so I completely retract any comment I ever made about the US
I live almost exactly on the "Aldi Äquator" (Aldi equator - this is a real thing), near to where the Albrecht brothers lived. People here go purposefully to Aldi South instead of Aldi North even if they happen to live just north of the equator. The whole shopping experience is much worse.
Honestly, I prefer going to Aldi Nord. It's a cleaner, more focused shopping experience, while Aldi Süd and Lidl tends to have too much distracting fluff.
Fair enough. I "go" shopping because of all the interesting and distracting stuff. If I want a clean / focused shopping experience I order from home, even if it's a little bit more expensive.
Penny and Netto are the Resterampe (Bargain Basement) of Rewe and Edeka. That aside, if you like Lidl, why not go to Kaufland, which is the Luxus-Lidl of the Schwarz-Gruppe?
Oh, and depending where in Hamburg, there is also https://www.globus.de/hamburg-lurup/index.php# which reminded me of my childhood, shortly after they've opened at the remodeled site of a former real,-, which is second only to https://www.edeka.de/eh/nord/edeka-center-st.-pauli-neuer-ka...
I mentioned Kaufland, as I said, if I were near Kaufland I would go, but there are not many Kaufland in Hamburg. On my way back from work there is a Budni, a Lidl, an Aldi (that I never go to), a Rewe, and a Denn's Biomarkt, so they are the convenient options. Also, Globus isn't really near us, but I visited it and it sucks! I hate it. Way too big aisles super spaced out for no reason. I much prefered the Real that was there. I have to admit that EDEKA at St. Pauli is amazing though. Sometimes I go out of my way just to go there.
I'm an immigrant from the UK though, this is all new to me. As others pointed out, most supermarkets are basically comparable in the UK. In Germany the variety between different supermarkets is crazy. Even between different Bio markts the quality difference can be extreme.
Huh. If only you knew the difference in the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, and Pasadena right next to LA :-) It's insane! Because of the involved distances in Colorado, and the variety of quality. In case of metropolitan LA it's just the scale, like in the movie Idiocracy :-)
I haven't been to that Globus in a while, have just been there shortly after it openend in the summer, and 2 times after that. It really reminded me of my childhood, because then there was another Globus elsewhere, where I went, and it was always fun because there was stuff to sample. Like there was in this new one. Instant flashback! While the sortiment isn't that overwhelming, it tops Kauflands and probably most Rewe easily, Edeka not so sure. What they do have though, is freshly pressed pomegrenade juice. Where else do you get that? Oh, not to forget, also a large (real) bakery IN STORE where you can look into, which is always busy, and gives the outside air a really nice smell at 4AM in the morning. Which is very rare nowadays.
Whatever. Enjoy the ride ;-)
The way I’m interpreting the charts, the least expensive (green dot) clusters are indicative of which port received a given item.
The stores furthest from the port also have the highest cost.
So they’re passing on transport costs?
All businesses pass on all costs, otherwise they would go bankrupt.
Revenue must remain greater than expenses (outside VC funded moonshots).
On the contrary, a successful business will eat some costs in order to generate more profit. That's the definition of a loss leader.
When Publix sells a rotisserie chicken for $8, they're taking a loss on every one. If people only came to Publix for the chicken, they'd go bankrupt in a month. Hence they aren't passing on the cost. They hope people will buy other items too, which have higher margins, and make up the difference of lost profit - and they are right.
In the context of the comment I replied to, I meant all businesses pass on all costs in aggregate.
But the commenter I replied to then clarified they meant the business does not evenly spread the transportation costs equally amongst all customers nationwide.
Right, they're all part of the same concept. The business doesn't necessarily pass costs on to a customer. They may be intending to make a profit, and thus may recoup costs in other ways than what the consumer is directly paying for. "Eventually making enough money to keep the lights on" is a different concept than "recouping all costs".
Other examples:
- "Free" online services aren't paid for by users, so the business eats the cost of the service. But they hope to recoup the cost from advertisers or from selling data. The users are customers, and the advertisers are customers, but only some of the customers are subsidizing the business, hence the cost is only passed to some of the customers.
- Another example of the above: 40% of the profit for Neiman Marcus comes from 2% of the customers. The brunt of the cost of the business is not getting passed on to 98% of customers.
- Tech darlings (Uber, etc) lose money hand over fist for years, sometimes decades, never recouping their cost.
- Some businesses/industries are heavily subsidized. The customer sees a low price, and the business's costs are actually "passed on" to a tax-paying polity, who are often not the customer.
- A business may write down costs (due to a loss), paying the difference out of pocket, without passing on this write-down to customers.
So a business can spend more money than it makes, it can spend someone else's money [not needing to recoup said cost], it can literally just pay a cost out of pocket without any expectation of return, and it can spend a lot of money to make very little in profit.
When Publix lets me see inside the market because they have the lights on, lets me not shiver because they have the heat on, or lets me use a shopping basket without charging for it, they're also "eat[ing] some costs in order to generate more profit".
Surely GP's text should be ever-so-slightly charitably read to mean overall/aggregated costs, not that each and every individual cost is passed on.
if the additional costs are lower than the revenue the businesses can choose whether to pass on costs or not.
Thanks Einstein.
I was referring to passing them on on an individual store basis rather than averaging across all stores.
Would make sense. Aldi tends to operate on a fixed margin.
In the past that used to be around 2-3%, which is why, until 2014, they wouldn't accept credit or US debit cards, as the fees were higher than their margin and they couldn't pass those on to customers.
I'm not entirely sure on that but I have no data to back it up, just personal experience. The south (GA, SC, FL, etc) has the Port of Savannah which is the 3rd busiest in the US (right behind Los Angeles and New York). Yet we have some of the most expensive food items, especially in Atlanta which is a massive nationwide distribution hub due to our railways and highways.
EDIT: Makes sense for fruits and vegetables mainly, due to California's agriculture. But shelf-stable and prepackaged goods still maintain a very high price even over in the South.
Most vegetable/fruit prices seems cheaper on the west coast. I assume because most are produced and in California and don't have the added transportation costs?
I would assume so as well. Generally produce apear cheaper in West/South although organic avocados are bucking this trend
Probably because avocados are less popular in the Mid-North, so they sell them for less.
It'd be interesting to evaluate this because unlike iPhone, fruit can trivially be substituted. In other words: the margins on them are what capitalism predicts: essentially nothing. This even goes for the aldi store as a whole.
It does not apply to specialist medicine, and only to a very limited extent to Apple products. So Apple can "enshittify": extract the maximum the market is willing to bear. They can steer demand. Aldi cannot.
It is also interesting how some products are just marked up for NYC only https://www.aldipricemap.com/earthly_grains_instant_jasmine_...
Up here north of the border, food (along with everything else) on the west coast in BC tends to be slightly more expensive than it is in e.g. Ontario. This is an interesting site, would love a Cannuck version.
Logistics make up the bulk of most cheaper unit cost goods.
The price a farmer gets is peanuts per unit.
Less applicable to an iPhone, but very applicable to produce or even toilet paper.
The price a farmer gets is peanuts per unit.
Which is probably where that informal use of 'peanuts' comes from.
I also assume suppliers are regional as well. Different supplier, different product, different prices.
What would it take to add the ALDIs in Europe to this map ?
That's an interesting question because there are actually two legally separate Aldi companies, Aldi Sud and Aldi Nord.
They divide Europe up by country so you'd have to get them to cooperate on that.
Which Aldi is North America?
Both, in a way: Aldi South is known as just Aldi in the US, while Aldi North owns Trader Joe's.
Ah, so that's why I can sometimes buy Trader Joe items in Dutch Aldi (Nord).
Data :) Not easy to get it at scale without APIs
Well, the Aldi online shopping site [1] is using an API [2], but it is probably not intended to be used publicly. You could try exploring it to see if you can query prices directly.
[1] https://www.aldi.us/online-shopping/new-aldi-grocery-website...
I believe there is already a framework for this, for all supermarkets, and it is being used in several countries with significant political impact.
I'm curious why you're using a commercial tile provider -- CARTO -- instead of OpenStreetMaps?
Pretty sure I am not paying anything or using any API key :) Open Street Map basemap was too colorful and contrast with my color scheme was not very good in many parts of the map
Hey ayocado, I have some experience with self-managed/self-hosted base maps. There are some modern tools that make the setup pretty easy (e.g. Protomaps, MapLibre) and you can still use a minimalist style similar to the CARTO one you have now.
If you're interested in switching over, feel free to shoot me an email and I can try to help!
Here are some demos [1][2] I've made without using any third-party map services. All open source! [3]
[1] https://wcedmisten.fyi/project/north-america-hospital-distan...
[2] https://wcedmisten.github.io/nextjs-protomap-demo/isochrone
Thank you for the kind offer. Am exploring other options, will reach out if need help
From what I can find, CARTO does not have a free map tile server. In other words, while it technically works, I think it's against their terms of service. They probably don't care if you're small, so I wouldn't worry about legal threats, but at some point the tile server might check the referer and break your app.
It looks like you can just use OpenStreetMap instead, although the resources are donated so there is no guaranteed Service Level Agreement: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
It's a common misconception that the OpenStreetMap project provides free map tile resources for use by others. The focus of the project is the map data.
What is the misconception? That paged you linked to says that map tiles are free for use with a few reasonable restrictions:
Clearly display license attribution, normally in the bottom-right corner of the map.
Do not actively or passively encourage copyright infringement.
Recommended: Do not hardcode any URL to tile.openstreetmap.org as doing so will limit your ability to react if the service is disrupted or blocked. In particular, switching should be possible without requiring a software update.
Recommended: add a link to https://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap to allow your users to report and fix problems in our data.
Recommended: a contact email on your web page or app store page. If we cannot find contact information we will be unable to do anything except block if an issue arises.
Although our map tiles are generally very reliable, their availability to others is on a best effort basis and we offer no SLA or guarantees.
Do Americans find it difficult to slice their own mushrooms?
Wait until you see peeled mandarins in plastic containers.
That's sort of like noticing that frozen pizzas/TV dinners exist and asking, do people find it difficult to cook their own food?
Personally, I find washing the mushroom debris off the knife and cutting board to be more inconvenient than the slicing itself
This is hardly unique to USA, the supermarkets here in the Netherlands also offer sliced mushrooms. I never buy them, but find it hard to judge if well off people want to spend an extra 90 cents to not have to spend 3 minutes cutting them.
I've heard sliced stuff is something desirable for people with some disabilities but I am pretty sure most people who buy these kind of stuff don't suffer from any of them.
I am pretty sure vegetables/fruits will get bad and loose their vitamins faster too if sliced.
Also it is a waste of packaging for nothing. I'd rather have someone standing in the vegetable area of the shop to slice stuff for the handful of people with disabilities than have them already packaged.
Thanks for highlighting this absurdity. Gotta love em dorky Muricans
I looked up the price difference locally on Instacart. $1.65 for 8 oz mushrooms, $1.75 for 8 oz sliced. The "sliced" version is labeled a "best seller".
As someone from the Netherlands, I was surprised how expensive the local supermarkets in the US are (and also that they don't include taxes in the price labels). I still remember that over 10 years ago, one banana and one granola bar cost me over 10 dollar (nowadays it's probably a lot more). I almost cancelled the purchase at the checkout, but I didn't want to look like a cheapskate.
The nearest K-mart would be 1.5 miles out of town and of course everyone would take the car to go there to buy groceries in bulk.
That sounds insane. Are you sure you weren't being ripped off? Or this was a convenience store at a very lucrative location (i.e. tourist trap)?
Or this was a convenience store at a very lucrative location (i.e. tourist trap)?
Seriously. What's interesting is that in the big cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) if you go to the neighborhoods where people actually live, grocery prices for fresh items are usually lower than in suburban or rural parts of the US. High sales volume overcomes the high real estate and labor costs.
An organic banana and a granola bar at Trader Joe's (Aldi Nord) in the US is $1.50.
That seems odd. Where in the U.S.? A banana at my grocery store in western New York State costs less than 50 cents (49 cents per pound).
Granola bars admittedly can be ridiculously overpriced for what they are but even just one CLIF Bar is less than $1.50.
That doesn't sound right. Bananas are generally the cheapest fruit in the US. Was this some sort of fancy energy bar? Were you in Hawaii or Alaska?
Why are some entries grouped together, like “spaghetti or butternut squash”?
(Spaghetti or butternut) squash
Oh, didn’t realize spaghetti squash exists; til.
Me, too! [1]
It's just how Aldi has advertised the product in their flyer
how do you find data about price?
It is from their weekly flyer page
And then what do you do to get the data onto the map?
Plotted using Leaflet. A python script creates separate HTML file for every product that has a price differential across stores (many products do not have any price difference across the country). Hosted as a static site.
So you download each state's flyers?
Would it not be better and more insightful to take an aggregate price of 50 items (picked from various categories) at each Aldi store and create a map like this to understand how Aldis in different regions have different pricing and the difference etc?
I am saying this because currently, some items like 'Navel Orange' are cheaper on the West Coast vs the East whereas items like 'Veggie Burger' are cheaper on the East Coast compared to the West Coast.
I only have data for the advertised products in this week flyer, very limited product range in that unfortunately
Why are spaghetti and butternut squash grouped together?
Not noodles vs. gourds but two different gourds:
* spaghetti squash (named for the long fibers in it's flesh)
* butternut squash
...should probably be written with some hyphens: "Spaghetti- or butternut- squash"
...or with some parens: "Squash (spaghetti or butternut)"
Initially, I was like wow someone has too much time on their hands, but now I'm totally fascinated by this and can't stop studying it.
This is awesome! Thanks!
I can’t believe a Big Mac has a different cost at individual stores. I’m not in the US.. I don’t think it’s like that here in Australia but someone will probably prove me wrong :D
Formally, McDonald's actually has relatively little control over the franchisees.
Even corporate owned stores will often price different.
This is great I would love to be able to toggle a high contrast version for those with red/green color blindness.
Yes, as a red/green color blind person this is mostly useless to me because the scale goes from red/green, through greenish yellow, back to red/green. Expensive and cheap look the same.
Yes, I can't read this either. Also, consider using a sequential color scale, rather than diverging. A diverging color scale should be reserved for datasets with a neutral value or natural midpoint. For example, if you were displaying growth, zero would be the midpoint, to quickly differentiate between positive/negative growth.
There is no meaningful midpoint here. A sequential scale from light to dark would be easier to read.
What an odd selection of items to compare. Presumably representative of the authors diet - by my gander some sort of pescatarian.
Almost nothing on this list I ever buy, other than some of the produce. Why not some staples for the rest of us like milk, butter, bread, sugar. Heck, basically any pizza without cauliflower crust.
This is the list of products under their weekly promotion flyer. 0% correlation with my diet :)
Hah, I stand corrected.
I find these types of maps fascinating. For people wondering what would this map look like if we were not limited to the USA and Aldi: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/gmaps.jsp?indexToShow=...
There are a few larger categories (groceries/rent/etc.) rather than individual items.
There exists data for websites of groceries in german speaking countries. But I think without location coordinates of each supermarket.
This one tracks all online prices of all the austrian grocery brands https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
Related thread on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37533633 But didn't took of.
They also gathered some historical data and competed with an government initiative to establish a price comparison app.
I love maps like these, the McDonald's (1) or Taco Bell one (2).
That said, these don't seem to cover things most people really buy - meat particularly, and fresh veggies. Or paper products. Have you considered adding more items?
It is not easy to get this kind of data as most of these companies do not provide any public APIs. I will continue exploring adding more products.
Relevant Trader Joe's discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39304068
Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's (traderjoesprices.com)
2024-02-08T16:37:38 (270 points / 146 comments)
This is awesome, is there something like this for Costco?
"Mama Cozzi's Pizza Kitchen 12" Veggie Cauliflower Crust Deli Pizza" Pizza with Cauliflower? WTF or just an Easter egg?
It’s a cauliflower crust pizza. Fairly common among the keto/low-carb crowd, but definitely fairly niche.
For those disappointed about limitations of the data, I assume it's because aldi.us has a minimal web presence that comes down to pretty much only weekly fliers when it comes to food pricing data (locally at least).
When I was in college (within the last 10 years), Aldi was a god send. We could get a load of whole wheat bread for 70 cents. A one pound bag of pretzels was like a dollar. A dozen bagels was $1.25. A pound of turkey lunch meat was $3. I had a semester where my food spend averages $23 dollars a week, all thanks to Aldi's insane prices (I let it go up a bit after that).
While everyone has been affected by food price increases, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Aldi is still notably cheaper for a lot of things about two weeks ago. The bad part is now when I see a can of beans for $1.50, it seems like a rip off since it's about _twice_ as much as the Aldi equivalent. The ingredients are the same: beans and salt.
I love Aldi for their raw efficiency that they generally take up. I know quite a few people who hate the structure of an Aldi, but I absolutely love it.
Aldi does pickup through Instacart, and while I know the prices wouldn't be 1:1 - it might be a great source of data for price deltas
No milk or eggs?
Only the products that are on this week's flyer are covered
So...Will get my Navel Oranges in Whichita, will do a quick jump to Mount Pleasant for Kiwis and get me the Spaghetti in Farfield...A Python script retrieving current Airline rates and implementing Minimum Spanning Tree should help optimize next week's shopping...
You could do this for YouTube views. "How I fed my family of twelve for ten dollars a week*", popping by various cities to get the best prices on unprocessed food ingredients, to serve them up some gruel, totally ignoring the travel costs.
Flying a thousand miles to pick up a pack of dried lentils, then another thousand miles to get a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes and then some more miles to pick up a bag of flour - that would have made great content a few years ago. This would be legitimate because the revenue from the 'content' would have paid for the flying.
Funnily enough I thought trader joe's was an Aldi store brand for a long time because I grew up in Europe
But it is kind of? Theo Albrecht bought it in '79.
I'm loving the grocery store price map/compare stuff lately. Oh how I wish it was easier to collect that data and watch items. Especially at Costco, Whole Foods, Publix.
Cool. Anything similar for EU?
Every price map like this should serve as a reminder that competition works. You can see prices are lower in areas where there is competition for a particular product and higher where there isn't any competition.
After about 25 years in Denmark without earning money, ALDI closed all shops here last year.
That's a great map! If I would still live in the US, my wife would use that map every day :-)
Very nice!
I would love to see something like this but for all supermarkets around the world with prices in local currencies adjusted.
i.e.
Where is the cheapest place in the world to buy a banana?
Where is the most expensive place in the world to buy a banana?
Now the 'banana' -- could be any food item, it doesn't matter.
A future tool like this could be able to help future societies predict which areas of the world are in economic ascent and which are in economic decline (cheaper prices = economic ascent, expensive prices = approaching potential future economic peak and/or approaching potential future economic decline, etc.)
Anyway, looks great!
Eh US only. Doesn't even have Aldi's home ground.
it's nice to see sites like this! i've made something similar tracking craft beer prices in Singapore in the past (burplist.com)
Are there any regulations for supermarket chains around mandatory data exposure via API ?
And if not, why ?
What's with the very clean north south kiwi divide?
This doesn’t really help because they all set the same prices in a big geographic area
This reminded me of when I was in the north east. The produce there is terrible compared to what I can get in southern california. We're really spoiled here. Excellent and cheap produce year round.
Seeing that Washington granny smith apples are not the cheapest in Washington is pretty odd.
Some years ago, the UK had a great website comparing online prices between supermarkets called MySupermarket[0]. They went closed down, but it genuinely saved me lots of money. IIRC, it even compared the prices with delivery fees.
I was sad they closed down, but a few companies have popped up since, but I've not been able to try them to see if they come close to how good it was. Heck, at the time I thought about creating an alternative, but wasn't sure where to start, so didn't end up trying.
Anyway, point is, we need more of this sort of comparison sites for things to keep things competitively priced, and to ensure people don't pay more for the same things.
Was kind of disappointed to see no data points in Germany
(USA)
Neat tool to start asking questions about food systems. The variations of prices are affected by many different things, from where it's made, to how it's transported, where it's stored intermediately, how much vertical integration is involved, the costs of retail in different locations, etc.
French Green Beans and Washington Granny Smith Apples are good ones to compare. West coast: only bottom-end prices. East coast: only top-end prices. These are two items you could grow on either coast, need temperature control for shipping, can be seasonal depending on the source. You could find them locally on either coast, so they're probably not shipping them from one coast to the other (or are they?). Price fluctuation might be just regional retail costs or supply/demand. Or it could be they're shipping them cross-country just to simplify logistics and marking up the price accordingly.
Simply Nature Organic Pasta is all over the place. Could be regional price fluctuations, could be logistics, maybe demand.
you Americans need to think about your "LEGOs" problem
How long do you thing that they will turn the already-plural "data" into the hyper-plural "datas"? Or has this already happened, I am too afraid to check.
Datums?
...and lets not get into the "paninis" situation.
Eh, devils advocate: when a word becomes more of a loan word than just a usage of its proper origin, doesn’t it make sense to follow the new languages patterns?
Different grammatical situation of course but similar in spirit is “latte.” It just means milk in Italian and so in Italy you’d always say cafe latte. But in the states everyone knows it as the coffee drink (Starbucks probably to blame).
Same with salsa—just means sauce in Spanish—but it’s become an English word in the states at this point and taken a different meaning.
Entree being another more egregious example…
Entree really is a particularly egregious example because it's meaning is different in different English speaking countries.
I've seen (older) German texts where "Jesus" is declined as in Latin, eg "the apostles Jesu" (=of Jesus, genitive) or "We saw Jesum" (=accusative). Somewhat jarring. As you say - when do you stop?
Data is a mass/uncountable noun now (like meat) rather than a countable noun (like coin/coins). Turning it countable involves a helper noun like data point / data points.
"Datum?" Almost nobody uses that in the vernacular.
I have seen it used in more than one software project and I know IT/Software people (including myself) who use it.
Data /is/ plural. One datum, set of data.
Exactly my point
Datases.
Nasty datases
Datae
You really don’t want to go down this road. I have no problem starting a movement to get Americans to call them “LEGO’s” and you won’t be able to even suggest it’s wrong because it’ll just be a contraction of “LEGO parts,” “LEGO bricks,” and “LEGO sets.” (But feel free to lambast us over punctuation and quotation marks.)
That isn't how contractions in English work – you can't form a contraction from two nouns.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/con...
Quite right, what's needed here is a portmanteau - Legarts
I prefer Legricks. Dammit kids, pick up your legricks, I darn near killed myself!
This comment made me twitch involuntarily.
LEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.
Imagine that, language and grammar change from country to country. We must alert the king! Light the fires of Gondor!
If anything it should be Al'sdi (Albrecht's Discount)
To continue this nitpick: it's "Albrecht Diskont" (no genetive), so it should be AlDi or ALDI (the latter is the spelling used officially by Aldi).
When I was a child in the 90ies, older people still called Aldi "Albrecht" (and the middle class avoided going there for fear of being marked poor):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Albrecht...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Aldi-Kal...
https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/news/media/7/The-Albre-b...
Interesting side note: Aldi is not called Aldi in Austria (it's "Hofer" there, which blew my mind as a kid since the logo is the same), because the Aldi trademark belonged to "Adel Lebensmittel Diskont" there.
People still avoid Aldi in the Netherlands if they want to keep up appearances. Lidl seems to suffer from this stigma a lot less.
That's interesting, because the customers at Aldi here in Germany are basically a cross-section of the population, but tend to be middle/higher middle class. Especially after the update to most of their shops during the last 7-8 years [0], most Aldis look really nice inside. This combined with the huge advantage that shopping at Aldi is really efficient (the stores are not large, for most items, you have only a single option to select from which usually has an excellent quality, and the cashiers are arguably the fastest in the industry) makes Aldi very attractive for people who could easily afford shopping at a non-discounter. Sure, I enjoy the occasional hour-long visit to a large supermarket with the family on a weekend, but after work? I want my shopping done in 10 minutes max without selecting from 30 brands of pasta and go home.
At least in larger cities, the average Lidl often looks a bit run-down and grimy, and the customers tend to be lower class (that's not the case in rural areas, however). I always found that interesting, because prices / quality are basically equivalent (although I tend to prefer Aldi products). I live near the border to France, and the situation there appears to be similar.
At least a few years ago, however, Aldis in Switzerland also looked very run-down (though not as run-down as Denner) with distinctly lower-class customers and a much larger focus on selling alcohol than in Germany.
[0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Bilderstreck...
Dutch here, worked a few years in Germany. I can attest to the difference in esteem of the Aldi/Lidl in de and nl. But you already agree: German shops just look run down as a matter of course. Rewe and Edeka the least probably?
However (I've lived some years in FR and PL too), nothing beats Dutch supermarkets in terms of shopping-speed. Nowhere. If you think (German) Aldi is fast, you should try a Dutch shop (preferably in the city around rush hour so you can see it shines under pressure). As a low anchor, you can try the same in France (any brand, but Lidl too) ;) This includes stock: Dutch supermarkets are rarely out of something, but in Germany this is par for the course (or I am extremely unlucky?)
Also, and this is actually quite true for the Netherlands as well, there is a quality problem. It can be good, but it rarely is great. The French (and Belgians) really have that beat, at the cost of speed. Only fresh veg and bread is where Lidl shines, and I love them for it.
Bread?! Lidl?! Aharrharrhaarrgh. (cough, spit...)
From a Dutch perspective :) You should see what foam they consider bread. One of the things I miss from France :) Lidl has a batard that is really quite good, unsurpassed by any Dutch bread.
Can't have anything from them which is (re)baked in store. Makes my nose run, and throat slimy, sometimes even constricting.
I've given up on them. And almost anything else too. Because that is a function of modern bakery supply chains in general, not one specific 'outlet'.
You haven't had bad bread if you've never had Dutch bread. That includes virtually any 'bakery' (those are mostly chains who also rebake). Dutch bread is barely baked, and barely bread. Really, moulding shite and baking it is superior.
Do not get in a bad-bread-pissing contest: Dutch will win it every time.
Try having some stuff in the US that passes for bread. You'd long for the Aldi back home!
I disagree to both to the single option to select from, and the excellent quality. For Aldi-North that is. Sampling for about 2 to 3 times a year there, since about 2014. Before that I lived there.
Hm. Been at the Aldi-Äquator in the 90ies, which is the division between Aldi-North and South in Germany. So one could pick 'branches' from the overlap there, and compare. Which was really different at the time.
Anyway, I remember the talks about that fear of being marked poor. It was all a load of BS as you could see from the parked cars, and style of clothing of shoppers.
Similar to BILD.de perceived as trash-tabloid, nonetheless having the largest circulation.
Bild is trash tho...
Yah. No objection there.
Mom shopped at Aldi but didn’t mention it to Dad
Related: is the price map of McDonald's then McDonald's's price map?
Why not McDonald’s’
Because it didn't occur to me that might be a possibility :-) is that what it would be?
It is a regular, but not universal, occurrence for people to elide the extra possessive 's when the word already ends in s.
For example, although adding a possessive suffix 's to the nane "Jordan" would result in "Jordan's," adding it to "James" could result in "James'". There's an apostrophe written at the end, but it's pronounced the same way as "James."
I said it's not universal because I still know people who would say "James's" (with an extra syllable at the end) in everyday speech anyway. I don't know to what extent this varies by dialect.
It's also elided when a plural already ends in s (and I think this is universal, but I haven't looked it up). For example, "the doctor's computer" (the computer of one doctor) sounds the same as "the doctors' computers" (the computers owned by the doctors). The apostrophe is written on the other side of the s, but it also sounds the same. Note that not all plurals end in s, e.g. man/men, woman/women, goose/geese, etc., and in these cases you still add the s, e.g. "the geese's beaks".
James’ = AP style James’s = Chicago Style
https://grammarbrain.com/james-or-jamess/
McDonalds'
Baker's dozen -> Bakers' dozen
baker's dozens
McDonald'ses. :D
Or just omit "the" - We have many McDonald's here in our town.
Companies often have press guides or branding guides that clarify this. For Macca, an old guide covers this (Trademark Usage / Page 3).
https://issuu.com/lukaszkulakowski/docs/002725
IIUC, that seems to be saying "don't write sentences in this structure" rather than "here's how it would look if you did write it". (Though it would seem strange for a manual to dictate the grammar for its own name.)
Following the example of Big Mac sandwiches (not Big Macs) I believe you'd write McDonald's restaurants' (not McDonald's'). I.E. always keep the trademarked word as-is, add sandwich or other nouns where needed to make the grammar work.
I think the confusion in this thread and elsewhere makes it clear why companies release brand guides.
Yeah, but companies don't get to decide how language is used. Apple can try all they want to demand that people say shit like "Use iPad to do it" or "Experience iPad" but that's just what they want and they can't stop people using English without their toxic marketing BS. Saying "Use an iPad to do it" is completely acceptable language and more in line with existing language no-matter what Apple marketing says.
McDonalds'
I always assumed this was a purely Aussie phenomenon, but I guess it makes sense that it's more of an "informal speech" thing than a regional ism.
It's British too. Tesco is always called Tesco's.
British supermarket Sainsbury's even put it in their logo.
The actual name of the company is J Sainsbury plc.
Sainsbury's is a reduction of John Sainsbury's supermarket, so they need sense. Just like Wilko's is Wilkinson's general store.
Well obviously but poster's point was that it's a British/Commonwealth colloquialism to do that.
It started as "J Sainsbury" with no apostrophe s. Then it changed it registered as "J. Sainsbury Limited" in 1922, again no 's.
"John Sainsbury's supermarket" was only contracted and picked up much later for marketing.
Or even Sainsbo's ;)
I can't read the link but we've the same thing in Ireland. I've always assumed it stemed from shops being family owned. e.g. We have a stationary store that was originally called Eason and Sons which when said quickly sounds like Easons.
There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me
Pet peeve: it's ALDI, not Aldi. It's an acronym for ALbrecht-DIskont.
Acronyms under most English style guides should be written in lowercase with the first letter capitalized. Only initialisms should be in all caps, which Aldi is definitely not.
e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/business/aldi-winn-dixie-...
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63015985
Aldi's corporate style is "ALDI" but that's just their internal guidance, not the rules of English.
I almost always see most acronyms (not brands with an acronym origin like Aldi) in all caps, and always considered it an odd quirk of the BBC that they did not.
E.g. The NYT itself: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=nato
Even the Daily Mail: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nato+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2F...
But apparently the Guardian doesn't do the all-caps either. Are there any American publications/style guides that don't do all-caps?
Editors will make exceptions to general style guidelines when they think it leads to better clarity when reading. For instance, most newspapers will write iPhone with a lower case 'i', despite that being incorrect for a proper noun, because people are used to seeing it that way.
Actually it's 'Aldis', because we're talking about more than one.
Just to clarify why this is wrong. First we are not talking about more than one, there is only one "Aldi" company.
We don't use Aldi's (notice the use of the ' for possessive after a single noun) in this case even though every company name is a proper noun which would follow this rule. It's not used because the Price Map is not belonging to Aldi, it is a price map "FOR" Aldi.
We are talking about multiple Aldi stores. I don't know if Aldi US is one company, or a franchise, or something in between. But I'm pretty certain they have more than one store.
When accessing from UK: "This content is not available in your country/region."
Holy moly. How is this even still a thing?
fitting for reading about a german supermarket chain
Surprised to see Wichita news as the url about this! Hello from ICT
Edited :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20231107074602/https://www.ksn.c...
how about Tesco's || Tescos' || Tescos for Tesco. it's just Tesco