I found the best supermarket. It treats you like it’s a communist dictatorship

I am a survivor of grocery shopping paralysis. I was never one to pop in and out of shops with a list, but somewhere along the line I spiralled into a best-price, highest-health-star comparison vortex, and trips to Coles or Woollies could take half a day.

I knew from Choice magazine that ALDI was cheaper than either of the big two, but I didn’t want to go to ALDI. For reasons I cannot quite explain, I associated its wares with freeze-dried space food. Formaldehyde, even. The concept of a shop that sold cheaper unheard-of brand names had a vague sense of mutation about it. Clearly lots of other consumers harbour such (likely less insane) reservations: 48 per cent of Australians primarily shop with Woolies, followed by Coles at 39 per cent.

I unilaterally formed a conspiracy theory that ALDI, a German multinational, sold goods that had been banned in Europe for classified reasons. It seemed at least likely all the goods had passed through a slightly broken cloning machine.

When I finally ventured there, I would at first only buy its non-consumables. Washing powder from Denmark, even if micro-structurally altered by a particle physics machine, seemed acceptable, but the idea of food doing the same gave me Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vibes.

My grocery paranoia might sound like xenophobia, but I assure you it was not. I had simply misunderstood the whole concept of ALDI because it had entered my field of vision during early parenthood, a time when I was so sleep-deprived that I trusted my middle-of-the-night thoughts.

By the time I decided to give ALDI a proper chance, I was further along the journey of parenthood, at the Second Demented Phase – the one in which you will pay for anything to make life easier; the one in which the possibility of buying cryogenically frozen grapes from Bavaria at the same place as a ski jacket or air fryer had strong allure.

So I came to love ALDI. What I love most, still, is how it can make me feel I am living under a dictatorship. I love a grocery store that severely limits my choice. Such constraint sends a tiny shiver of thrill through my overburdened brain. At ALDI, I can simply go with the product among three that most impressively skirts the edges of trade infringement. For example, Hedanol, which looks, smells and pain-relieves like Panadol, and is for your hed.

Or Cheezy Twists. Twisties masquerading as Twisties. Or the Flat Bear, a flat polyester sleepy toy that is exactly the same other than in name or material as the trademarked sheepskin Flatoutbear.

Personally, I prefer it when the ALDI product evokes something indefinable of the copied thing rather than copying it exactly. I like the gentle, unconscious familiarity, the uncanny – what is this thing that looks like something I know but is not the thing I know?

In my experience, it doesn’t take long for the original household-name products I have known from Coles or Woolies to fade like a dream. The simulacra ALDI product successfully body-swaps and, as with heartbreak softened through the passing of time, I often no longer even remember what I once bought from Coles or Woolies.

ALDI knows, though, that austerity must occasionally be injected with unhinged desire. So, while the main ALDI shop resembles a bread ration journey under a communist regime, the Special Buys aisle is slotted in the middle like a wild day-pass from North Korea to Bali. There my synapses pop and lock: Oooh! A plastic step! I could reach new places! Oooh! A pet-cooling mat! I could get a pet and cool it! And so on.

ALDI also uses the predictability of its product-offer cleverly. Just as one has been lulled by the sameness (I could do an ALDI shop blindfolded, truly) a new, never-before-seen item will appear – such as its cheeseburger-flavoured spring roll. The effect on the mind of the sense-blunted ALDI shopper is profound: the item must be bought. Like those limited-edition lamington-flavoured crisps (bork! Fire that food scientist!), the product itself may be repulsive but it represents the finitude of life. Never again might we have the chance! We buy it. Even though we have to cram it into a too-small bag brought because we actually only came to get milk.

And sometimes the one-off surprise item is good. Great, even. For about six months ALDI had a cheese that was so unbelievable that my kids and I dubbed it God Cheese. They don’t have it any more. I look for it every week and am reminded that we all one day will die.

For me, there is still one other occasional option, along with 2 per cent of Australians: the IGA. There, I can counteract both affordability and limited choice in one fell swoop, with something like 200 grams of Gorgonzola for $1000. And then it’s back to ALDI, where I have just enough remaining salary to buy some Topz, its ersatz Ritz, to eat it on. And a tuba.

Nicola Redhouse is a Melbourne writer and author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.

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