ALDI — Local services in Alpine Township

4 things to know before your first trip: (1) grocery carts must be rented. (2) They only take CASH OR DEBIT cards. NO CREDIT cards. (3) You must bag your own groceries (4) The short-haired, heavier set, blonde, tattooed cashier will ruin your groceries. Even if she says she can help you, stay back. Wait for another lane to open. Circle the aisles one more time. Unless of course she comes out from her register and begins to unload your groceries for you (true story!). Then you're in for it. All other cashiers are awesome. Load groceries on the belt heaviest to lightest. Most cashiers are fairly respectful of the order in which groceries should be loaded. RENTING CARTS: approach the cart corral and insert your quarter in the red coin slot at the top right portion of the cart handle. That causes the locking mechanism to disengage and now you're ready to shop. When you're done shopping and done loading your car simply bring the cart back to the corral, line up the key from the cart ahead of you, push it into the back side of the coin slot. This will push out the quarter. If you forget your quarter, no worries. Many people will just give you their cart when they're done (paying it forward!) Otherwise you can make change inside with a cashier. You'll save a ton! Somehow Aldi earned the reputation that they were like a Save-A-Lot or Family Dollar. And that couldn't be farther from the truth. The organic and gluten free selections are wonderful. Staples are cheap ($1.69 per gallon of milk a few weeks ago. $.99 eggs a while back, too). Prices shift occasionally but nothing like Meijer. I stopped shopping at Meijer 2 years ago when my weekly bill topped $250. Aldis was an answer to prayer. No need to clip coupons. No need to wait for 2-day sales. Prices haven't really increased at all since I started shopping there. Now we can feed our family of 8 for $130-50 per week. It's quite remarkable. I agree with other reviewers that the Alpine store has outgrown its footprint. I'm secretly praying for a store to be built in Standale! All in all, it's worth it. You don't have to walk the Thrifty Acres of Meijer. That's a reward in...

These stores are known for their skimping on employees and for their expectations of said employees having to leave registers to restock merchandise- many times resulting in one doing checkout and another running back and forth trying to do it all...this is fine untill they get slammed. This store had 3 employees, that I could see. And was seriously about at capacity. There were only around 10-12 carts available! Getting in the store was a challenging due to the stores starting the selection process inches from the entry! No reading labels here today! There were pallets here and there, the most difficult to navigate being the produce and fruits. Between the mob of people and skids parked in my way, making it a difficult experience for me at this time having some mobility issues. The prices have gone up in a year that I've been shopping in different stores, possibly demographics. All of this into consideration, it appears as employees are over achievers (which are what Aldi targets by starting wages a little higher, and seemingly only hiring a skeleton crew that are doing it all) working like crazy trying to keep foods on the shelf and get the consumers checked out.....prices are not really as low as I expected them to be either. The super effort on the part of the employees is what tipped the...

I don't know if four or 5 stars is appropriate??? The one on Alpine is decent. Usually crowded. One of the workers was kind of a jerk the other week for unknown reasons, but everybody else is usually quite nice. The only issue I've had recently was that I bought 5 gallons of milk over the course of a couple of weeks and they were all pretty close to expiration. Four went bad right on or a little before expiration. That kind of sucked. I'm sure I could have returned them, but I'm not interested in storing gallons of sour milk indefinitely until I have time to take them back. Hopefully a fluke. Otherwise most of the stuff is well priced. Vegetables are good quality. Fruit is mostly decent, but check it well. Their LaCroix soda water is overpriced. You can get it cheaper at Kingma's on Plainfield Ave. (Probably literally the only item you can get cheaper at Kingma's though:) Aldi's is definitely cheaper than Meijer, but obviously you don't get the same amount of selection. Definitely worth shopping there if you don't require name brands. (They do carry name brands but they're...