My wife Andie and I have started doing a lot of our food shopping at our local Lidl. It's not really any further away from the Tesco and/or Sainsbury's we had typically been going to up until now, it's generally a bit cheaper, and there's something just a bit more fun about it, inasmuch as grocery shopping can ever be fun. Also, I am nearly forty-four years old, and thus several decades too old for people to take the piss out of me for going to Lidl.
For the unfamiliar, Lidl is a budget supermarket that, as well as having the usual supermarket groceries, tends to have a bunch of random crap down its middle aisles ranging from portable greenhouses to cookware via dog toys, and also has an aisle or two that have a rotating "themed" selection of foods, with the theme usually being a particular geographical area.
The one… challenge we have, if you want to call it that, is because Lidl has these interesting "novelty" sections each time you go, the temptation is to do that thing where you go to another country and visit their supermarkets, and then you want to do stupid shit like buy their version of Corn Flakes to see if they taste any different, stuff like that. I know I'm not the only one who does this because Andie does it too.
Okay, the Corn Flakes thing is an exaggeration, but the natural response to seeing unfamiliar but tasty-looking things in a supermarket is to go "ooh, that looks unfamiliar but tasty, I'll give it a try". You will then repeat this process approximately 10-15 times over the course of your complete visit to Lidl — along with deciding that you actually do need a new frying pan, and the one they had in the middle aisle really wasn't that unreasonably priced — and end up with a shopping bill a good £20-£50 more than if you'd just gone to Tesco.
This, I guess, is the genius of Lidl. They can position themselves as a budget supermarket, because they are, but the way they merchandise their products means that people are, on the whole, probably more likely to spend more than they normally would. This is a work of dastardly genius, but I'm not mad about it.
I like being able to do the weekly food shop and discover weird American snacks that are a cross between Wotsits and a bag of salted peanuts. I like knowing that when I'm buying bread and milk, I have the option to also purchase a chainsaw at the same time. I like the fact that I could show up to Lidl at any hour of the day, purchase a large pack of toilet paper, some lubricant and a large item of garden furniture and no-one would look twice at the contents of my trolley. Well, all right, they might in that last instance.
Also, you remember a while back I talked about my lifelong desire to rediscover the brownies the friends of my parents once served me in America one Halloween? Lidl's in-store bakery brownies are the absolute closest thing I've had to those brownies. I still don't think they're quite there, but they are, by far, the closest I've had to those brownies from all those years ago. And thus their merchandising genius can't be all that evil, can it? Unless they're lacing those brownies with something that makes you inherently more suggestible…
Oh well. Anyway, we need to do a food shop soon, so I will be intrigued to see what nonsense we come back with next time. Perhaps I'll even report on it. Bet you can't wait, no?
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