My love affair with Aldi

In the past 6 months or so I've really started couponing and watching what I spend at the grocery store. Normally I just go to Walmart for everything except produce & meat, then hit Reasor's or Food Pyramid for these two categories, depending on who has the better sales going on and what side of town I'm on. Then I discovered that Walmart price matches competitors' ads, so I was going more & more to Walmart to shop what was on sale at other stores. I soon realized I needed to pay a little visit to Aldi to see what it was all about... my friend Cristin had always told me how cheap things were there, and I had been in Aldi before with my sister and mom (but that was before I even cared about prices).

Let me just tell you that I am now officially smitten with Aldi. Sometimes I wake up and secretly hope that I have to run an errand on Memorial so I can stop by & pick something cheap up. Mind you, I typically try & only grocery shop once a week, but you know how it is when you run out of something random on a Thursday and really need to replace it. I've probably shopped at Aldi 5 or 6 times since our affair began, and I have never spent over $20 there. Now, I'm not going and getting a heaping cart-ful of groceries, but I usually end up with 10-12 items. FOR LESS THAN $20. It's a beautiful thing. I've never been a name-brand food snob, so if you're like me and don't care what it says on the label, you've got to go.

I took Jason and the kids a weekend or so ago, and you should've seen his face when he walked in. He was like, 'Oh wow, this place is freaking me out.' By the end of our excursion, he had developed a healthy appreciation for all that is Aldi, but not enough to stop him from developing a new lingo... when something is 'ghetto' to him, he's promised me he's going to say it's 'so Aldi.' Whatever. We mock that which we don't understand. (Or something like that).

Here is my family at my home-away-from-home. One might think we don't get out much.