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Show HN: Aldi Price Map
Hi HN, Inspired by the recent discussion on traderjoesprices.com, and sites such as mccheapest.com, here is a map of how much does it cost to shop (this week's promo items) at Aldi
- pistachiosPower 3y agohow do you find data about price?
- Aeolun 3y agoI feel like there’s a few countries missing :) Intersting to see how the prices relate just in the US though.
- ayocado 3y agoOops, yes it covers US only. Could not find easily available data for European countries :)
- jansan 3y agoIn 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.
- zyx321 3y agoYeah, Aldi in the US is Aldi South, Trader Joe's is a subsidiary of Aldi North.
- twelvechairs 3y agoThere's also Aldi in Australia and China Also I'm not quite sure about the grammar of "Aldi's"
- ayocado 3y agoI will check if I can find data for Australia or China. Fixed the grammar :)
- getwiththeprog 3y agoWould be great for Australia, we have a supermarket monopoly, divided by two major chains, then Aldi's supermarkets and Foodland's supermarkets.
- Shrezzing 3y agoWhere 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.
- 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smithcoin 3y agoThis is great I would love to be able to toggle a high contrast version for those with red/green color blindness.
- jrmg 3y agoYes, 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.
- NickFanion 3y agoYes, 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.
- justhw 3y agoMost 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?
- ayocado 3y agoI would assume so as well. Generally produce apear cheaper in West/South although organic avocados are bucking this trend
- getwiththeprog 3y agoProbably because avocados are less popular in the Mid-North, so they sell them for less.
- candiodari 3y agoIt'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.
- ayocado 3y agoIt is also interesting how some products are just marked up for NYC only https://www.aldipricemap.com/earthly_grains_instant_jasmine_rice.html https://www.aldipricemap.com/earthly_grains_instant_jasmine_...
- rkagerer 3y agoUp 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.
- 3y ago
- disillusioned 3y agoNo milk or eggs?
- ayocado 3y agoOnly the products that are on this week's flyer are covered
- pjot 3y agoThe 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.
- ssss11 3y agoSo they’re passing on transport costs?
- kuschku 3y agoWould 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lotsofpulp 3y agoAll businesses pass on all costs, otherwise they would go bankrupt. Revenue must remain greater than expenses (outside VC funded moonshots).
- stefs 3y agoif the additional costs are lower than the revenue the businesses can choose whether to pass on costs or not.
- ssss11 3y agoThanks Einstein. I was referring to passing them on on an individual store basis rather than averaging across all stores.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoOn 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.
- kube-system 3y agoPet peeve of mine: it's 'Aldi' not 'Aldi's' https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-to-the-end-of-store-names/ https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-...
- Aaronmacaron 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231107074602/https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-to-the-end-of-store-names/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231107074602/https://www.ksn.c...
- ayocado 3y agoEdited :)
- dataflow 3y agoRelated: is the price map of McDonald's then McDonald's's price map?
- notso411 3y ago[dead]
- ace2358 3y agoWhy not McDonald’s’
- dataflow 3y agoBecause it didn't occur to me that might be a possibility :-) is that what it would be?
- trealira 3y agoIt 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".
- reiz 3y agoThat's a great map! If I would still live in the US, my wife would use that map every day :-)
- daft_pink 3y agoInitially, 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!
- ssss11 3y agoI 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
- thih9 3y agoWhy are some entries grouped together, like “spaghetti or butternut squash”?
- bowsamic 3y agoI 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
- denvrede 3y agoI 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.
- kuschku 3y agoHonestly, 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.
- denvrede 3y agoFair 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.
- PaulRobinson 3y agoIn 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.
- BaudouinVH 3y agoWhat would it take to add the ALDIs in Europe to this map ?
- ayocado 3y agoData :) Not easy to get it at scale without APIs
- Kon-Peki 3y agoWell, 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/ https://www.aldi.us/online-shopping/new-aldi-grocery-website... [2] https://api.commerce.aldi.us/ https://api.commerce.aldi.us/
- Lio 3y agoThat'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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Geographic_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Geographic_distribution
- statquontrarian 3y agoI'm curious why you're using a commercial tile provider -- CARTO -- instead of OpenStreetMaps?
- donalhunt 3y agoIt'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. https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
- statquontrarian 3y agoWhat 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. Of course, there is no Service Level Agreement: 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. But that seems quite reasonable for donated resources.
- ayocado 3y agoPretty 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
- statquontrarian 3y agoFrom 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/ https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
- silisili 3y agoI 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? 1 - https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest 2 - https://taconomical.com/ https://taconomical.com/
- ayocado 3y agoIt 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.
- felixfbecker 3y agoWas kind of disappointed to see no data points in Germany
- kristopolous 3y agoThis 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.
- gordon_freeman 3y agoWould 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.
- ayocado 3y agoI only have data for the advertised products in this week flyer, very limited product range in that unfortunately
- chirau 3y agoWhy are spaghetti and butternut squash grouped together?
- steamer25 3y agoNot 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)"
- odiroot 3y agoEh US only. Doesn't even have Aldi's home ground.
- oniony 3y agoDo Americans find it difficult to slice their own mushrooms?
- master-lincoln 3y agoThanks for highlighting this absurdity. Gotta love em dorky Muricans
- raziel2p 3y agoThis 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.
- sva_ 3y agoWait until you see peeled mandarins in plastic containers. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35727935 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35727935
- prmoustache 3y agoI'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.
- francisofascii 3y agoI 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".
- rendang 3y agoThat'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
- theqwxas 3y agoI 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=getGroceriesIndex https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/gmaps.jsp?indexToShow=... There are a few larger categories (groceries/rent/etc.) rather than individual items.
- djdeutschebahn 3y agoThere 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 https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise Related thread on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37533633 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.
- das_keyboard 3y agoHow 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...
- tomcam 3y agoDid the TLD provide any clues? I would Germans would prefer a .de domain.
- ayocado 3y agoWell I did search for any available data for Germany but nothing available easily :|
- das_keyboard 3y agoTo 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.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoDon'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
- ivandenysov 3y agothere are even memes about this. Like this tactical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zacwvs/supermarket_civil_war/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zacwvs/supermarket...
- nwatson 3y agoAldi North is called Trader Joe's in the USA.
- 3y ago
- victorbjorklund 3y agoCool. Anything similar for EU?
- rustybolt 3y agoAs 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.
- nicksergeant 3y agoThat 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.
- raziel2p 3y agoThat 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)?
- Kon-Peki 3y ago> 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.
- ericb 3y agoThat 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?
- reducesuffering 3y agoAn organic banana and a granola bar at Trader Joe's (Aldi Nord) in the US is $1.50.
- 867-5309 3y ago(USA)
- threesevenths 3y agoEvery 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.
- belter 3y agoSo...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...
- Theodores 3y agoYou 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.
- frankdejonge 3y agoSeeing that Washington granny smith apples are not the cheapest in Washington is pretty odd.
- FinnLobsien 3y agoFunnily enough I thought trader joe's was an Aldi store brand for a long time because I grew up in Europe
- infecto 3y agoBut it is kind of? Theo Albrecht bought it in '79.
- donatj 3y agoWhat 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.
- figmert 3y agoSome 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySupermarket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySupermarket
- neogodless 3y agoRelevant Trader Joe's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39304068 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)
- moxplod 3y agoThis is awesome, is there something like this for Costco?
- jjice 3y agoFor 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.
- Navarr 3y agoAldi 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
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 3y agoThis doesn’t really help because they all set the same prices in a big geographic area
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoNeat 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.
- maxglute 3y agoWhat's with the very clean north south kiwi divide?
- slu 3y agoAfter about 25 years in Denmark without earning money, ALDI closed all shops here last year.
- whitakerch 3y agoI'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.
- mipsi 3y ago"Mama Cozzi's Pizza Kitchen 12" Veggie Cauliflower Crust Deli Pizza" Pizza with Cauliflower? WTF or just an Easter egg?
- sgerenser 3y agoIt’s a cauliflower crust pizza. Fairly common among the keto/low-carb crowd, but definitely fairly niche.
- peter_d_sherman 3y agoVery 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!
- mderazon 3y agoAre there any regulations for supermarket chains around mandatory data exposure via API ? And if not, why ?
- ngshiheng 3y agoit's nice to see sites like this! i've made something similar tracking craft beer prices in Singapore in the past (burplist.com)