Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
What do the public want from a grocery store? The question has vexed marketing gurus for decades. Finally, we have an answer. The public want a brightly-lit warehouse in which they can find giant blocks of cheese sandwiched between power-drill kits and eastern European Y-fronts.
The German discount-supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl seem to have colonised the country almost overnight with a winning combination of cheap and not too cheerful. Aldi is sometimes considered to be a little more upmarket than Lidl, although that's like suggesting that Jordan's a bit classier than Jodie Marsh. Each unashamedly reverses years of consumer psychology research. If you handed them a copy of Fergal Quinn's Crowning the Customer they would probably use it to prop up the frozen-doughnuts freezer. Lidl and Aldi couldn't care less about greeting you with the aroma of fresh bread or the hearty delights of fruit and veg. In my local, the first aisle presents you with the things you really came for: biscuits and booze. Both companies seem to design their stores with 1980s eastern European austerity in mind, which may also explain why some of the fashion items were last modelled by Raisa Gorbachev.
Much of Lidl and Aldi's strange allure comes from their delightfully random weekly special offers. It gives them a jumble-sale atmosphere, as if all that is missing is a table of chipped mugs and torn comics. A single aisle might contain such incongruous items as thongs, walkie-talkies, apple trees, surf boards, computers and, on a two-for-one deal, prosthetic limbs. And unless you are there early in the week, you could miss the really good deals and face a choice of Day-Glo bicycle shorts in XXL or XXXL. A recent Lidl offer included bargains on a whole range of fishing equipment, including a portable fish detector, a bite detector and a smoke oven. When you spy such items your first thought is: "Who buys this stuff?" Your second is: "I can't wait to try out my new smoke oven."
Their products are recognisably close to, but presumably legally distant from, famous brands. And they come in one size: monstrous. The detergents, for instance, are sold in boxes deeper than the shopping trolley. And, most important of all, it is cheap. It shows us how much we've previously overspent on olive oil, nappies and biscuits.
A strange voodoo economics is at work, however. You go to these places to save money yet end up buying so much that you spend just as much as you would have anywhere else. Usually on things you don't need. Go in for a tray of cheap beer and a bin-liner-sized bag of crisps and leave with a trolley filled with a dozen pineapples, 13 types of German cold meats and a five-kilo bag of dog food. You might not own a dog, but you leave happy that, if you ever do, you'll have saved a fortune.