Crying in the Frozen Pizza Aisle at Aldi

The Germans take thrift shopping super seriously. You aren't likely to run into fancy marketing gimmicks at the neighborhood budget grocery store. This is the country where bread is labeled "BREAD." The Germans appreciate stores with a no-bullshit approach.

The failure of Walmart in Germany attests to this. When even the richest family in America can't buy their way into the German retailing sector, you know something is up. A 2006 NYT article contains quite hilarious anecdotes about how Walmart tried --and failed -- to adapt to German culture:

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union, which represents 5,000 Wal-Mart employees here.

Want service with a smile? MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE, YOU INSUFFERABLE YUPPIE.

Besides failing to adapt to local culture, Walmart simply couldn't compete with its biggest German rival, Aldi. The budget behemoth attracts 95% of blue-collar workers, 88% of white-collar workers, 84% of public servants, and 80% of self-employed Germans, according to a 2002 survey conducted by the German market research institute Forsa. The company's enormous success has made its owner, Karl Albrecht, the richest man in Germany and the fourth richest in Europe.

Aldi may make $53 billion in revenue every year, but you don't see the money when you walk into its stores, which look like food prisons. Wanna talk to the brocolli? You'll need to pick up a corded phone and stand behind the bulletproof glass.

In America, I find comfort in wandering the aisles of local grocery stores, perusing the packaging, fondling the candy. The advertising makes me fantasize about all the wonderful lives I might live. Here, not so much. If you want to picture Aldi, imagine a place with the florescent lighting of Target, the cramped ceilings of a parking lot and the screaming neon color schemes of a 99 cent store. You just want to get the hell out of there before someone calls your name over the intercom and you're turned over to the Stasi for loitering around the pickle jars.

It's so comically miserable that I often want to stage some kind of theatrical intervention. The store I frequent is primarily visited by Turkish families and broke artists, and I sometimes envision the two demographics breaking character and engaging in political rapartee.

Of course, in the real world, this will never happen. And so I take a selfie in the frozen pizza aisle instead, hoping someone will notice me and mutter to themselves something delightfully disparaging about Americans.