One quarter in our house never goes in the jar. It rides in the cupholder of my CR-V, and its only job is to get me a cart at the Aldi in Columbia once a month. Tyler calls it the expensive quarter, since it comes with a two-hour drive attached.
We started the monthly Aldi run in February. Columbia is about an hour south of Macon on US-63, and we were already going down there about once a month to see my friend Kayla or pick up things the stores in town don't carry. Adding Aldi to the trip seemed like it had to save money. After three months of receipts, I finally sat down and checked.
How I compared
Every time we got home, I took the Aldi receipt and priced the same items at the Walmart in town, matching sizes as closely as I could. I used the Walmart store brand whenever there was one, since that's what we'd actually buy there. A few things didn't line up exactly, like the size of a bag of shredded cheese, so I worked those out by the ounce.
Then I took out the gas. The round trip is about 120 miles. My CR-V gets around 29 miles a gallon on the highway, so that's a little over 4 gallons, and gas has been running about $2.79 around here this spring. Call it $11.50 a trip.
| Month | Aldi receipt | Same cart in town | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| February | $142.18 | $176.40 | $34.22 |
| March | $158.61 | $191.05 | $32.44 |
| April | $136.90 | $168.30 | $31.40 |
| Three months | $437.69 | $535.75 | $98.06 |
So the same food cost about 18% less at Aldi. Take out three trips' worth of gas, $34.50, and we came out $63.56 ahead over three months. That's about $21 a trip.
Where the savings came from
Not evenly. The biggest gaps were on the things we buy every week: cheese, butter, eggs, bread, canned beans and tomatoes, frozen vegetables, and snacks for Tyler's lunches. A two-pound block of cheddar was more than a dollar cheaper. Eggs have been expensive everywhere this spring, but they were still cheaper at Aldi all three months.
Meat was closer than I expected. Some months the family packs in town beat Aldi on ground beef, so now I check the price in Macon before we go and only buy meat in Columbia if it's actually lower. Produce was a wash. Some things were cheaper, some weren't, and twice the bag of potatoes in town was the better deal.
There are also a few things Aldi doesn't carry that we like, so we still shop in town every week. The Aldi run didn't replace Walmart. It replaced about one of our four weekly trips and made the other three smaller.
Is the drive worth it?
Tyler, who does our oil changes and knows what tires cost, had a fair point here. Gas isn't the only cost of driving. The IRS uses 70 cents a mile for the whole cost of running a car, wear and tear included. By that math, a 120-mile round trip "costs" $84, and Aldi loses badly.
But that only matters if we're driving to Columbia just for groceries, and we're not. We were already making that drive about once a month. Kayla lives there, and so do the stores we need for the odd thing, like a part for the truck or a birthday present. Aldi got added to a trip we'd take anyway. Looked at that way, the gas is the only extra cost, and even that's generous, since we'd be burning most of it regardless.
If we had to make a special trip just for Aldi, I don't think I'd do it. For us, it works because it rides along with everything else.
A few things make it go smoother. We bring the big cooler and two ice packs for the cold stuff, since it's an hour home. I make a list from the sheet the night before and stick to it, because the middle aisle at Aldi is full of things I didn't know I wanted. And we bring our own bags, since they don't hand them out.
So for us, the drive is worth about $21 a trip. That's not going to change our lives, but it's around $250 a year if it holds, and that's $250 that can go to the house fund instead of the grocery line. The expensive quarter stays in the cupholder.
