The Real Reason Some Aldi Customers Are Furious About Their Shopping Carts

Once again, grumblings have emerged that the carts Aldi exclusively uses are too large for some of their customers. On March 31, The Daily Mail reported that one customer from Southern Australia who stands at 155 centimeters (about 5 feet tall) and has suffered from four spinal injuries found the 1.1 meter-tall carts (about 3 foot six inches) are simply too cumbersome. The piece also notes that similar complaints have been leveled at Costco and its reportedly too-large carts.

As such topics go, some agreed that Aldi should at least offer a smaller cart option. Others lambasted the people complaining. News.com.au quotes one response that reads "Why is there an issue with the trolley? Don't people have anything better to complain about? For goodness sake... the trolleys are perfect in size." 

Of course, nothing constructive was actually achieved regarding the carts. The Daily Mail reached out to Aldi, inquiring whether they could introduce a smaller set of carts for smaller people. Aldi stated that they had no intentions of doing so. So those who grew impassioned on behalf of Aldi can rest easy, though short-statured people who want a more appropriately-sized cart are still out of luck.

This is the second time complaints concerning the large size of Aldi's carts have emerged. The first round occurred in 2016 when Aldi first introduced their new, bigger carts, as The Daily Mail reported. The complaints were roughly the same then as now. The carts are reportedly made for giants, meaning that smaller people develop aching backs by using them.

However, the size those new Aldi carts reached mark a continuation of cart growth that has occurred at least since the 1970s. In 2000, Slate wrote that their size had tripled between 1970 and 2000. In 2011, Martin Lindstrom, a marketing consultant, told Today that his team had experimented with a cart doubled in size. Customers with an oversized shopping cart bought 40 percent more groceries.

Turns out that grocery cart details really matter. It stands that companies may have introduced bigger carts with larger spaces to fill as an incentive for customers to spend more money. However, if that is the case, the complaints concerning Aldi's size show that we may have reached the upper limit of swelling grocery carts. Otherwise, one day we might have to drag them along, fastened to us like horses pulling a cart.