The Aldi Cart Hack For The Days You Forget A Quarter

Aldi is a grocery chain praised for its affordable goods and well-known for how it handles shopping carts. Customers at the store must deposit a quarter into a little slot to free a shopping cart, and upon returning it, the customer receives their quarter back. But what happens if you don't have a quarter when shopping? While the internet is rife with Aldi cart hacks, many of which aren't on the level, it seems the easiest thing to do is just ask an employee for a quarter when you don't have one.

Many people don't carry cash — let alone quarters — on their person, which can leave you in a pickle at Aldi. While you should always try to come to Aldi prepared, don't beat yourself up if you don't have a cart quarter. Instead, confer with a staff member to see if they can help you. Customers claim this trick is quite successful and that staff supports it because it stops people from sticking random items into the cart.

With so many grocery store hacks floating around the internet, it's normal to wonder which are actually effective. According to one Reddit thread, the Aldi quarter hack is actually encouraged at the chain. As stated by a commenter, each staff member is allowed to disperse up to $5 in cart quarters every shift. The commenter explains that the policy benefits staff members and customers, as providing a cart quarter stops customers bogged down with groceries from complaining about "how they are going to carry it all out once checked out."

Another Reddit thread backs up these claims. Per a commenter, Aldi leaves room in its budget for distributing quarters and encourages staff to provide them if asked. Of course, not all locations are the same, so your closest Aldi may abide by different rules. In this case, consult a fellow shopper. Many are happy to hand over their cart when another customer is in a bind, and you should keep the karma train rolling by providing that same cart to the next customer when you're finished shopping.

It's no secret that Aldi's policy for handling carts is a far cry from most other grocery store chains. Like many other procedures at the store, it's all part of the establishment's cost-saving strategy. As explained on the Aldi FAQ page, depositing a quarter into the cart increases the chance that a customer will take their cart back to the corral when finished with their shopping trip. This saves Aldi from needing more staff members to ensure carts are sufficiently collected, allowing the store to maintain the low prices customers have come to expect.

While Aldi incentivizes customers to dutifully return their carts after shopping, consider that proper cart etiquette could also say a lot about you as a person. The shopping cart theory was first posited by Scientific American, stating that the decision to return a shopping cart to the prescribed area indicates a person's moral standing. In so many words, the theory claims that people who always or frequently return their carts are more likely to uphold social order, while people who rarely or never do are more likely to serve their own needs. While many people wholeheartedly abide by this theory, others find it reductive. Fortunately, Aldi sidesteps possible moral conundrums with its helpful cart policy.