Maybe I Should Start Going Back to Aldi

Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash

I used to enjoy going to Aldi.

Well, not the peripheries of the store.

Just the belly.

That central part filled with things like bar fridges, socket wrenches, rakes, and biking shorts.

Firstly, it forced you to dream that one day you could use all of that stuff, so the best time to buy it was today.

And secondly, it gave you that little adrenaline rush before the Thursday catalogue sale.

A quiet, anticipatory excitement.

You never knew what lurked in the belly.

But these days Aldi doesn’t need to excite me.

I have Instagram.

Instagram lets me doom scroll past ads for things like a periodic table in a glass case, with a replica of each element inside.

What the.

An actual 3D case. With little compartments for each element.

Sixty-seven dollars. And Instagram thinks I should buy it.

As home decor.

Anyway, I know I’m not obliged to buy any of it.

But it still feels like there’s an agenda at play here.

My defences are being tested.

To the dear intern at Instagram who’s long been replaced by a machine, and that machine soon to be replaced by AI, what makes you think the periodic table is something I would want to look at in my living room?

Or even in my study, for that matter?

I spent years trying to escape that thing.

I liked my high school chemistry teacher Mr Abraham, but chemistry I could survive without.

Okay, organic chemistry was an exception because, as a Piscean, Kekulé dreaming up the benzene ring spoke to me on a different level.

The rest was mostly unnecessary.

Maybe not as torturous as physics perhaps. But this cluttered chart of letters and numbers stood between me and freedom.

The second that bell rang, I was out of there, running from anything that remotely resembled scientific notation.

Who decided it was a trendy home decor piece anyway?

And my social feed wants me to put it up as art.

Imagine I did. Then what. Crickets.

Maybe then someone will visit me and remark,

“Oh, I love how that decorative chart of atomic weights really ties your room together.”

It would be the same person who can find tones of peach with a hint of elderflower in sparkling water.

But it’s not just the periodic table memorabilia.

Over the weekend I saw a targeted ad for a premium notebook that cost $59.95.

Thanks for the five-cent discount. May as well have made it sixty.

For goodness’ sake, Insta, do you not realise that eventually, however flowery my writing is on that paper, it will end up recycled into three-ply that helps wipe a bottom somewhere?

Nothing is truer.

And also, if you know me well enough to know my handwriting, no amount of premium paper is going to fix that.

So what’s next.

Vintage charts of multiplication tables?

I knew I should have stored my children’s Kumon workbooks and laminated them.

Maybe those would have lit the Insta marketplace.

Look.

People who know me well know I like my shiny tech toys.

You know who you are. Stop smirking.

I have purchased (umm, invested in) my fair share of laptops, computers, screens, and gadgets of various sizes and shapes that promised to make my life better.

And yes, I know those cost a lot more than a sixty-dollar periodic table or a notebook with artisanal fibres pressed into the pages by the last sighted wood elf.

But seriously. Can we pause for a moment?

I miss the honesty and simplicity of Aldi’s belly.

Those socket wrenches gathering dust in my storage cupboards. At least they could theoretically fix something.

That exercise bike that is now the world’s most expensive clothes hanger? It had the best intentions.

But a decorative periodic table?

We’re not even buying useful things we won’t use anymore.

We’re buying useless things we will definitely not use.

Maybe I should start going back to Aldi. At least when I bought pointless stuff there, it knew it was pointless.