Once upon a time I was forced to buy my groceries in Superquinn. That was even before Tesco was in Ireland and before Aldi and Lidl arrived. Then I remember the week the first Aldi in Parnell Street opened. There were queues outside the shop and inside you couldn’t use a trolley because we had to walk through the shops like ducks in a row because there were soooo many people inside.
Nearly every Aldi and Lidl in Dublin (and there are MANY now) is busy and the market share of the two shop chains keeps growing, but there are some people who still think that they are too good to shop in Aldi and Lidl. But this snobbery is crumbling when you experience the high quality goods for SIGNIFICANTLY lower prices than others charge.
Oddly, though, when it comes to setting up new shops, some parts of Dublin are still totally against an Aldi or Lidl in their neighbourhood and I don’t believe for a minute that this is because of the dying village centres (they are already dead since Centra, Spar and Starbucks took over) or because of the REAL traffic increase. Maybe the PERCEIVED increase and this always reminds me of the stupid idea that Fingal County had when they limited the opening hours if Ikea near Ballymun and tried to force the shop to charge for parking during peak hours to avoid that looming traffic chaos that would bring the M50 to a stand still. Nothing like that ever happened and Ikea luckily was able to change the Fingal County rules.
So it is either a total misjudgement regarding traffic OR it is snobbery and I think ultimately it is the snobbery that is the reason for the NOs in Castleknock and Clonsilla that is described in this article www.thejournal.ie/lidl-2-3201010-Jan2017/
By the way, both Aldi and Lidl have managed to create pretty and very well integrated shops in some areas, so the look of the shops is not a good enough reason anymore to reject them.
