A few days ago, I went to Aldi for coffee only to find that they’d run out.

In this case, it is likely caused by an unwise product change at Lidl. It is a change that Aldi made too, some years ago, after which I contacted them because I knew that people took a detour for that specific product. I can’t have been the only person who contacted them because Aldi ended up doing what I suggested that they should do. Aldi later discontinued that product again but by then, Lidl had a great option so everyone then started flocking to Lidl for it. (This had happened a few times before.)

I’m talking coffee. If people take a detour because you have really good arabica coffee and then you start mixing it with robusta so that you can sell it at the same price, you do not understand that you should never come between customers and their coffee. I told Aldi that instead they should continue to offer the same great quality coffee in slightly smaller packaging and that is what they did.

(However, Taco Bell, it does not quite work the same way for your tacos if you are trying to cut your costs! If you think you can hand out regular tacos that only have at most 25% of the filling in them, whereas the filling used to spill out before, you guarantee that customers will stay away. We can all eat empty taco shells at home if we want to, after all. That is not why we stop by, to eat empty tacos. What you could do instead is decrease the size of your taco shells substantially so that people still have the feeling that they’re eating a filled taco instead of an empty taco shell. That is admittedly hard to accomplish because all the machinery makes only one size taco. But you’ve made taco bowls too, haven’t you? If you can do that, you can also make smaller tacos.)

Just now, I went to Tesco and discovered that they too had run out of what I went there for. They actually had a lot of empty shelves! So I got some more shampoo and printer paper instead and called it a wrap.