Think of Aldi as a Parody of Ourselves

I find supermarkets absolutely fascinating. In a free market society we largely end up determining and reinforcing our own purchasing habits. When we step into a supermarket everything is custom-tailored to catch your eye, to make you want to buy it, to lay out in concise terms through clever packaging and branding just why you want it.

This is why Aldi is so interesting. Many supermarkets have a store brand, but it makes up such a small fraction of their sales that it doesn't really factor into the larger picture. While most supermarkets are filled with brand-name products, Aldi only has their own brand.

Now, if you are shopping at Aldi, you only have one reason to really be there... everything is dirt cheap. Why you're there and what you buy are pretty much predetermined by the time you walk in. So you won't be considering what particular brand or type of cheese you want, you get what they have: Happy Farms "Brand" Cheese. Everything sold in Aldi is distributed by Aldi, but nothing bears a giant Aldi logo like a Wegmans-brand food would. Instead, all the labels are poor mimicries of why somebody might purchase this item. For instance, their low-fat cream cheese has a "Fit & Active" brand. Anything that can be deemed even slightly Mexican food, it is under the brand "La Mas Rica!" The bread is labeled under the brand "L'oven Fresh."

To try and sum up what I'm saying, Aldi has these strange brand names not out of necessity but out of precedent. We expect to see so many varied brands at our supermarkets that if everything had a giant Aldi logo front and center on it people would be unnerved by it to the point where they would be uncomfortable buying it. So, all their food has to have fake branding and feign the desire to impress people into purchasing them. So their entire branding scheme is a parody of what we want to hear, but don't necessarily need to because we have to buy it anyway 'cause its so damn cheap.