'What A Joke': Why Aldi's Blind Box Promo Might Just Backfire On The Chain

A few days ago, The Takeout wrote about Aldi's Blind Box promo, which involves the chain giving away a limited number of mystery boxes each day. While I'm not naive enough to think I stood a great chance of scoring one, I thought it would be worth a try. I set a reminder on my calendar to log on to the Aldi Blind Box website just before noon and clicked on the link as soon as it showed up. Much to my surprise, I was informed that the box was in my cart. However, I would need to wait 28 minutes to check out. "Hmmm, okay," I thought, "I guess $50 worth of free groceries is worth a little inconvenience." Well, it would have been, but you probably know where this is going.

Once the time had elapsed, I was allowed to check out and managed to type the first three letters of my name before a popup told me my cart was empty and checkout was canceled. Needless to say, I was pretty ticked off and in need of further info/fellow sufferers/a place to vent. I searched on Google and immediately found several social media posts where nearly every commenter had experienced something similar and felt the exact same way about it. As one member of Facebook's Aldi Aisle of Shame Community expressed it, "What a joke on these blind boxes. I was in front of my computer waiting, immediately claimed one and it says 8 minutes wait time to check out. Waited the 8 minutes and THEN it says out of stock."

A number of disappointed Aldi shoppers speculated about why the boxes were gone so fast. Some Facebook commenters wondered if the offer was, in fact, a scam. It's unlikely, since Aldi is hardly a fly-by-night outfit, but its handling of the promo still seems sussy. According to one commenter, "Influencers supposedly got early access. So the boxes were all gone before the public could even try." Others speculated they were all claimed by bots.

Some people chastised the complainers for being so vocally disappointed over missing out on a freebie, but that doesn't really seem like the point. For most of us, the real issue is Aldi raising false hopes and then wasting our time. If the website had told us right away the boxes were gone, we'd have just gone on with our days; but as it stands, we're all feeling played. The people who are posting about this are members of online Aldi fan communities, so we are (or were) faithful customers. I don't expect special consideration for writing about Aldi must-buys (I write about disappointing Aldi items, too), but this blind box promo feels like the opposite of a customer loyalty reward. 

In the words of a fellow disgruntled shopper, "Aldi USA your customers are NOT happy! So if there's 100 blind boxes per giveaway, & assuming people actually claimed them, that's literally 400 happy customers compared to this." What was Aldi hoping to accomplish, anyway? To push us into the arms of its competitor Lidl's irresistible bakery? It might want to rethink this marketing tactic, just saying.