TV review: Pop in for cookies and come home with a chainsaw — the magic of the middle aisle
Lidl staff: (clockwise from top left) Shannen O'Connell, Samantha Ryan, Gemma Dowling; Caoimhe Bracken, Adam Kinsella, and Christopher Ryan
For some of us, the cruellest blow during the pandemic was when the Government decided to shut down the middle aisle. It had been the only treat left: a stroll around Aldi or Lidl, wondering if your life would be better if you spent €19.99 on a waffle maker. And now that treat was gone.
(RTÉ One and RTÉ Player) dragged me back there, reminding us that we’ve come a long way since the ‘stop having fun’ days of the deepest pandemic. Like all these consumer and retail shows, it gives you a chance to play Conor Pope Bingo, where you bet how many minutes go by before Ireland’s favourite consumer champion pops up on screen. The prize goes to those who went for two minutes, and Conor gave good value as you might expect.
He point s out the strangeness of Aldi and Lidl when they came here first. They weren’t that strange to me because I lived in Germany for a while, where an aisle selling gherkins would be next to the one selling motorbikes. You’d go down for a bottle of Riesling and arrive home on a Kawasaki.
That surprise purchase was the big attraction when Aldi and Lidl came here just over 20 years ago. Now, a lot of us use them for a weekly shop. This documentary featured a busy Lidl in Dublin’s Moore Street and a refurbished one in Tipperary town.
There is a scene in the Tipperary, where an employee from the town is marvelling at the choice of water-melons in a ‘there was none of this in our day’ kind of way. And of course, that’s what Aldi and Lidl have done in a lot of areas — they’ve helped introduce us to food habits from all over Europe.
is a slice of life in modern Ireland, good and bad.
Gemma, who works in the Moore Street branch, says it can be a nightmare being a woman on the shop floor, with male customers trying to touch her, following her around the store looking for her number. It gets way more sinister when she recalls a customer who spotted her on her way home, who threatened to rape her if she didn’t hand over her phone number. The show is all the better for this issue being discussed — otherwise, it would just be a long ad for jolly German supermarkets.
The mood lightens as they take a close look at the middle aisle. Christopher, from the Tipp store, quotes his father with “you’d go into get a cookie and say, f**k it, I’ll buy a chainsaw".
David, a regular shopper in Moore Street’s Lidl, who has four identical welder thingys at home, tells us that he’d rather be 'looking at them than looking for them'. It’s both funny and a reminder that middle-aisle madness highlights that many of us have more money than sense. The planet won’t let us carry on like this forever. But, for now, we can thank the middle aisle for helping us through the pandemic.
