An Aldi customer was left frustrated and seeking a change in policy after she says the store charged her for groceries but refused to let her leave with them.
Jade (@mumbods) first began sharing her saga with her TikTok followers at the beginning of November in a comprehensive 13-minute video that’s already been viewed just shy of 800,000 times.
Why did Aldi charge this customer then keep her groceries?
It all began when she paid for her groceries with a debit card at Aldi in a self-checkout lane. The machine insisted she still needed to pay the full balance and began to beep, which eventually drew the attention of a manager.
“I showed him that the [$156.08] had just been deducted from my account,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Oh yeah, this happens sometimes. It’s just an issue with your bank, and if you want to go with these groceries right now, you’re going to have to pay again.’ I was like, ‘Pay again? Pay again how? Because you already have my money.'”
Jade understandably balked at the idea of paying for the groceries a second time, particularly after the manager claimed that it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 12 business days for the original transaction to be refunded. Just as frustrating, she says he declined to provide her with any proof that she had completed this transaction but was being sent away without the items she paid for, just in case things didn’t resolve automatically after all.
Instead, she was told the issue was with her bank—and one that “happens all the time” at Aldi.
“If this happens all the time, then why don’t you have something in place so, one, it doesn’t happen all the time?” she asked. “Because this is [expletive], to be honest.”
Getting to the bottom of things
Jade made the video on the same day that everything happened. At the time, the transaction had not reversed on her account.
In fact, when she called her bank the following day, they were able to determine that the transaction had gone through. If there had been a glitch that would result in it being reversed automatically, it would have still been listed as pending. As it stood, she was given two options: return to Aldi and try to get them to refund the transaction or file a dispute and have her bank fight the charge on her behalf.
After her experience dealing with Aldi in person, she opted for the latter.
She also filed a complaint with Aldi online, with the hope that they would institute some sort of policy to deal with this situation in all of their stores. Viewers made it clear that Jade was far from the only person who had experienced this, and she worried it could be a much more dire situation for someone living paycheck-to-paycheck who was suddenly left with neither their money nor the groceries they’d attempted to buy.
@mumbods Has this happened to you at Aldi?? Apparently this is a thing…? @Aldi UK please fix this!! #aldi #aldimums #warning #mumshop #groceryshopping #grocerystore #casino #Aldi #mumsoftiktok #mumlife #mumbod #mumbods #foodshopping #aussiemums #aussiemumsoftiktok ♬ original sound – mumbods
After going back and forth with both Aldi and her bank, Jade ultimately was able to get her money back, but was left unsatisfied with the resolution.
“It seems like they’re under the belief that this is something that’s only happened to me or is a rare occurrence, when that’s very clearly not the case,” she said.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Jade via TikTok comment and Aldi via email.
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The post ‘They were trying to make me pay twice’: Woman claims Aldi held her $160 hostage after she paid at self-checkout. Then they kept her groceries appeared first on The Daily Dot.