Trader Joe's and Aldi's: Secret Siblings

I posted recently about Trader Joe's opening another store in St. Paul soon. Now I've just found out that the extremely popular Trader Joe's (popular, that is, among my more well-to-do circle of friends) is owned by the same folks that own the more downscale Aldi's, which has 19 locations in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs, including 2 in South Minneapolis (one on East Franklin and one on East Lake, across from the Midtown YWCA). According to the Newsweek article, some (most?) of the stuff in both TJ's and Aldi's is name brand stuff in generic packaging.

I wonder how my TJ's-loving friends will feel about the TJ's-Aldi's link (if they don't already know). I know of one person (a thrifty mom) who shops Aldi regularly, but most of the TJ's crowd wouldn't be caught dead in an Aldi's. Having shopped Aldi's a couple of times myself, my issues with it are: (1) cash only -- that doesn't work well for us, as we like to do one big grocery shopping trip per week and I NEVER carry much more than $20 in my pocket; and (2) limited selection -- again, we have time to do one big grocery shopping trip per week, so we need to get everything at once, and Aldi's doesn't have everything we want. That said, we have saved a lot of money at Aldi when we were selective (and even when we weren't, we didn't blow it too badly: we once bought several bags of hot dog buns, put them in the freezer, and then wound up throwing them out after about 3 months because we almost never eat hot dogs -- but since they were marked down to $0.05 per bag, our total wastefulness was limited t0 $0.20).

So, perhaps we need to fit time into our schedule to go to Aldi's more often (and carry more cash on us). In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that although several of my friends rave about TJ's, I've never set foot in one.