Why You Don't Hear Any Music When Grocery Shopping At Aldi

The fact that grocery stores play music to entice you to spend more is established psychological science. That is, mellow, familiar tunes tend to relax shoppers and put us in the right headspace to load up our carts. That's why it's so interesting to note that Aldi, the currently the 11th-largest grocery chain in America, doesn't play music in its stores. Have you ever noticed that? You will now. When you're shopping your grocery list at this budget retailers and trying to remember whether you need eggs or not, there's no background soundtrack of easy-listening favorites to get stuck in your head.

Turns out that, like so many of the little quirks that make Aldi unique amongst supermarkets, the lack of music is a cost-saving measure. For the same reason that Aldi largely doesn't stock brand-name products and requires you to deposit a quarter to use a shopping cart, it doesn't pay for licensing tunes in its stores. These measures help keep overhead costs down, which means that it can pass on savings to you and protect its reputation for having great deals.

Southern Living quoted an Aldi spokesperson commenting on the music situation: "No detail is overlooked in Aldi stores when it comes to saving money for our customers, and that includes our decision not to play music [...] when we realized we could save even more on music licensing costs, it was a no-brainer."

You might be wondering how much it could possibly cost to suffuse a grocery store with some '80s soft-rock in the name of entertainment. Is Aldi saving substantial bucks here, or is it just being cheap? Delving into the issue, it turns out that music licensing is really expensive, especially on the scale of a major chain like Aldi.

Currently, monthly pricing for in-store music streaming ranges from $19 to $36 per location. As of January 2025, Aldi had 2,464 stores in the United States. A little math tells us that, even on the cheapest end of the spectrum, that's tens of thousands of dollars that Aldi would have to spend just to play background music in all its American locations. For a company that's built its name on savings, a shopping soundtrack would be an expenditure that simply doesn't make sense.