Tomatoes, mince, yoghurt - and an inflatable canoe
As the panic buying rush of 29th November looms, it’s worth knowing that for some people, every day is Black Friday. And those people are the men who shop at Lidl. All they have to lose is their marriages.
Announcing the discount supermarket’s results this week – a pre-tax profit of £43 million, a sharp recovery from its £76 million loss the year before - UK chief executive Ryan McDonnell credited the chain’s fabled ‘Middle Aisle’ with helping drive revenue. For the past 25 years, Lidl’s middle has specialised in extremely unusual and incredibly cheap items that logically have no place next to the spuds and breakfast cereal.
What's in the middle of Lidl?
This week, for instance, there’s an electric chainsaw (£34.99), a cordless drill set (£39.99) and a double mattress (£279.99). But these bargains are in limited supply. Every price tag carries the stark warning “when it’s gone, it’s gone.” Once an item sells out, they’re replaced by something else. Lined up for next week, a robot vacuum cleaner (£143.99), a cordless angle grinder (£34.99) and an ice bath for the garden (£35.99).
The main shoppers for half metre tall Peppa Pigs, plastic cactuses with yellow smileys for faces and unfeasibly long drills, says McDonnell, are men - and their impulse purchases do not spread universal joy, even in the season of cheer. “We often get partners at odds with each other because men have disappeared up the aisle and are buying things they maybe already have,” he explained.
Alice, a designer from Chertsey, has a husband who has “to date bought home a green Scottish kilt complete with a sporran, a portable toilet for £40 and I almost had to physically restrain him from buying one of those James Bond style undersea scooters which is basically a propeller engine you hold on to and it drags you along. And I had to stop him picking up an inflatable avocado, although I think he was teasing me about that one.”
The Lidl Middle has become something of a retail cult. Local newspapers list new items every week and there are Reddit communities and Facebook fan pages devoted to discussing unusual items usually purchased – and this is the crucial thing… when the shopper wasn’t looking for said items and has almost never used them since.
Reddit users recall inflatable hot tubs, a ‘learning Arabic’ wall poster, a forestry safety helmet with attached ear defenders, a weed killer flamethrower and a self-assembly cement mixer. The latter? “Took me all day to assemble it whereupon I realised it was simply too big to store,” one user explained. “Sold it on eBay unused.”
Some items proved wildly popular - one shopper “came back with a two-man canoe despite not living near any suitable body of water or being interested in canoeing previously. I don’t think it has been touched since.”
Lidl is a German chain, and it has been offering middle aisle discounts across the continent for over 25 years. Although the items seem unusual, a spokesperson explains, they are chosen for the season and when the company’s size means it can bulk buy at a good discount.
It’s not just Lidl. Rival Aldi also offers ‘Aldi Special Buys’ – a far less catchy title. According to Aldi, a hanging egg shaped garden chair big enough for two sold out online in less than four minutes. It took 39 minutes for 2025’s Glastonbury Festival to do the same.
The Lidl middle man
And for all Aldi’s good intentions the Lidl Middle Man is on his way to becoming a legend. This October, the aisle received its own hymn when Welsh hip hop group Goldie Lookin’ Chain dropped the Middle of Liddle – a track about the mind-bending experience of shopping there. Lyrics include:
“It's a safe space, my happy place, where you can buy power tools or a briefcase. Like a double slit experiment to a photon, it's a metaphor. When it's gone it's gone.”
And there’s a rousing chorus:
“Hey, ho, let’s all go. To the middle of Lidl. (whatcha gonna get?) I don’t know.”
You don’t get that kind of track about Waitrose…
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