A brief review of Aldi’s official LEGO tubs

Anyone who’s ever shopped at Aldi is well familiar with what those of us in Australia refer to as the isle of shame, where the weekly specials are placed. You’d expect a supermarket to stock food, sundries, or maybe even kitchen accessories, but Aldi regularly places everything there from toys and linen, to power tools and entire washing machines. You’ll go to buy some simple ingredients for a salad, and leave with two beach towels, a light-water reactor, and a Commodore 64. What is it with four-letter European retailers? Last week’s fateful find was a set of large LEGO block storage tubs made to look like the legendary Danish building blocks. Each box has the characteristic studs across the top, and the same recessed areas on the bottom so one could stack them just like real LEGO. Fiendishly clever, one could say. I should qualify this by saying I had a lot of LEGO as a kid, and admittedly I still have much of it now (I had a half-baked plan to build a computer case for an Apple II…