There. I admitted it.

As we tight-fisted, low-budget cyclists know, Aldi sometimes stocks bike gear in its crazy weekly specials, and a lot of the stuff is pretty good value. For example the folding bike (as I’ve noted before) is the cheapest Dahon you can get, albeit without the Dahon badge on it.

While I’ve never tried to nab the plain label folding bike, I usually grab a few pairs of the Coolmax socks and I’ve had one of their bike computers run reliably for over a year, which I reckon is a reasonable return on twenty bucks. I can’t say the styling of the Aldi cycling tops and shorts is to my liking, but I have heard that others have found the clothing OK.

When cycling shoes came up in Aldi’s weekly specials, my gut reaction was that while I’m happy to use odd bits and pieces of supermarket gear, there is something inherently not quite right about buying cycling shoes from the supermarket. And it didn’t help that they were about as visually appealing as bowling shoes.

And so I gave them a miss.

It appears I am not alone in my bias. Despite being very reasonably priced, at my local store an unsold pair—in my size—languished in the bargain bin weeks after the cycling specials had gone on sale.

Eventually I relented. I figured that at worst they would be OK as a pair of backup shoes for my commute ride. And let’s face it, a pair of shoes—even bowling shoe ugly ones—for less than the cost of a pair of cleats to put on the bottom of them was a tough deal to ignore.

Installation

I got hold of a pair of cleats and went to install them on my lovely new shoes. I didn’t much like the look of the nuts provided in the shoe, so I wanted to screw the cleats onto the nuts that they came with. But when I pulled out the insole I found that the cleat nut in the shoe was inaccessible because it was sealed into the sole, with no way to remove it without cutting a hole. I wasn’t about to do that, so I went ahead and screwed the cleats onto the nuts provided in the shoes.

A quick check for position on the bike, then it was time to tweak the screws up nice and tight. I’d barely begun to give it any torque when the thread on one of the nuts snapped off. Pop.

Broken cleat nut

Uh, oh. Looks like these shoes are going back. That’s not a problem, Aldi is very reasonable in taking returns—no questions asked, although I did clearly point out that the product was broken and not suitable for the task.

Speculations

What really makes me nervous is that the cleat nut might have held on for a bit longer and given away later at a much more critical moment, perhaps causing me to fall in heavy traffic. How do you disengage a shoe when you can’t twist the cleat out of the pedal? Or maybe I might have come to really like these shoes, found them comfortable even, and started wearing them on longer rides. How happy would I be to get stranded 100km from home with a broken shoe cleat? Not very.

I really should trust my gut reactions. And if you have a pair of these shoes, I recommend you reconsider how and when you use them.

Sometimes a bargain isn’t a bargain.

Reputation

Look, I don’t hate Aldi. I think their grocery products offer good quality for a good price. And in the near future Aldi could be giving the big two arrogant and lazy supermarkets in this country a very big scare, not before time. The Aldi specials are a marketing gimmick to get new customers into their stores. Of course, some people will always see these cheap “while stocks last” offers as shonky practice and poor quality. And this image isn’t helped by the fact that last week I saw the same pair of broken cycling shoes back on sale in the bargain bin at my local Aldi.

Broken shoes back in the bargain bin

That really does look shonky.