West and East Germans buying behaviour is very different. Germans do prefer to buy from discounters, but where most people in the West shop at Aldi, in the East Netto is preferred.
Research figures that the German news portal 'Handelsblatt Online' has, show that two thirds of the Germans regularly visit discounters when shopping. But there are regional differences in which discounter is visited most often. A questionnaire shows that that Netto is the most popular discounter in East Germany - by far. Over a quarter of East Germans regularly visits this chain, whilst only one in five visits Aldi or Lidl regularly. In the West, however - according to questioning 2000 supermarket customers - Aldi dominates. Four out of ten consumers say they do their shopping at this discounter. Less than one in four shop at Lidl, and only one in ten shop at Netto.
Netto has over 4000 stores and is strongly represented in East Germany. The chain also represented here, Aldi Nord, has over 2500 stores in the whole of Germany, of which around 750 in the five Eastern states and Berlin.
