It's 11 a.m. on a drizzly Saturday in downtown Aachen, a city in western Germany near the Belgian and Dutch borders. With Germany teetering on the edge of recession, most stores in the neighborhood are half-empty. But on a street called Löhergraben, one store is packed: Aldi. With brown speckled floor tiles, garish neon lights and a limited assortment of products in half-opened cardboard boxes, it's the least-inviting place around. But it's also the cheapest, and so the line to Aldi's two cash registers stretches the entire length of the store about 30 people in all, their carts overflowing with...
