Walk into an Aldi and there is roughly one of everything.
One ketchup. One brand of cornflakes that is not quite the brand of cornflakes. A typical store carries somewhere around fifteen hundred products, and a full-size supermarket carries tens of thousands, with the counts varying by who is doing the counting and where. Same weekly shop, a fraction of the options, and a queue of people who could shop anywhere choosing to shop there.
Here is the part that should bother anyone with a growing catalogue.
Every extra line you carry sends you a bill. Some of it is obvious, the shelf and the stock and the cash sitting in it. The rest arrives quietly. A forecast that is slightly worse because the demand is now split three ways. Photography. Copy nobody has read since 2022. One more product that can go out of stock at the worst possible moment and take a customer’s trust with it.
Then there is the bill you send the customer, which is the one nobody counts. Choosing costs them something. Standing in front of eleven near-identical ketchups is not a service, it is homework, and Aldi worked out that most people would happily skip it if somebody they trusted had already done the choosing.
Online this gets worse, not better, because adding a product feels free. There is no shelf to fight over and no floor space to lose. So the catalogue creeps, and one morning you are running a shop where a long tail of near-dead lines quietly eats the photography budget, the ad spend and the attention of a team that could have spent the week making the top twenty sell harder.
The number worth watching is not how many products you carry. It is how much each one earns you. Rank the catalogue that way and the answer is usually uncomfortable and always useful.
Range is not a service you provide. It is a bill you send the customer, and Aldi built an empire on the discovery that most of them would rather not pay it.