Supermarkets provide almost everything a consumer needs. So why not buy a PC there too?

Baked beans. Blip! Kitchen roll. Blip! Weird German sweets. Blip! Laptop. Blip! Would you like a bag sir?

Hang on a minute. Laptop? What the hell is a laptop doing on the conveyor belt at ALDI? Am I supposed to put my faith in these people to provide reliable IT hardware? I barely trust them with my tomatoes.

It's all Tesco's fault. For years the ubiquitous retailer has been expanding into new markets with the same aggression it has expanded into the high street. A bit like a non-militarised version of the US army, wiping out independent traders with its special brand of discount freedom, right down to the red, white and blue iconography. And it uses it to hawk televisions, DVD players, white goods, clothing, car insurance, credit cards, DVD rentals and anything else it can think of. In 2015 you'll be able to buy human organs from the freezer section. In 2020 Tesco will purchase Google, which by then will own you. And you'll have to go and live in Tesco and have people buy you for £17.99. You won't like that.

This insanity, in turn, is all based on chocolate. Supermarkets have long piled little rows of sweets by the conveyor belt in the hope that shoppers, deadened by a 45 minute trawl through the aisles, will perk up at the prospect of a Mars bar. It was a master stroke, so the stores extended the idea to literally everything. Before you know it you're manhandling a trolley into the car park with new home insurance, two extra bank accounts and brown stains all over your face. That's from the chocolate, obviously. Not from poo.

So it was only a matter of time before budget supermarkets started getting in on the act. ALDI doesn't carry quite the same reputation as Tesco, so it's a harder sell. But it also means a different type of customer. It's not just the gentry swanning round Waitrose in their top hats buying Fox and Quail Tartlets who like computers - poor people like them too. They can use them to search for jobs online, look at pictures of celebrities or, when the ambient noise in the home gets too much, unplug the keyboard and beat their children with it.

Thanks to the world having recently gone wrong, there are now a lot more poor people kicking about. Which means even you, proud and intelligent and high quality readers of RollZero that you are, may also be watching the pennies. And if that means a trip to ALDI, you may find yourself tempted to pick up a computer. The Medion Akoya E3300D has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 dual core processor, 4GB of memory, 640GB of storage, Windows Vista and a load of other tripe. £389, for that. Or - get this - the Medion Akoya S2210 laptop boasts 300 Swarovski crystals embedded in the lid. Not that the manufacturer thinks ALDI customers are trashy. That one's £487 and it's also got a processor, RAM, memory and stuff.

We'd go into the specs a bit more, but if you're the kind of person who picks up PCs in the supermarket, we probably lost you at "laptop".