Aldi's Barcode Strategy | Hacker News Reader

Aldi's Barcode Strategy

motherjones.com

213 pointscurtis265 comments

I've been an Aldi fan for more than a decade, buying almost all of my family's groceries there (four kids, it's cheap and doesn't require figuring out what is really on sale this week vs. what is really over-priced this week, or messing with Coupons). The quality of most of their products meets or exceeds that of the name brands[1] except in a few circumstances (their equivalents to Cheerios and Frosted Mini Wheats are very sub-par, but in the case of the Cheerios, they're about half the price for a much larger box, so we mix 'em).

I actually get a little stressed when I arrive with a cart full of groceries and an empty line -- they ring them up at about twice the speed I can pull them off the cart.

The Aldi process is very well thought out. They're the only cashiers I've seen that sit in a chair while ringing things up. They needn't move, nearly at all, beyond swiping things past the register to read those giant barcodes (on anything store branded, which is most things). I remarked to the cashier about their ridiculous speed and was informed they are also tracked, directly, on their speed and have targets to meet (and incentives if they're "the fastest").

[1] Their produce is consistently good (love the sweet, small, green grapes) and their Frozen Chicken Nuggets are better tasting than any I've purchased, including the organic ones at Costco.

The sitting thing is common in England (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe). It definitely stood out to me when I was visiting.

It's the standard in Germany as well, at least for grocery stores.

It's so rare here I can't think of another time I've seen it. I've always wondered why: comfortable people tend to be less grumpy and the typical cashier job involves "not leaving a very small space for a long period of time". This small space is about the size of ... a chair.

I think the perception of people standing in line is more likely to make them feel that the cashier is working slower because they're sitting[1]. Aldi's lightning quick cashiers would prove that wrong, but perception tends to be all that matters in these scenarios.

[1] People routinely over-estimate their waiting times in situations like this. This became apparent to me when talking to the helpdesk manager at my old company. He would get an e-mail from time to time from a person complaining that they were on hold for "20 minutes". The call stats for the day indicated a maximum hold time of 5 minutes.

Expect to see more of it in California in the future. All it took was a class action lawsuit (and 7 years).

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-court-sitting-wo...

Standing still for long periods is associated with and/or causes some bad health problems.

so is sitting for long periods of time.

Yup, basically all food stores are sitting, but clothing shops all seem to be standing, weirdly.

The difference is probably the combination of high footfall and continuous restocking in food shops, which results in role specialisation and hence a more static workforce where the role is static.

Cashiers in clothing stores are removing hangers and folding things all the time, which is easier if they're standing.

standard in France and Germany too. I don't think cashiers usually stand anywhere.

What the article doesn't mention: Aldi optimizing the speed of their cashiers is nothing new. The northern Aldi ("Aldi Nord") for a long time had three-digit article codes for every product that cashiers had to know by heart--which also meant that they couldn't have more than 1000 different products. In fact, that system was so efficient that they completely switched to bardcodes only in 2002 as they didn't see any advantage before that.

Interesting - Part of me wonders about what their accuracy rate was with that kind of system. 1,000 different 3-digit numbers is still a lot to remember. It's possible, but it would seem to add a pretty big barrier for a lot of people who would otherwise be fine as a cashier, elsewhere. Though when I worked at CompUSA in the early 90s, we lacked barcode readers and each product had a 6-digit SKU which meant only being able to remember a handful of them for the most popular products[0]. It was also horrible for accuracy because each SKU was assigned in order, so fat fingering any of the numbers would result in the wrong product being rung up. This was often caught, but if it was the last or second to last digit that was missed, it was likely to end up being a different version of the same product (more RAM, different CPU, etc) and it would be missed[1] resulting in either the customer paying more (unlikely - those were not missed) or paying less (likely, because the cashier wouldn't notice and the customer was less likely to say anything if they happened to actually notice and the result is them saving a few hundred bucks).

[0] We did have one cashier that I'm fairly certain had well over 90% of the products in the store memorized (we'd grab random things trying to throw him off, but he was like a machine). He had brain surgery a decade prior or so and said the way his memory worked changed shortly afterwards.

[1] The worst case I recall was a $500-$600 memory upgrade kit for an Compaq laptop that was fat fingered, resulting in the generic being rung up. It had an identical description but was half the price. A few days after inventory was done, they traced it back to a single customer who bought every one we had in stock in one transaction. The customer probably knew the price was way too good and decided to buy them all as a result (it's unlikely even he knew it was a cashier error since the product looked right on the receipt).

Well, I am not that familiar with it, but given how much attention they gave to optimizing this, my best guess would be that they made sure that similar products didn't get similar codes. And I guess for a grocery store, mistakes aren't that big a problem, especially for ones that mostly don't sell anything but their own brands (and thus normally don't have all that many similar products at different prices anyway).

Also, yes, the rumor always was that Aldi paid well. Presumably the savings in additional staff and space and cash registers was still worth it.

> Part of me wonders about what their accuracy rate was with that kind of system.

We bought all our groceries at Aldi Nord in Germany when I was young, and I never recount a cashier typing a wrong code, despite the ridiculous speed.

"What the article doesn't mention: Aldi optimizing the speed of their cashiers is nothing new. The northern Aldi ("Aldi Nord") for a long time had three-digit article codes for every product that cashiers had to know by heart--which also meant that they couldn't have more than 1000 different products. In fact, that system was so efficient that they completely switched to bardcodes only in 2002 as they didn't see any advantage before that."

Hmmm ... so you could populate an Oh By Code[1] with your list of grocery codes and just give them that single code, which they could look up and parse ...

Well, provided your grocery list was not longer than 4096 characters...

[1] http://0x.co

I wonder if there is some information theory paper to be written here. On one hand you want the most common products sold to have low Komogorov complexity codes (111, 123, 147, …).

Then there is the question of the distance between similar products and similar codes: is it better to have similarly priced products have similar codes, so that errors don't amount to much in the final tally, or to space out similar goods so that confusion is avoided?

Maybe there is a whole phase diagram of optimal strategies that depends on the error rate. But then again one has to have a good error model. Do errors come from mistyping or from misremembering?

Aldi Sued even just had the cashiers just memorize prices and type those instead of the indirection via three digit codes.

They even chose prices to minimize hand movement.

Aldi cashiers were like machines. They never had to stop and look-up a product code like modern cashiers do when the barcode gets rejected. They were just hammering the codes into the registers and they matched the speed of barcode scanners.

The funny thing is how POS systems in the US have regressed over the past 25 years. The IBM registers I used in the early 90s were fast and accurate while slinging packages over the scanner. Nowadays everything is laggy and needs special care to present the UPC to the machine just so. That is except for Aldi's systems.

This is so true. I worked as a supermarket checkout operator at a large Australian chain of supermarkets for a few years, and the PoS systems were redone while I was there. Before were old Fujitsu machines running an old version of OS/2 with mechanical keyboards. After overhaul, Windows xp embedded machines with touch screens. The touch screens were a massive step backwards, especially when it came to punching in produce codes (many of which I can still remember today).

That and the 'express' lanes being physically smaller used a different, smaller model of scanner rather than the larger scanner built into the counter. The smaller scanner, though removable which was helpful when scanning large crates of soft drinks and other heavy items (would pass the scanner to the customer so they didn't have to lift those out of the trolley) was slower and laggier for everything else and had a smaller "field of view"

I've noticed this as well. I worked as a grocery store checker in college, and was consistently one of the most efficient in the store. Yet now when I use self-checkout machines I feel like I'm fighting them every step of the way. Yes, I scanned the item. Yes, I put it in the bag. No seriously, it's in the goddamn bag.

Right with you there. I got into the habit of having both hands going independently scanning items two at a time. The self-checkouts, which only allow one item to be picked up, scanned and placed in the bag at a time, are therefore infuriatingly slow.

In the UK these machines are notoriously inefficient especially with situations like you describe and also when you are buying alcohol or something they consider dangerous.

In Spain however I've noticed they get around this by having one person with remote access to every machine, so if there is problem with your bag or they need to verify your age it's all done from one point rather than an individual member of staff having to intervene in each case.

It's a lot better system.

The touch screens allow us (I work in backend retail) to push updates to hundreds of shops across a region without having to update those mechanical keyboards. It's a huge benefit to the industry. Before, when a new feature was added we had to send a human technician out to every one of those shops. Or get the shop managers to replace the key, or sticker the key. You can see how much easier it is to push updates over a network compared to the alternatives.

As for scanners, they vary a lot in design and intended purpose but with some optimization and testing they are are always better than the emerging tech for scanning items; your smartphone camera. The industry is heading toward you doing the scanning yourself (albeit in addition to the traditional shop model). Phone cameras are a pita having not been designed for this purpose. I don't see any IR scanners being available to the general smartphone market any time soon, but they do exist as 'jackets', mostly for tablets.

Makes sense. The mechanical keyboards had dedicated keys for the most common produce items, but maybe 10-20% of them were not applicable at a time due to being out of season and/or not available for some reason.

I worked in Tesco in the 00s while I was studying, and when I first started the checkouts had physical keys with some quick access keys on the side of the screen which changed depending on the context. The normal keys had a rather satisfying mechanical mechanism, where as the quick access keys just used a conductive-rubber mechanism so were a bit harder to press.

When I first started there was a menu driven by the mechanical keys so if you didn't remember produce codes, you could use this to go through everything. The systems were networked and these menus were updated regularly with seasonal products. To get to potatoes (for example) you would press Menu, Down, Down, Enter, Down, Enter and be presented with the different types of potatoes. You could even hit the keys in quick succession without waiting for the UI to update, so it was pretty quick if you knew what you were doing.

Later they changed the system to instead of being driven by the mechanical keys, to use the quick access keys. These were harder to press and you couldn't press them in quick succession - you had to wait for the UI to update before pressing them.

Just before I left they started phasing out the physical buttons, and I think all the new checkouts are touch-screen driven which I assume is even worse. Under the hook they (were anyway) running Windows XP, and the same software.

Ah, but the touch screens enabled an executive committee to feel important, so they fulfilled their function.

So true it hurts. My go-to grocery recently downgraded to the CC chip customer-facing-POS. I used to be able to swipe my card ahead of time and generally be on my way within about 6 seconds of the last item being scanned. Now the system has no pre-swipe ability and far more lag. Like, the first few times I used it I messed up and hit wrong buttons because there was ~1000ms of lag. It works sorta-alright if you use the CC chip, but it's trash otherwise.

I just don't understand how that big of a fuck-up is possible; they were clearly losing money with much longer lines. Everyone complained about it, and I know I don't make quick stops anymore because it's too much hassle.

Yes, the new CC chip readers are so slow (must keep card in machine vs. quick swipe) and multi-step that it's faster to use cash.

The part that really upsets me about how the US is doing chip-and-pin is that they're missing the pin part. Someone can still steal my wallet or card and use it without anything else. It provides very little additional security while adding more complexity, expense to merchants (which they'll pass on to customers), and much worse UX.

They are so fast, that I change strategies on which line to choose.

Usually less stuff to be checked out in front of you is good, but at aldi I go for least people, no matter how much stuff they loaded. This might be even more significant in germany, where many pay cash and you get every cent back in change.

Buying groceries Germany Aldi's and Lidos was the most stressful part of my time there.

Why?

Usually they scan items faster than you can bag them. The area after the scanner is very small and takes only few items so you have to move fast.

I saw below that US Aldi cashiers put the items into a grocery cart. That doesn't happen in Germany as you are expected to do that yourself.

Everyone has their own strategy of how to place items onto the line to slow down the cashier at just the right moment.

> Everyone has their own strategy of how to place items onto the line to slow down the cashier at just the right moment.

I am German and and I've never heard of this ^^. You just put the items on the belt in the order that they should go in the bag, then you can pack very quickly.

> in the order that they should go in the bag

That's one of them. Even that is something that you don't usually do outside Germany. To get to the next level I recommend to put weighted produce to the end or just after items that are not straightforward to pack.

I do that in the US even where they have an employee bagging my stuff. In fact, I do that to ensure optimal packetization—for an IP analogy. :)

Otherwise I end up with 2 pieces of fruit in 1 bag, 1 bottle of soap by itself in another bag, followed by again more fruit in the 3rd bag… It's a fun fragmentation problem.

I always try that (grouping things I want bagged together) but usually the bagger just does his own thing anyway.

Knapsack/binpacking

As a german in the US, I suddenly felt as if I had a OCD about the way to bag stuff. Store employees were more or less dumping things kind of randomly in bags without sorting by weight and by robustnes of the product. On the other hand declinining help with bagging seemed to be kind of unusual.

Other differences I noticed: Time at checkouts was at least 2-3 times longer than in Germany, even at the better german supermarkets cashiers are much faster. Also, in Germany I never encountered cashiers to comment on the goods I bought (I don't mind much, but it still felt a bit like an intrusion in privacy. I once bought a glass of Ghee - a common ingredient in southern german cuisine - and the cashier went on and on about how unusual it was that a white guy would buy it).

>Germany I never encountered cashiers to comment on the goods I bought (I don't mind much, but it still felt a bit like an intrusion in privacy. I once bought a glass of Ghee - a common ingredient in southern german cuisine - and the cashier went on and on about how unusual it was that a white guy would buy it)

In the US service employees are required to be fake "friendly." This was an attempt at that. I hate it myself.

I always associated ghee with India, I had no idea it was used in Germany too.

Its not really. Most people would get it from the "asian shop", but many "German" supermarkets have a small shelf for "international" stuff like asian noodles, taco shells and russian stuff.

Seriously, Ghee is Butterschmalz

Ghee is just slightly different - it is cooked longer so it is more caramelised, and you can taste that.

Ever thought why you shouldn't use real butter to fry meat? Its because it will turn brown and black because of proteins. You can however extract the fat from butter by melting it: clarified butter. Ghee - if it has not been fermented/flavoured - is essentially clarified butter.

    > > in the order that they should go in the bag
    > is something that you don't usually do outside Germany

That's a basic sign of civilization, after workable plumbing and provision of healthcare.

But the area isn't big enough. It only works if the cashier wait for you to put all your items in the belt, before start scanning. If you're still putting items on the belt when the cashier starts, the stuff will pile up on the little shelf thingy after the cash register. Now they're in the wrong order when you need to speed pack them afterwards.

at least here the belts are loooong

I'm sure they make the area small to force the customer to pack the stuff quickly.

>The area after the scanner is very small and takes only few items so you have to move fast.

What's the logic behind only having a very small space for scanned items. Aldi in Denmark normally have packing tables, but still, you can't even get your stuff in the basket quickly enough. Interestingly Lidl (another German supermarket), decided to go with normal longer areas after the scanner, because the Danes expect that.

I don't feel like Aldi has ever properly justified the almost non-existing area for scanned items.

It makes the customer pack faster. Once the next one is served you usually are almost gone. That doesn't happen if there is more space. It also saves floor space in the market.

Except Aldi, Lidl and the like German supermarkets also have the long areas after the cashier. Your items often roll away and you can't reach them anymore.

Where i have been in Germany, there was no space after the barcode scanner, you directly put your cart there, and they dump everything in the cart after scanning (the cart is quite shallow, I guess it's to limit the drop height). Next to the exit, there is a table where you can sort your groceries into bags, and take as much time as you want doing so.

Yes, I think the layout is exactly the same everywhere. There are two small spaces of around 15cm times 30cm if I had to guess and a small notch to hold a basket separating them.

Especially in the more centrally located stores many people directly bag their items then and there.

The two US stores I've seen have kept one cart after the cashier. When done checking out, you take the newly full cart and leave your empty there for the next customer.

That sounds like hell. It's already awful waiting for some old woman to rifle through coupons, and pay by check. The fact that she now has to bag all her food would make me just leave the line.

You'd be amazed how fast she goes with all the pressure.

Well, they have no coupons and accept no checks. Plus, many old people that need a walking frame are actually better with moving stuff into the shopping cart then I am (not that I'm particularly slow).

Well I guess that is 2/3 of the problem taken care of!

The key is to just dump everything back into the cart and bag it later, on the table behind the cashiers. I sort my stuff by how well it can be stacked - pasta, cans, potatoes and the like go first, then milk, cheese, etc, and finally fruit, delicate vegetables, crisps, and other things you don't want crushed. You can just shove it all in the cart that way - I can match the cashier's speed.

AldiSort!

What's an Aldi customer's incentive to do this? Is the cashier going to throw your groceries on the floor if you don't keep up?

If not... why not take your time and bag your groceries safely?

> What's an Aldi customer's incentive to do this?

Social pressure. You've just waited in a queue, and there are people behind you in that queue.

Really, wow I never felt that. I always put them in my bag at the natural speed. The only social pressure I felt was when paying before finishing packing. This lead to the next persons groceries being mixed in with mine and accidentally packing their stuff etc. Now I take my time and finish packing before paying to avoid this issue and it is all good.

well you tactic doesn't work that well in Austria. The peer pressure for slow people is noticeable (especially during busy times).

But that's one of the things I like about that. You take a cart - put everything in the cart and pack it into your boxes / bags afterwards and don't waste everybodies time. But this may be a very German thing to do.

I bet airport security is pleasant there.

You would be wrong. It's pretty much the same, the only difference is that you don't need to take off your shoes most of the time. However, opting out of the body scanner (where those are deployed) is a much bigger hassle than in the US.

The people in line behind you will get angry, as everyone expects an Aldi checkout line to move fast. And because the cashiers have a quota to fulfil in terms of scanned items per hour, they will start putting your stuff into your cart if you're excessively slow about it.

It's also not unsafe in any way, I've never damaged anything. You have all the time in the world to bag your stuff safely after the checkout ;)

The reason why there is so little space is because there are supposed to be baggers. I guess they finally got rid of them to save money.

I dont think this is true. In Germany there never has been a 'bagger-culture' :)

They are so small, so that you just pass through the items into your shopping cart. Basically you don't have much of an option. If you shop without a shopping cart (like me buying just a few things that fit into my bagpack) the cassier might suggest that I take a cart next time.

Then there is this side-board across the checkout that you can use to bag your purchase.

What you also see a lot in Germany is people taking empty cardboard boxes from the shelves and use them instead of bags at the checkout. It is quick and convenient.

Then my marketing book lied to me.

When was Germany supposed to have had baggers according to the book?

When Aldi came to Denmark and didn't redesign the checkout for not having baggers.

Germany never had baggers. In fact, to me as a German, the job of a bagger appears about as nonsensical as that of a telephone sanitizer.

Walmart had baggers for the short time they were operating here.

Did they? I remember shopping at Walmart around 2000, but I don't recall seeing baggers there.

What are baggers? People standing after the checkout that put stuff into bags for you? If so, that sounds quite unusual, unnecessary, and even annoying to me.

Annoying?

Yes. Here in Australia the cashiers usually do it for you, into rather flimsy single-use plastic bags.

Seems a bit foreign to my German soul, too.

Well here in Slovenia I see this approach does not fly with old people. They will simply take their time to bag their stuff properly. What is the cashier going to do but wait? Throw stuff on the floor?

This! +1 for not letting yourself be pressured by the queue.

Most UK supermarkets are shrinkng space after scan to near Aldi levels. A couple will ask if you want help packing (which unless you're elderly and infirm will slow things considerably)

it's quite common to see a set of 4 trolley bags (£1 from pound shop, much more from TM holder) which are designed to fill a standard trolley and dump stuff in those to drop in car boot. Of course you'll barely be able to move the one with all the tins and bottles without ripping the handles off, but...

...you BAG your groceries at Aldis? I just normally grab a few of the empty boxes from the cereal section.

Boxes are annoying to transport on a bike. So yes, I use my pannier or a bag.

The most common strategy of most Germans I know is to simply put everything into the cart after it's scanned, move the cart towards the car and dump everything into some sort of carry box in the trunk. Carry that box (or boxes) into the house at home and put the stuff you bought wherever it is stored.

If I shop by bike I usually have a backpack that I brought for shopping open at the cashier and dump everything in it upon scan.

One time use bags are sort of faded out. There's no more free bags (I think). Makes ecological sense imo.

Have the same experience when shopping in Germany. Im very supriced how ineffective there system is, with an non excistent area after the cashier. You have to trash all stuff down fast and then pack/repack afterwords somewere else and you get stressed.

The swedish system feels superior in my honest opinion. There is a big area afterword divided by a Y bar so 2 people can be served simultaneous. The 2 top Y boms are electrically controlled by the cashier so groceries goes to either left or right side.

https://www.ica.se/imagevaultfiles/id_53554/cf_6099/kassan.j...

So when one is finshed, that person can pack everything as he/she wants without hurry while the other persons groceries are served simultaneous by the cashier and that persons stuff goes to the other side.

Useally you could pack your stuff without hurry while the 2nd person is served. But if both side temporary is not finish because two big shopper both Y boms could be closed so 3 people could be served simultiously. Two could pack and the 3rds groceries could still be handeled by the cashier.

And not to forgett, everyone in sweden (almost) payes with card which speeds stuff up alot. You pay while the cashier scaning the groceries. When finished you just press "ok".

The system is very efficient if you measure throughput. It does not feel as nice and you are pressured to pack very fast which is why the more upmarket stores use the Y-layout or at least a long surface after the cashier (never seen the closing bar in Germany though). Customers stopped caring as it is used for decades now. FWIW I usually pack while the items are scanned which means I can leave as soon as I paid which one can't do with the other layout.

But why card payment is so hideously slow in Germany is something I can't understand. After they gave you the final sum you need to tell the cashier that you want to pay with card, wait for the terminal to light up, insert the card (finally, up until recently you needed to hand the card to the cashier for them to insert it – technically you can insert earlier and it still works but many cashiers don't know and stop the process), wait once more, enter your PIN, wait once more, remove the card, wait again for the receipt to print (otherwise the cashier tells you stay as they can't verify payment before that). In the time it takes you can pay with the same card five times in Sweden – and didn't need to speak a word (great for me as my Swedish is only rudimental).

Card payment at Aldi (Süd) for me is about as fast as it takes Rewe to register that I put the card into the terminal. Aldi also never asks for signature and always goes for PIN because it's faster. It doesn't have to be slow, but sadly in most stores it is. (Debit card here, though. No idea how it is for credit cards and whether they work differently.)

If you ever have the chance to visit Sweden I urge you to try paying with card there (well, it's easier than cash there anyway). It's unbelievably fast.

But you are right, among the German stores Aldi has one of the best terminal.

It is only at Aldi where you have no area behind the cashier, all other have those and I hate them. You have to stand in line and wait until some slowly moving /&%%/ is packing all his stuff in slow motion into his much too small bag, while the cashier and everybody else has to wait before he slowly moves back to the cashier, pulls out his money, again in slow motion. Just a waste of time. The Aldi system doesn't allow for such unsocial behaviour.

> You have to trash all stuff down fast and then pack/repack afterwords somewere else and you get stressed.

1. Always have one or more foldable boxes in your car (like https://i.imgur.com/GG4FfAi.jpg). Make sure that those boxes can carry a heavy load.

2. Take one of those boxes into the store with you.

3. Load all objects onto the belt in the order in which you want to put them into the box (heaviest first).

4. Then just dump them into the box after checking as they come.

5. Finally just load the whole box into your car without repacking anything or carrying multiple bags.

I'm shopping in German supermarkets every week and I never get stressed. On those other hand I'm often annoyed by how slow things are in supermarkets in other countries.

>> where many pay cash and you get every cent back in change.

Aldi just started accepting cards in the US a short while ago

*Credit Cards. They have accepted Debit Cards for several years at least.

They accept both credit (Visa and MasterCard, by far the most common in Germany) and debit (EC)in Germany. Credit was a recent addition

Aldi accepting credit cards in Germany? The 5 or 6 Aldi stores around me (around Leverkusen) are still cash or EC card only.

Both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd started to accept MasterCard and Visa last fall in all stores.

https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/aldi-sued-a-bis-z/aldi-sued-a-bi...

http://www.aldi-nord.de/aldi_bargeldlos_bezahlen_321.html

I always go for least people. The bottleneck is not the cashier, it is the dolts who seemingly have no idea how to pay at the grocery store, despite ostensibly having done it their whole lives.

Up until a few weeks ago Aldi in the United States only accepted cash, EBT or Debit.

Your strategy, especially at Aldi, is the way to go. I read an article about a decade ago that was challenging grocery store "express lane" speed. Since groceries have been using the same kinds of scanning mechanisms at every chain for a very long time, the barcodes are usually optimally placed to allow for the "scan/bag" to happen quickly[1]. The article identified that the bottleneck was more often the transaction times and not the time to ring up an order meaning that an express lane with three people in it would take longer than a lane with one person and a cart full.

Granted, this was a decade ago and many things have changed since then, including the "super store" which includes a lot of products not optimised for scanning in the first try.

[1] Cashier experience plays a roll here, as anyone who's shopped at Walmart can attest. At Aldi, though, solves this by having the barcode occupy almost the entire length of one side of the package, making it harder to miss the scanner than hit it.

I also look for older people who are more likely to spend a few minutes filling out a cheque. I also notice how slowly most people interact with CC terminals, as if they've never used one before and have to figure out every single interaction.

Aldi and Lidl are blasting through other super market chains with their low cost, high quality goods. If there were ever perfect case studies for usurping incumbents in a sharply competitive market Aldi and Lidl are it.

They also get rid of a lot of "frills" that other grocery stores are accustomed to performing that add to cost e.g. items are still in their transport cardboard boxes on the shelves so employees spend less time stocking shelves, they allow people to take these cardboard boxes home instead of shopping bags and this reduces waste cost.

They dramatically reduce their range which cuts inventory storage. You'll never seem more than one or two instances of the same item. i.e. theres only one type of can of baked beans.

You're expected to pack bags away from the cashier so they can get to billing the next customer and not wasting time packing bags.

They ensure theres always a little bit of a queue so the cashiers are constantly scanning if not they close the till.

Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in front of it. You unlock the cart by sliding in a quarter so you can use it while shopping. Since people want their quarter back they have to return the cart to the store. Great solution to eliminate a bag boy sweeping up carts from the lot all day IMO.

Also way back when ALDI didn't even have barcode scanners to save money. There was a person typing all of the items manually into the computer with some 4-6 digit code when you checked out. It was crazy as they were incredibly fast.

The ShopRite my parents used to go to when I was 10 (which would be in the mid 90s) had this, so it's not exactly a big strategic play on Aldi's part.

It's done in their home market Germany since the beginning of the 80s.

> Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in front of it.

Wait, there are supermarkets that don't have that? How does it work? Do people just leave the shopping carts standing around on the parking lot? Not cynical, geniunely wondering how that works.

Anyway, afaik virtually all supermarkets in Europe have that system. I'm pretty sure Aldi didn't invent it.

In the majority of US supermarkets, there are receptacles in the parking lot for carts. You just find the nearest one and push it in there and leave it after loading your car. It saves a trip back to the store. Later, a store employee will push a line of 20+ carts back all together to the store.

We have this in most supermarkets in Europe, but the receptacles have the chain and key for retrieving your coin. Employees typically carry a fake coin on a keyring for bringing the lines back to the shop.

(Supermarkets also sell branded versions of the fake coins for customers too accustomed to arriving with no spare change for a trolley)

Yup. Aldi is the only place in the USA I've seen this. Everywhere else people can and do leave carts all over the parking lot even though there are return sections in the middle of the lot. Many just leave right in their parking space because they are too lazy to walk 20 feet to the nearest collection bin.

The stores in the US mostly have metal "Cart Corrals" where you return the cart. They send out someone to collect them every now and again. This keeps the carts away from the cars, so you don't get dents. But of course, there's always a few lazy people who just leave them all over the place, or (my favorite) launch them towards the corral and turn their back and walk away as the cart careens off-course.

Aldi's system certainly encourages "correct" behavior, but I'd rather not have to take the cart all the way back to get my coin. Especially in a parking lot the size of the typical Costco or Walmart. I'd just hand the cart over to the next arriving customer so I can leave quicker.

As I commented below, there's nothing preventing having both systems. Most European supermarkets have the "cart corrals" with built in coin chains.

You can als just abandon your cart. Someone else will be happy to earn a Euro returning the cart.

Yep. There are stalls for cart return around the parking lot. There's a fair amount of theft. Derelict shopping carts floating around are one of the most reliable markers of a sketchy neighborhood.

In Chicago, some places have a little square outside the main entrance with posts too narrow to fit a shopping cart through, or an "invisible fence" system that locks up the wheels if the carts are brought past a certain line. In that case you have to bring your car around to the loading area and the cart always stays inside the perimeter.

In the UK, it's not the case. Most have carts that have no such feature, though a good proportion do. From my own anecdotal experience living in less desirable areas, the use of the coin system tends to be in areas that would be more likely to have carts taken/stolen.

At a branch of downmarket discount retailers B&M recently, I asked the cashier if I could make some change for a trolley. He handed me a sardine-can key and asked if I knew how to use it.

That jimmying the coin operated locking mechanism with part of a tin of fish is considered semi-common knowledge leads me to suspect Britain's trolly theft problem is endemic!

I've also bought a tin of sardines. Just in case.

I think most places used to have the coin system, but it's often been replaced with a wheel lock. There's a wire loop at the perimeter of the car park, which clamps a brake on the rear wheels if the trolley is passed over the loop.

The two systems clearly solve different problems. The coin system is to encourage people to put the cart back in place; the wheel lock to prevent people stealing a cart. A euro fir a cart is not a bad price, if you need one to take with you.

In our area we have wheel and coin locks. Wheel locks only work in retail parks though as there are too many possible exits in other locations.

In the US, only Aldi and some urban based supermarkets where homeless people and drunks will run off with the carts use them.

More often these days, they just put an electronic wheel lock on the front wheel to disable the cart when it leaves the lot.

>> Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in front of it. You unlock the cart by sliding in a quarter so you can use it while shopping.

I must admit that the first thing I did after observing this new system was to test whether the chain was long enough to "lock" the cart to itself and get the quarter back without returning the cart. Try it for yourself ;)

Spoiler alert: it will not work. The people in the cart factory attaching the chain will have tested that as well.

Spoiler spoiler alert: you can however lock two carts to each other, though it is a bit of work! I never tested more than two, but the geometry of the situation would make it moderately difficult.

You can make a long chain of a few dozen carts into a ring.

See also http://research.swtch.com/zip

> you can however lock two carts to each other

Not with the ones I've seen in NL, unless you put one cart on top of the other and turn it upside down. Indeed, that's a bit of work, lifting one cart (or pushing both carts flat on their side).

I would hypothesize in the US at least that a large percentage of shoppers would still abandon carts at random, but that enterprising teens / homeless people might step in to collect the deposits, so the store could still avoid needing to assign an employee to do it. That said, I rarely have any coins, so needing have a quarter to take out a cart would be fairly annoying.

My experience is that if a cart is left in the lot, another customer is willing to pick it up and use that cart. A quarter profit and no change digging.

And the quarter is somewhat annoying at times, but regular shoppers often make sure they have on in their car. In addition, there are often folks willing to trade a quarter or make change and the cashiers will often make change as well. If all else fails, they are usually located in locations with other things nearby, so you can buy something smallish and be on your way with the shopping.

At least in the UK that's not true any more. Both Aldi and Lidl have moved out of bottom end discount and now also have premium lines too. So now for many lines you'll find discount, mid and premium versions - all still private label, all still styled to match equivalent brand or competing supermarket range. Lidl's premium meats are suspiciously close to Tesco premium range branding for instance, but vastly better. Still far fewer lines than Tesco or Sainsbury, but a heck of a lot more than five years or so ago when it was typically one of each thing.

Quality wise they beat the other supermarkets by a long way, except Waitrose or Co Op, on most things. There are exceptions, Aldi cheese is awful.

I come from a country where there are always plenty of open cashiers and no lines. If I saw a queue there I would leave and not go shopping because its either overloaded or some system was down. When I first came to Germany I kept seeing the queue and thinking "oh, I will come back later when it isn't so busy". But I have noticed the reverse occurs too. If there is an idle cashier no one goes to them. They assume, due to the absence of the queue that it isn't open yet or something, so they head straight for the queue.

Noticed that too. So classically german.

Aldi in Ireland (and I'm assuming the rest of Europe too) has a new system in place. If sensors above the checkouts detect the lines are too long an automated voice will announce "Checkout 2 will open soon, please start unloading your goods on to the belt". 30 seconds later another announcement will say "Operator to checkout 2 please" so the operator arrives to a checkout with a fully loaded belt.

And the reverse happens as well, when the line reduces another announcement will state that the checkout is closing and customers should not approach that checkout.

I'm always amazed at the little things Aldi does to make their process even more efficient.

I've seen these at Lidl in Germany, too. It's really great; when a new checkout opens, I see the green light coming up and can immediately take first place in that queue.

One trick that I find helpful: When in the queue, leave some space to the person before you, to make the queue appear longer and thus incentivize the cashier to open the next checkout.

Lidl UK and Aldi UK are rolling this out too

"Aldi and Lidl are blasting through other super market chains with their low cost, high quality goods"

Yes, and no. In the UK, I'm glad that Aldi and Lidl are challenging the larger supermarkets, but I would hate to see a situation where a race to the bottom on price means consumers have less choice across the entire supermarket sector. By choice I don't mean 20 brands of ketchup, I mean - to give just one example - a wide variety of herbs and spices for instance. (In my local Aldi and Lidl, they rarely have more than ten.)

Plus, UK supermarkets are a bit more flexible in catering to local shoppers. You'll often find South Asian/African/Chinese/Carribean/Polish goods stocked in the supermarket to reflect the local population.

Also, the discount supermarkets don't always treat suppliers any better than their larger counterparts. Last year, milk farmers in the UK protested against supermarkets that were paying them less than the cost of producing milk. Lidl and Aldi were among the supermarkets implicated. (To their credit, both Lidl and Aldi and other supermarkets agreed to raise the price they paid for milk as a result of the farmer's protest). Irish farmers also protested against Lidl and Aldi's low milk prices last year too.

In Germany, where Aldi and Lidl dominate the supermarket sector, there is far less product choice in the supermarket sector because of course the key to their low prices and profitability is fewer stock lines. I hope the supermarket landscape in the UK doesn't turn into something similar.

The race to the bottom in Germany has created a market where food is of good quality but not great. Larger supermarkets do have quite a bit of selection but it's not as good as the stuff you can get in a French or British store. You can get a fair selection of spices in stores other than Aldi or Lidl but sometimes I have the suspicion that it's only the third-class that is left after the stores in neighboring countries have bought their supply.

In Germany Aldi is known as the hardest negotiator and the price setter for basic food. When they lowered the milk price by one fourth to 46 cents recently (which is way too low to cover production cost) all other chains responded within a few hours for their store-brands.

I hear this quite often, but on the other hand I live about 20km away from the french border, and overall food quality does not go up much if you go there (with the obvious exceptions: Cheese, Baguette, Wine).

Typically you can buy most items available in an Aldi store for the same price in other supermarkets (value brands).

"When they lowered the milk price by one fourth to 46 cents recently (which is way too low to cover production cost) all other chains responded within a few hours for their store-brands."

They tried this in my area maybe last year. Aldi dropped the price of milk and some other stuff to ridiculous prices. It went from around $2 to $0.60-0.70 at Aldi with Walmart, Kroger, etc following by dropping to $0.99. Aldi ships milk on racks with little else in their dairy selling that fast. Competitors, that I'm aware, all hand stock milk with tons of other products selling fast. Employees were exhausted from wave after wave hitting the milk section and so much milk stored that they couldnt get to other products. Convenience store owners were also posing as regular customers to buy basket loads of it over course of a day despite policy of 2 per customer. Results were so devastating to big players they backed off and didn't price war Aldi again in my area. So far. Milk went back up.

I thought it was hilarious they'd even try given they're "as much overhead as possible" organizations going against an essentially "zero overhead" organization. What did they think would happen? Lol...

From Ireland, so I know what you're talking about. I suppose my point was really that Lidl and Aldi have swept into an market over the last 10 years, where customers are hard fought for, seemingly with ease. The Tescos of the world definitely can't compete at with own brand quality or price.

I don't know about the UK, but in Ireland Aldi and Lidl are proliferating across the country. The growth is so extreme, they're hiring grads at €60k plus an Audi in order to train them up as shop managers. I mentioned case study because they've taken a fundamentally different approach and it's working. Their low cost structures across supply chain, product base, building construction and shop design are how they're carrying out this coup.

Shouldn't the milk farmers who can't meet cost of production leave the sector instead of guilting people into supporting their lifestyle?

It's an animal welfare issue.

If you want animal welfare, there are two good avenues: regulation via the law, or convincing customers to pay more for milk from happier cows.

in the Southern US I am more surprised by the great quality of their fresh food. While I hit up mostly fruit the vegetables are good too; best damn watermellon I have had short of a farm stop

they also sell really odd stuff at times seemingly totally random too. Once I found bird baths there and another week an four post canopy

> they also sell really odd stuff at times seemingly totally random too. Once I found bird baths there and another week an four post canopy

They buy those items in large amounts very cheap. People love those "bargains" and can't stop to buy it, even if they don't need it at the moment. And they are not randomly, they are seasonal and they do repeat every year. In Germany you get a weekly flyer for those bargain items in your letterbox and I would guess that it is the most read "publication" in Germany.

After the Bild, perhaps.

Incidentally up until recently their only advertisement was a full page in Bild.

I can't wait for Lidl to come to Australia, too. The local incumbents are no real competition for Aldi.

They used to type in short (3 or 4 digits) codes for the products at Aldi in Germany maybe 10 years ago. I assume they did this because the scanner technology was not as fast. The cashiers memorized the codes and were crazy fast.

Aldi Süd cashiers learned the prices. They actually choose prices that were easier to type and as few different prices as possible. Barcode scanners were installed in 2000 in anticipation of the Euro introduction.

Aldi Nord cashiers learned three digit codes (around 800 ones). Scanners were only introduced in 2003 because they started to sell loose produce which is weighted at the checkout. Additionally, that allowed them to get away with less training.

The checkout speed dramatically decreased since then. Before they had to pick up each and every item they often entered the numbers faster than you could load the items onto the checkout line.

6000 items per hour was the target before. Now it's around half which would have gotten you fired back in the days.

And they ordered the POS software from two companies - at the same time. When the two companies finished the development, they paid both of them but choosed the better one which is now in production...

At least for the last incarnation in 2013 Aldi Süd took offers from 14 companies, chose 8 which delivered a proof of concept, then chose 3 to fully implement the software which was then field tested for three months.

They also have full rights to the source code and in-house developers to do small changes.

The hardware is supplied by a different company that also has software on offer. But apparently that is not good enough.

I've maintained for years you can tell how well a shop/chain is run by how fast it processes your card, McDonald's are currently the fastest I've found generally with Aldi running a close second.

Seems logical that once people have selected what they want to buy you get them out the shop as fast as possible.

I was born in 1990 and I have never seen a checkout without a scanner. Do you have a video how the procedure looked like at Aldi Nord and Aldi Sued?

The same as it is now, just no barcode scanner. With one hand the cashier moved products from the band to the other side for you to pick up, while they typed codes into a 9-digit number pad with the other hand.

And interestingly they were not any slower.

my mother still says they were much faster.

But I think Aldi had a smaller varierty of products back in those days too.

Are you sure that? My memory is hazy but I think you parked the shopping cart at the register instead of behind it and just moved your items from the end of the belt back into your shopping cart while they typed in the codes without picking up anything. I think I even remember that customers were a bit confused that they needed to move their carts behind the register which was solved by signs and floor markings.

A grocery store with only 800 items seems absurd to me. That's 10% the variety of a USA grocery story.

That's the whole point of this store. For each type of product they usually only have one brand, mostly the store brand. They also only carry fast moving products and almost no long-tail. That's one of the reasons they can offer extremely cheap prices while maintaining good quality. In the US they have no problem beating Walmart at their own game using that strategy.

Additionally, they used the same code for things like different types of yoghurt of the same size (they still have the same barcode, makes scanning faster).

Of course we have bigger stores in Germany, too. But they are not quite as profitable.

If I remember correctly, the codes were the prices. Which meant they could not have to products at the exact same price, and had quite a few products at strange prices like DM4.32 (while almost all competitors had their kitchen-psychology prices of 9.99).

Each product in the database will have a barcode (GTIN, EAN) and a PLU which is often a 4-6 digit code assigned internally. The PLUs are used as lookup codes when the barcode fails (usually because the product is not entered in the DB). The codes afaik were never prices, you would use prices for that.

You might be mixing up Aldi Nord and Sued. In Aldi Sued they really just typed in the prices.

Not an American, so Aldi is just Aldi the German supermarket chain to me. I'm talking about how product databases and shops are run in general throughout Europe. Seems like Aldi invented their own system that no other chain uses.

I was referring to the history lesson matt4077 gave in an ancestor comment.

Yes, the Aldi chains were using their own system. It's not too much of a leap: they only have a few different hundred items total, and they already control the packaging and what's printed on it.

In any case, I am really glad Aldi (and Lidl) are making great inroads in the UK and Australia. Mostly because I think the incumbents in these places can use some shaking up from their cosy oligopolies. (Tesco in the UK and Coles in Australia feel `evil' in exactly the sense that we decried Microsoft to be.)

Occasionally they incorporate the barcode into the artwork a little too, like on this hair shampoo: http://imgur.com/jx5COyD (There's another longer barcode segment on the other side as well.)

Kind of akin to https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf (representing a machine-readable pattern as a graphic element in artwork).

Edit: more details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

If you enjoy this sort of curiosity, checkout https://reddit.com/r/barcodeporn

I'm inspired to visit Aldi's again. It's been years. I remember them as being a rather depressing very low budget ambiance, dimly lit by a few flourescent tubes with an awful color spectrum, and populated by a sad bunch of customers who looked like their next option was the local community kitchen. Kind of like the typical older Kmart that's about to go out of business.

We have one in my hometown, and that's exactly what I remember. But on my most recent visit home, my wife needed something and the nearest place was Aldi. They definitely changed. It wasn't anything like I remember.

I was in one a month ago out of curiosity and that's exactly how I would describe my experience.

I remember about 8 years ago when Aldi first appeared in my hometown and my parents would occasionally shop there. I hated their self branded foods. Now my wife and I shop there all the time and their own branded stuff is actually pretty good. Lots of people agree it's become much better. Occasionally produce is under-ripe and their selection is definitely smaller than other stores, but it's great for a lot of things.

I started shopping at Aldi because I have four children and our grocery bill was becoming unwieldy unless I spent a lot of time preparing for the visit. The local grocery stores play a game where they mark down a bunch of things "with card", but their regular prices are well over the average price at places like Walmart/Meijer. Aldi is consistently cheap and has resulted in me no longer wasting my time couponing or checking ads to make sure I'm not paying $5.00 for salad dressing that's normally $2.50 and often on sale for $1.50.

I was bugged by having to bag my own groceries, put a quarter in the cart (nearly unheard of outside of Aldi where I live) and having to pay cash (they take credit cards now). But a few things happened: about 80% of what I purchased as "store brands" were superior or dead on par with the name brand (a few were misses, a few were dramatically better). The total spend on produce and meat was significantly lower than I typically paid and I noticed when I was purchasing the produce that the quality was very consistent. My green grapes, the kids favorites, were much smaller than I typically bought but it turned out that makes them sweeter and there were fewer brown buggers in the bag.

As to the bagging, I am beginning to prefer it. They always have empty cardboard boxes and a large counter to organize things and because we intentionally grocery shop no more than once per month, I end up with a huge amount of things (we do joke, however, that it's impossible to get a combination of things at Aldi that fills the cart and results in a bill greater than $220 -- my current record highest). Organizing it in boxes according to what fridge/freezer/cupboard it will end up in makes that part of the process a lot easier (easy enough for the kids to do it without our help).

And for the quarters, this tiny little deposit results in the carts being put back in the bay. It saves them money, sure, but it has two other benefits. The bay always has carts -- I don't have to surf the parking lot during the holiday season because all are in use or scattered through the lot. And unlike every other store where more than half of the carts have problems, Aldi's are always in perfect working condition. No stuck or crooked wheel forcing me to push the thing sideways to make it go straight and I'd imagine that has cut down on damage to parked cars, too.

There are 2 Aldi's near me here in the UK. One in a wealthier area and one in a poorer area. They do seem to alter the store somewhat to match what they sell. The Aldi in the wealthier area has a larger area for fresh foods and a large stock of those foods. I think the poorer one has more biscuits and soft drinks.

I remember the pre-barcode times at Aldi in the late 1980s in Germany. The cashiers would type in numbers into the cash register like crazy. They knew every price of every product and had to put it into the machine. It was at least thrice as fast as every other shop at that time.

It felt like barcodes didn't make it that much faster, but Aldi ones are still around the fastest ones.

While the speed is impressive, it also adds a lot to stress because the cashiers require you to get away as fast as possible.

I wonder why a large retailer like Walmart doesn't start incentivizing their suppliers to do this as well?

Some math.

-Assume a fixed 120 customers an hour

-Assume each customer buys 20 items

-1 minute for customer to pay + 1 minute total scanning time for all items = 30 customers / cashier / hour (4 cashiers needed)

-Assuming additional barcodes double the scanning time (seems reasonable to me from my experiences at Aldi):

-1 minute for customer to pay + 30 seconds scanning time = 40 customers / cashier / hour (3 cashiers needed)

Savings of $12 an hour ($8/hr + taxes, training, insurance, etc)

120 customers * 20 items per customer = 2400 items total in the hour

$12 savings / 2400 items = $0.005 per item savings

Obviously the assumptions were a bit simplistic, but couldn't Walmart offer their suppliers, say 10% of the estimated savings, $0.0005, per item to add a few more barcodes?

The benefits only get really apparent when almost everything has easy to scan barcodes.

Also, presumably these suppliers will be supplying to competitors of Walmart, so it doesn't make sense for Walmart to fund their shared efficiency gains. Everyone would end up making the same gain, and Walmart wouldn't end up any further ahead of the competition.

The suppliers consider the packaging to be a form of marketing/branding. They want it to look a certain way with key information, regulated or marketing, on various parts of it. The goods at my local grocer are packed with all kinds of info and graphics. Store brands often do the same thing. Customers love it much like they love variety on the shelves, symmetrical presentation, and interesting displays.

Aldi, like Costco, aims for a "no frills" segment that basically doesn't care how they place looks. They want to go in there, fine exactly what they need, get it cheap, and get it fast. This lets them do things like just drop boxes instead of neatly arrange products or cut beauty/info out of packaging in favor of barcodes. Ugly stuff that gets other segments to stop shopping at a place.

So, there's a few tradeoffs that apply before we even think about a company pushing vendors to do it.

Note: "Walmart offers their suppliers." They're same suppliers in many, but not all, cases. There's one or more companies that literally do nothing but put different names on the same stuff to make it look otherwise. Dirty, industry secret. ;)

Walmart doesn't care about your happiness. They only care the labor as a percentage of hourly sales.

They figure once you invested an hour marching around a football field sized store you'll happily wait 45 minutes to check out.

I've actually just started seeing boxed products at Walmart where the UPC barcode runs up the entire side of the box, so they do appear to be grabbing this strategy. I can't remember the brand-name of these products, but they're rock-bottom cheap and come in pretty plain blue cardboard boxes.

That's also the reason supermarkets love contactless (rfid) cards: they reduce the time needed to pay to a half :-)

This thread shows how different the shopping culture is in various countries. I love it :).

Seems like something Zizek would use when talking about ideology :)

Visited Aldi and Lidl in Germany and I am sorry but I can't help hating those stores. It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being there. And then the whole experience with the cashier is hyper stressful and they are so blinding fast at scanning the groceries. It is like you are subject to some German Blitzkrieg or something.

Interesting with the article that they explained why it was so fast. I actually just thought Germans were super fast at everything in general.

I could't figure out how to pack my groceries as fast as they scanned them and get time to pay without holding up the line.

I agree they are sometimes too fast for you, but when you're a student the savings are well worth it, often half the price of a normal supermarket

> often half the price

How's the food inflation nowadays? A couple years back it seemed like all the frozen items were huge boxes with lots of empty air in there.

So I eat junk food occasionally, usually end up regretting it ... unlike the local supermarket at an expensive $3.33 for a bag of 40 name brand pizza rolls, I could buy a large box of generic pizza rolls at Aldi for only $2.50 ... woo hoo sounds awesome ... containing 17 rolls. Oh maybe not so good of a deal. It was funny to look at frozen appetizers where there would be this big box of breaded mushrooms and in tiny print "qty 5" and so on. I seem to recall a big box with 3 mozzarella cheese sticks.

BTW I don't photographic memorize prices, the above prices were verified via google.

Much as I'm not rich enough to shop at walmart, I'm not rich enough to shop at Aldi.

Admittedly, the produce had little selection (food desert style) but what little was there, was good quality and cheap, so its not all bad.

> It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being there.

Can I ask which part of Germany you've been to – or rather which Aldi (Nord or Süd)? There's a surprising amount of difference between the two and I've always found one of them far nicer than the other.

Aldi "Süd" is the more modern one.

I was in Berlin

That makes it Aldi North. I don't actually like that one, South is much better.

> ... I can't help hating those stores. It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being there.

Then why go there? Normally, you enter most stores by choice, so after a couple of (negative) experiences, just stop visiting them.

Can't speak for all Aldi and Lidl stores (not even in all of The Netherlands), but in my hometown a new Lidl store is actually better than just looking cheap and barebones. Wide aisles (sp?), less garbage of empty boxes and packaging material, friendly staff, great parking space. And still you're not paying for additional services and special/luxury items (which aren't there).

Sure, and I don't go there. But why can't I still hate them? Does me having a choice mean that I should like them. I hate opera too, and I don't go watching opera either. But am I required to like it because I am not forced to go there?

Anyway in Germany there is not much of a choice whether to enter Lidl or Aldi as they are everywhere and there seems to be little else.

I've lived several years in the Netherlands btw and I really like Albert Heijn. That is more like my kind of store. The Aldi I went to in the Netherlands wasn't actually that bad.

In fact it sort of bothered me that Germany wasn't more like the Netherlands in shopping experience. Germany seems so ultra focused on cheap, plain and efficient.

> Anyway in Germany there is not much of a choice whether to enter Lidl or Aldi as they are everywhere and there seems to be little else.

While they're the biggest players, there are more traditional supermarkets like REWE, Edeka and Kaisers.

> Anyway in Germany there is not much of a choice whether to enter Lidl or Aldi as they are everywhere and there seems to be little else.

There is a lot else. Germany's supermarket market (heh) is divided between five corporations for the largest part: Aldi, Schwarz (Lidl/Kaufland), Edeka (Netto/Edeka/Marktkauf/Tengelmann), Metro (Real), Rewe (Penny/Rewe/Nahkauf).

I would like to have more competition on the market, but it's far from just Aldi and Lidl. Most corporations have at least one discounter brand (Aldi, Lidl, Netto, Penny) and one regular supermarket brand (Kaufland, Edeka, Real, Rewe etc.).

You're free to hate them, although I personally choose not to hate anything in my life. Life's just too short for that. My "Then why go there?" was a response to your "I get depressed just being there", not to your hate.

Indeed, Albert Heijn has great shops. The have a much greater variety in their products across the board, stock more luxury/expensive items (that Aldi/Lidl simply don't sell) and likely have a higher margin on these to cover for the additional costs of a more luxurious shopping experience and additional services (their free magazines, online shopping platform, apps with recipes, parcel pickup service from bol.com).

BTW, Albert Heijn is still the largest chain of supermarkets in NL, but Jumbo is catching up quickly. You should try them, once you visit NL again.

Reads like culture shock to me.

I am not dismissing your concerns, but I've had the opposite issues going to the US where everyone is super chatty, seemingly needy, and slow.

You go into a store and they yell at you "DO YOU NEED SOMETHING" uhh, no, I'm sorry I came in to look around, is that a crime? The waiting staff return to your table every 30 seconds, and the cashiers are more interested in your life story than how you want your bags packed.

Aldi and Lidl are hyper-efficient. Sure, there's no bells and whistles, but all that stuff does is distract you from the goods on display that seem to rotate much more frequently than typical supermarkets (so you cannot just shop mindlessly).

This made me laugh, you'll get used to it and start to enjoy it eventually. It seems like things are more relaxed wherever you are in the us compared to wherever you were previously.

When it comes to the "Do you need something," it's part of their job, if you're looking for something specific it's good to know that there are people available to help you. They're not asking you if you have a reason to be in the store, hah. Just tell them "I'm just looking around, thanks." And they'll tell you "If you need anything, [specific] let me know."

Sure, it's their job but some people simply appreciate being left alone and unsolicited offers just come off as pushy.

Your parent comment is right: it's culture shock. As a German I can't stand the idea of having to shop in American supermarkets. And it's likely no accident that WalMart failed to get a foot into the German market -- not just because of their blatant disregard for German labour laws (which are more worker-friendly than in the US).

I posted this as a response to another comment, but it probably bears repeating. If the person seems genuinely friendly, try taking them up on that offer, and see what happens. If you tell them what you're looking for they may give you recommendations, and you might end up finding something better. This is what typically happens to me.

For a lot of us northern europeans, it just doesn't fit with our culture. We value honesty and straightforwardness above superficial friendliness. Often I find American customer relationships just provocative. So often they act like robots. You can tell that all their smiles and friendly words are all fake. That makes it all feel like I am being lied to and that employees are forced to act in an unnatural way no matter how they feel that day.

I rather have people act friendly towards me because they want to. If they don't feel that great that day, they don't need to smile and put on a show, as long as they don't give me shit.

And also we like our privacy. When people follow you around the store and keep asking if you need help, or comment on something you are looking at, it just feels invasive and disrespectful.

Mind you I do actually frequently enjoy the more chatty nature of things in the US. And many are genuine about it. But the problem is that for every genuine person there seems to be one that does the whole robot routine because the manager has instructed everybody to have crazy smiles and sell as much shit as possible.

I totally understand, dealing with fake friendliness can be unnerving. Just remember, not all of those smiles/friendliness is fake, some of it definitely is, but some of it is genuine, just not at the same intensity as they'd show for close friends/family.

> If they don't feel that great that day, they don't need to smile and put on a show, as long as they don't give me shit.

I'd be fine with this personally.

> And also we like our privacy. When people follow you around the store and keep asking if you need help, or comment on something you are looking at, it just feels invasive and disrespectful.

If the person seems genuinely friendly, try taking them up on that offer, and see what happens. If you tell them what you're looking for they may give you recommendations, and you might end up finding something better.

I dislike both extremes. I agree with your parent post about Aldi being depressing in character, but it's not just the bareness and speed, it's the herding. I've been in an Aldi recently only once, and had gone in just to look around and see if I wanted to shop there in the future. Once inside, I realized that there was no path back outside except through a cashier. Look around and leave? Oh, no, you will buy something in order to be allowed to leave, the design seemed to say.

After I realized that Aldi didn't want to let me leave without buying something, I was determined to buy nothing, and finally waited by the entrance until someone coming in opened the door so that I could leave to the entrance side of the airlock/lobby, and then again for the outer door. I expected this procedure to look very odd and for people to stare, but it must be common enough, since no one seemed to notice.

You can just pass the cashier without buying anything. The cashier won't even notice you. Nearly every bigger supermarket in Germany has only exits at the cashier.

They might not have noticed, but I would have noticed waiting in line. There wasn't room to scoot by the people and their carts, and, as I said, every other route was blocked.

I thought this was to deter theft. It's normal, though not universal, in Irish supermarkets.

Hehehe I think you assume I am American. I don't really like the American experience either for many of the reasons you state. I come from Norway, so we have a all together different system. Like Germany we can't afford to have bag packers and such. However we solve the problem different from Lidl and Aldi. Usually there is a collector behind the conveyer belt, which has two different areas where it can send your stuff. Thus two shoppers can collect their items at the same time. That means you don't have to hurry to pack you stuff before it falls off the conveyor belt like Lidl.

Another common way in Norway is to simply let people scan all the goods themselves while they are shopping. Then you don't need a conveyor belt and cashier at all.

Norwegian grocery stores are also usually quite plain, but not as insanely cheap looking as Lidl and Aldi.

There are other more "western" grocery stores in Germany, like Edeka and Rewe. These are also self-pack, but there's room at the end to do it comfortably.

And they are much pricier.

I felt this exact same way through my whole childhood, but then as soon as i had to start paying for my own groceries, it was like a revelation. Now I adore the harsh fluorescent lights of value

I'm not in Germany, but the same pattern repeats across Europe. I wouldn't choose the budget stores, except there's one on the ground floor of my building. I still don't like it -- it's obviously extremely convenient for me, but the goods are arranged badly, and the whole shop stinks of stale beer from the bottle return.

If I want food to do proper cooking, I walk two-three minutes to a nicer supermarket :-)

> It is like you are subject to some German Blitzkrieg or something

Given it's in Germany, a British firebombing would have been the more-likely cause...

> the whole shop stinks of stale beer from the bottle return

Which is probably why Lidl moved the bottle return to a separate entry which is not connected to the aisles. Yes, it stinks of stale beer in there sometimes, but you only have to be in there for a few seconds to return your bottles.

I noticed at line in Costco the cashier's assistant rearranged by stuff on the belt to have the barcodes facing up and in the same direction.

Costco could probably save some money by putting barcodes on every side of everything.

> Costco could probably save some money by putting barcodes on every side of everything.

That's easier said than done because Costco doesn't sell only private label items like Aldi.

In Germany Aldi has such a market power that even for the few name-brand item they stock[1] they can demand different packaging from the manufactures. That includes not only barcodes but sometimes even more explicit ingredient lists.

[1]: Recently they started to stock more name-brand items due to a strategy shift. The other chains are not very amused.

They have enough buying power - they could probably mandate it

They have their own Item Number system. Even general-retailer items sold elsewhere often have the (Costco) Item Number on their packaging.

Costco could just print their own and add it to the packaging.

I'm not sure that the time needed to affix the label to every product is less than the saved time due to faster scanning.

Costco certainly asks for custom packaging. No other retailer is going to put an SD card or bottle of vitamins in a 2 sqft blister pack.

When Aldi went to the US, their management ended up with a whole genre of in-jokes about the concept of "cashier's assistants". I forgot the details but some were quite funny.

It's pretty easy to do this yourself as you put the items onto the conveyer, with large items in the cart at least getting the UPC code up.

I do this at WalMart when I'm in a hurry.

Off topic, but private labels are in many ways reminiscent of the state-controlled labels in former communist countries.

Interesting, is that a common connotation? I grew up with Aldi and Lidl in Germany and I've never made that association, but I suppose I can see why you might if you're used to branded products.

Well, I can see how drinking some Ja![0] branded beer after eating some Ja! branded crisps feels a bit like drinking BEER branded beer and CRISPS branded crisps...

But luckily Aldi and Lidl generally have less bland packaging than that. ;)

[0]: http://www.freshcom.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/...

Known as employing Germany's fastest typing cashiers Aldi introduced this quite late compared to other grocery stores. They experimented for many years to get the same speed and the result where these huge and multiple barcodes per package.

Do Aldis in the U.S. bag your groceries? In Ireland, you would have to bring your own bags, or buy their thick plastic ones. And then the cashier would tut-tut you if you took too long bagging your own groceries.

You have to bring your own bags over here too - not sure if they sell them, I haven't been to an Aldi in a while.

They do sell bags, from cheap plastic ones to sturdier paper ones for $0.10. You can also buy reusable bags right there as well.

It's the same here in the U.S, bring your own or buy their plastic reusable ones. The locations I've been too sometimes had spare boxes you could use, but that was pretty rare.

Finding empty boxes is an artform.

Aldi has no problem with you reshuffling the stock on the shelf to create an 'empty' box out of two partially filled ones. I've gotten really good at this.

When you think about it, it also keeps the shelves a bit more organized when people are walking away with the cardboard that would normally have to be recovered and packed up by the employees.

You bag your own. Generally the cashier puts the scanned items in an empty cart sitting there for that purpose, then you swap your empty cart for the one with your purchases in it and wheel it over to a counter against the wall to bag or box them up - at the counter there is a stockpile of empty boxes that you can take.

Yes. We bag on our own. Also we have to deposit a quarter to use the shopping cart. And it seems these stores have only 2 or 3 employees at any given time.

>> And it seems these stores have only 2 or 3 employees at any given time.

Interestingly, Aldi's starts the payscale at double the minimum wage, or about $18/hr in the US

The Aldis near me is looking for employees at $11.25 an hour.

You bag the groceries yourself in the U.S. too. The cashier puts them in a shopping cart which you take to a nearby long counter where you bag them. (They charge for bags but sometimes there are empty cardboard shipping boxes at the counter that you can use.)

You do have to bag your own. Or buy paper or plastic. You also have the option to pick up empty cardboard boxes or bring your own bags.

Oddly, here in Noway, you nearly always bag your own groceries regardless of the chain. You pay a little for plastic bags, which are always decent quality. Most people turn around and use those bags for their household trash.

I have gotten much faster at bagging groceries since I've lived here. I have never really had a cashier tut-tut at me for being too slow: but the bagging are is divided into 2 sections and sometimes they won't switch back to my side. There is some social pressure to be quick about it, but folks seem to understand if one has a lot of groceries.

I believe the reason for the tiny shelf you have to quickly empty is twofold, it means the tills take up less space, which means more shop space for stuff they can sell, and it speeds up the flow through the tills because peer pressure makes most people just pile it straight back into their empty trolley and sort it out after they've paid.

My strategy is to load everything onto the belt (heavy stuff at the front, fragile at the back), and line the now empty trolly with two or three of those strong reusable bags they sell, I can keep up with the cashier and end up with well packed bags that are easy^h^h^h^h possible to lift straight into the car, but then I'm a bit nutty when it comes to packing things, bags, cars, dishwashers.

Thanks for footnoting Dallas. Aldi being German I thought of a different example: that approach is how we ended up with France, Germany and Lorraine (of the famous Alsace-Lorraine fights between F & G). It was the three sons of Charlemagne...still very visible today!

Oh shoot, that means that when the local Sinclair station sell gas for less that at a nearby Chevron, Trader Joe's & Aldi are going to engage in a price war which will somehow end up bankrupting Safeway, ultimately resulting in a nationwide A&P hegemony. Or something.

It was the three sons of the son of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun

Thanks, memory can be a bit leaky at times.

I wonder if this system can introduce miscounting or double-counting of an item? Maybe that is why the cashier at Aldi moves through items so quickly.

I've never heard that happening. Usually those systems prevent scanning the same barcode in short succession and cashiers have to manually enter the amount if more than one is bought.

Given the way that barcode scanners work, as the sibling comment points out, there is almost certainly some kind of 'debouncing' going on. The system is acquiring data fast enough that it probably has enough time to repeatedly read the code tens or even hundreds of times before you move it out of the field of view. So I'd guess it triggers on the first detection and you get a short dead time to move the product away.

This is exactly how it typically works. There's a time that needs to pass before the scanner accepts the same barcode again, and any other barcode scanned resets the lock for the previous barcode (so you could scan two different items over and over in very quick succession, but this doesn't work with just one item). The time is configurable on the scanner and typically in the 1-2 second range.

As I work in cash register software development and sometimes wanted to perform performance tests on real hardware and without mocking the scanner away I have developed a few tricks around this rescan prevention delay. One involves a wheel with different barcodes printed on the side that is attached to a battery-powered screwdriver machine. The more sophisticated one is a belt made of paper with different barcodes on it that is always being rotated around using wheels in a little machine built using LEGO Technic parts. It is pretty awesome how mind-boggingly fast those bigger laser barcode scanners can scan barcodes when they are presented to them by the LEGO scan robot :D

In almost a decade of shopping there this has never happened to me and I'm one of those bastards that reads the receipt as I'm boxing the groceries before I leave.

I joked with a cashier about this, once ... she said, deadpan, "it beeps when it scans". I'm guessing they're listening for two beeps when they're expecting one? The store keeps stats on the cashier's times so I'd imagine there's some training and probably some things only an Aldi cashier could speak to about how they manage to be quick, accurate and deal with the 30 or so customers a day who (used to) come in expecting to pay with a credit card (they're now accepted at Aldi in the US).

I've seen a cashier sometimes scan something twice but I think it was human error of some sort.

She just pressed a button on the register and continued. I think she used the same functionality for scanning one item while you really bought 12 of them.

Amazing! Now I finally understand the reasons behind that :D

I noticed these giant barcodes, but I never thought they could be somehow useful. I mean, the average speed of cashiers here in Germany is "normal". That's fine, I don't care if they take 10 seconds instead of 5, nor I care if they take 1 minute instead of 40 seconds.

I've never noticed that their products had more than one barcode. In the Netherlands the skill of fast "bleeping" is lost nowadays, stores tend to hire young girls as they are cheaper, and only if you go to the store on a weekday in the morning you will encounter an older woman, but they are not so fast as in the past.

The small checkout counter makes the difference in my opinion, fast in the cart speeds up the whole process. Lots of times i'm stunned by people who wait by the cash register to pay and let the products stack up, so the next person has to wait till they put everything back in their cart. This is not a problem with Aldi / Lidl.

The only thing that would make it faster is a cart thats lower on one side so that they can make a slide for your products..

If scanning the barcode is the critical step, why do it with an ordinary barcode scanner? Just make a conveyor belt that has multiple cameras. One of them will definitely catch one of the barcodes. I've done barcode scanning with ZXing lib myself on a phone, it's super easy even with one camera.

Perhaps set up the bags in a clever way so everything other than eggs falls into a new bag.

Also, it can't be long before you just scan stuff using an app as you're taking it off the shelf, connected to a payment method so you don't even have to pull out your wallet.

In Sweden* (and surely other places) you borrow a portable barcode scanner when you enter the store and scan your own products. At the end the cashiers take the scanner and do something and you're done.

I think they do random "bag checks" as well every now and then. And you might need to have the stores credit/debit card (but I am not sure because I never used this system myself).

Here are some pictures https://www.google.co.th/search?q=ica+bar+kod+skanner&source...

* In the main brand supermarkets at least.

I know of one chain here in Norway that does this, but only in a few of their larger stores. I believe you have to set up a card with them that is connected to your bank account. They have regular lines as well for the folks that don't do this.

I somewhat assume that when this becomes cheap enough, some version of it will be in all the places, probably in conjunction with something that weighs the cart or basket to see if it matches up to what you have scanned.

Because you couldn’t easily tell if a bag of crisps has already been scanned, or if I bought two.

That seems to be a limitation of the barcodes themselves. Why don't they have three additional random-ish digits? Then the two-item/double-scan confusion would have a 1/1000 chance.

Because you would need 4000 instead of 4 printing plates to produce the packaging.

The "Price First" house brand at Walmart has many items with huge barcodes on all surfaces. I wonder how this experiment will work out given that these ugly packages compete right next to pretty ones.

I love Adi. I once got a $40 chainsaw there that I still use. (And, of course, tons of inexpensive food.)

For the longest time, they didn't accept credit cards here in the US, and I may be the only one, but I totally respected that. I suspect the recent change is related to the fact that US laws now allow for the credit card fees to be added to the bill separately.

I look forward to the day RFID tags become so cheap you can just scan the bags/cart and be done with it.

Waiting for this too. The day 75% of all cashiers in big chains lose their jobs

Aldi checkers used to key everything in, from memory, at lightning speed.

If a regular cashier is $10 an hour and an Aldi super cashier is $20 an hour, is there any net benefit to Aldi other than the extra floor space freed up by less check out counters?

I've heard that in the UK there are bag boys who even carry it to your car. Is that true and are you then supposed to tip?

That's not true in any of the Aldis I've been in here. If it were true, I doubt anybody would tip them.

In the UK it would be considered very odd to tip anybody you're not already paying directly.

No, that's the least British thing I've heard of.

Not to mind the least Aldi thing, too.

Seems like they need something like the Digimarc barcode?

Upvoted for the cat serving suggestion!

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