Hacker News Reader

Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

> 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 ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com