Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> -they have barcode on 5 or 6 sides of their products, and they're typically huge! They nearly never need to orient a product to scan it. Their scan speed is far faster than any other supermarket I've been at.

On a historical note (I am old enough to have shopped before bar codes existed):

Generally stores had little price tags attached to every single item. Which was labour intensive twice: First someone has to attach the tag to each item and at the checkout it needs to be found somewhere on the product, read and the price to be entered into the cash register.

With only 1000 products (back then, IIRC) and no weekly offers at all it took only 2-3 days for a new cashier to learn all prices by heart and easy for the store to skip the stickers altogether and just mark the price at the shelf. Typing prices without having to search for a tiny little sticker somewhere on the product was super fast and efficient compared to the competitors. Cashiers just dropped the product into the cart with one hand and typed with the other.

Aldi introduced bar code scanners several years after the "full assortment" competition. At some point probably the better inventory book-keeping started to outweigh the costs.

(Edit: clarified that Aldi had no price stickers at all)

There's a store called Bulk Barn here in Canada where cashiers still do this. Everything is sold in bulk (flour, nuts, candy, etc.) out of giant tubs with scoops, that customers use to fill clear, unlabelled bags. The cashiers have this spinning cylinder thing that lists all the prices, but I've never seen them use it. Instead, they plop each bag on the scale and type in the code, which takes two seconds each.

I don't know how they tell the difference between all the generic powders that look the same, like white flour and rice flour, but they do. And if they don't, I suppose they just ask the customer.

You’re supposed to write the bin code on the tag you use to close the bag!

I don't shop there often, but I've never seen any tags you can write on, or even writing implements of any kind. That's just how the store works.

Aldi cashiers didn't type the prices but numbers for the products. The register would lookup the prices. Cashiers would quickly punch those numbers in without picking up the items for many items and then swoop 5 to 10 items over the register part of the counter at once. I think Aldi held on to the system longer because it was indeed more efficient than scanning. But there is a limit on how fast one can bag the items, so I guess a little inefficiency can be tolerated.

> The register would lookup the prices.

Not in the 1970s and early 80s. Do you know what computers costed back then? 1 KB of memory was as expensive as the whole cash register used by Aldi/Lidl. And there was no computer networking whatsoever, not even between multi-million super computers. When the German railways introduced computers at the ticket windows in the 80s all ticketing data was stored on 8 inch diskettes. And if you bought a not so common ticket the agent had to swap the diskette first.

I don't think Aldi/Lidl used diskettes at their cash registers. Maybe when scanning started in the mid/late eighties, but they certainly didn't have to swap during the day.

> 8 inch diskettes

Maybe floppies was the more common term. Obviously that part of my memory hasn't been refreshed for a couple of years...

Don't copy that floppy!

If they had an unique barcode for each instance of a product, inventory management could have been easier.

The article critical piece of the old scheme is tar before computers, no one had a use for tracking whether the correct price was actually charged. And thanks to inflation, the range of possible prices was smaller.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com