I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.
Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).
Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fake customer relations smiles, Germans find that creepy and annoying. I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster.
And then comes workers rights. Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US (good luck, Tesla in Berlin). Running a business profitable in Germany is way different from doing the same in the United States. That's both for legal/bureaucratic reasons and also customer expectations.
People in Germany also bring their own bags and actively don't want some slave to bag their items. It's a real skill not to piss off other Germans in a supermarket when you scramble to bag your stuff and take longer than a few seconds. In my experience, Aldi cashiers (well-paid btw) are better than any robot you could put there. Their speed is insane (remember to keep up with the bagging or you will get evil stares or comments for being a moron).
The market is completely different.
You are on to something. This is almost the classic Aldi check-out experience in Germany. Also, for not putting your cart in the correct location.
In some areas yes, I hear that VW workers are paid well. In other areas, you have 400 Euro jobs and forced labor below minimum wage if the "job center" (formerly social security) decides that you need to be a slave.
I don't understand why people here defend Europe as if it were the 1980s. Those times are long gone, perhaps folks here have a sheltered life and only listen to state propaganda.
All of this is currently on the political line and there is enormous political will in the population to "fix" Hartz IV. It helped Germany out of its labor misery when Schröder became chancellor in 1998 (5m jobless down to ~1m) but it brought new problems such as 1€/h jobs (tax-free, on top of unemployment payments), weird sanctions and brain-dead mechanisms to put people back into work.
If it weren't for Corona it would likely be one of the major topics in the societal discussion right now as Hartz IV is widely recognized to be insufficient.
Federal minimum wage is also fairly new and already way too little. But Corona is shaking everything up, so who knows what will happen now.
That's because minimum wages are a fairly new thing in Germany.
I appreciate the low prices, but it also makes buying groceries kind of stressful in a way that was never true in the US.
How exactly is having more lanes going to help with the conveyor belt being small?
> just how much stuff are you buying that you cant fit it on the belt?
So the implication here is that it's my fault for buying too much stuff?
I was buying enough for at least a handful of days for a family of 3 that's stuck at home. I was trying to buy more at once during this pandemic so I don't have to visit the stores as often, but the grocery stores don't make it easy.
I can't imagine what it's like if you have 3+ kids. I mean, I guess if you're going to one of the suburban stores that are more like American ones, it might be fine then.
Its maybe that maybe Lidl / German stores are cheeping out on the store fit out - you can get lanes that can support two customers packing.
Like, the setup works fine for the way Germans go grocery shopping: smaller amounts of groceries, two or three times a week. It just sucks for families if you wanna buy more at once.
I miss Costco.
That bagging thing... don't know what to make of it, since we don't have it, but let me tell you that this can go the other way too. IMO the ones giving evil stares or making haste otherwise are the morons. Driven slaves under stress. I intentionally slow down and give space when some older or otherwise challenged person takes her time. To the extent of getting a real smile from the cashiers.
Also, some juicy reading on Walmart in Germany: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02...
I noticed one more stark difference: many Germans don't own a car and apparently the large Walmarts often needed to be located at the edge of towns. Germans do more local, atomic grocery shopping around the corner and carry their stuff home by foot, bike, or public transport.
Huh? Amazon does pretty well in Germany.
Germans aren't mythical creatures. Even if some of them like local stores, prices and convenience and quality still matter.
See eg https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/e-commerce-how-...
I am very skeptical Amazon would be able to take significant market share from Aldi, Lidl, REWE or Edeka.
Amazon would probably mostly compete by delivering that stuff to you, not by having stores.
And I don't see any deep seated German aversion to getting groceries delivered.
I do see Amazon having a decent chance of getting a big chunk of the grocery market, but I don't expect all of Aldi, Lidl, REWE and Edeka to have to close up shop.
(Similarly, Aldi and/or Lidl were winning a decent chunk of the grocery market in UK and Australia when I was living in either country. But they won't take 100%. The incumbents adapt. Some of the might fail, but not all of them.)
I doubt that since I think that Amazon's vision is very different from what many German customers want. Here is a (German) text of a German blogger who went to Amazon Books in the Empire State Building. His experience was not positive:
> https://www.danisch.de/blog/2019/06/18/ein-seltsamer-einkauf...
Also as a clarification, the in store demo Amazon Echo devices are set to a variety of names including Alexa and Amazon, which one to say where is printed on the product description tag I saw. They’re not spaced far enough apart though, occasionally “the wrong one” would answer me.
I had a much nicer time shopping at an Amazon Go Store, though selection was limited and I had to edit my receipt later as it thought I’d bought a pop when I had only browsed for flavours.
I wonder why they don't just use e-ink price labels? These are common around here for a decade or so.
They had lots of 'buy 5, pay 3' and similar nonsense deals. Often, the software in the register would "mysteriously" not have the deal, and you pay more.
And, of course, a 50% reduction usually meant that they just doubled the price in the week before.
Things got much better in the last ten years or so. That's roughly when Lidl and Aldi really started eating Tescos lunch.
What really helped in the end to rein the practice in was new competition from abroad.
British retail banking is similarly customer unfriendly. For example a few years ago (no clue whether that's still the case), you could NOT not have an overdraft. They called it an 'unarranged overdraft'. Instead of just letting you tell the bank to refuse to let you got even a penny below zero, they still gave you the money (to an extent) but with a hefty fee.
They also ordered your outgoing bills or standing orders for the day in decreasing size: that's the order that maximizes that number of items that hit your account when its below zero.
They regularly got dinged by their regulators. Nothing much changed.
This time the new competition didn't come from overseas, but from upstarts like Monzo.
I don't know whether the incumbent British retail banks have gotten their act together yet. But last time I checked they were at least afraid and scrambling.
That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to.
Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went out the door, you don't know what needs to be restocked.
Having said that, if the items being reduced were scanned as part of the process of being assigned a discount sticker, then the stock-taking process should be able to capture this.
(Reduced items are usually sold, or failing that, discarded or returned).
The important information is "We did too much of this cheese sandwich today" and correlate that with stuff like store location, the weather, public holidays, travel, etc. That's the valuable data. Then when double-discounted there's a further scan "We really did too many cheese sandwiches today".
I'm not sure where the value-add in projecting future demand is with a mass of low-value-add information. Not giving it a unique SKU seems like a saving to me. If anything, doing random sampling might be worth it, but in measuring flow of what comes in and what goes out, it's going out on discount or trash in the end. The goal is to not overproduce, not waste time tracking overproduced/allocated stuff.
But I'm not a supermarket expert.
Apply discount to previous product
Perhaps the primary goal is just to have it gone.
In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating?
Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation needed for main-stream adaption, they can get way higher margins in other categories (e.g. non-food).
IMHO the perfect supermarket of the future is not food delivery, but a drive-in/pick-up model where you can go 24/7 and where your order is packed 100% by robots. Until we reach this point in terms of technology, the traditional supermarkets will not change due to the above-mentioned oligopoly.
The prices go down because you don’t have to pay people. If it costs the same, you don’t lower prices just because you’re using automation.
Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate.
It took me a long time to understand this relationship, but while discussing this with a machine learning expert hired by LIDL it suddenly clicked: this is basically why they don't innovate further in terms of offline retail experience.
Automation is unrelated to where products are sold.
Automation might just mean one fewer cashier at a regular store.
Do other stores not do this?
I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records.
As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.
Amazon could not enter the German market that easily, people really like to shop in Aldi / Lidl and the online retail business is not as strong as in the US.
On a side note, Amazon is unable to penetrate ALDI & LIDL's market share because they offer better prices. It's as easy as that, and it is not about whether German people love waiting in queues or driving to some shop. The savings by shopping at discounters are very real.
Once you factor delivery costs into the equation, many German food retailers only offer the more expensive brand foods for delivery, and not the cheap stuff - exactly as Amazon does.
SAP is terrible yes, but do you know any other way on how to get complex processes from multiple sectors together in a single system?
SAP is basically admitting your logistics and operations became so complex and large that there is no other way to do this more efficiently.
One example is a company which produces ship engines and various other parts. They source all resources from different sub-companies across the globe. From the raw material to final assembly.
All this information needed to be tracked in an ERP system and to be honest, SAP works well in this regard because it has a standardized process (which is terrible i must admit) but atleast it's a standardized process.
ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices.
It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL.
I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.
It was quite seriously discussed and some were used during the 2005 election. You don't see any discussions about it today because the constitutional court put a stop to it.
https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/germany-constit...
Yeah, voting machines are pretty unnecessary (for most voting systems).
There's something to be said in favour of a method that any village idiot can understand and observe with their own eyes. Paper delivers that.
For example that it's a precondition to fair and open elections? :-)
Lowering the complexity and thus barrier to understanding just builds an extra buffer of transparency into the system. It's a very-nice-to-have.
You don't want to just have free and fair elections, you want to also convey the clear and unfakeable impression that your elections are free and fair.
There's a lot of signalling involved.
It's extremely hard to verify that whatever code you audited is the one used in the actual devices.
No such problem with pen and paper
(Fair as far as the voting system goes. Eg first-past-the-post on paper will still be a less fair voting system than Germany's weird proportional hybrid or my favourite, range voting. Or this fascinating gem: https://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html)