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Comment by ccozan | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I found very interesting: upto maybe 6-7 years ago in the Aldi shops there were no barcode readers at the cashier. Instead, the cashiers knew the price of _all_ products by heart and they had an incredible speed in typing at the numpads. I was truly amazed, it was hard to keep up puting the goods back into the shopping cart. There were literally no queues forming, since they took only cash.

Now the shops are a little more modern, accept cards and the cashiers are rather mindless drones instead of numbers prodigies from before.

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In Austria they're still quick. I remember seeing the old cahsier as a child - but it is still my favourite shop in terms of effectiveness.

Now they've started something like a bakery in stores with many people just buying one or two items, which slows down the process. The process in the shops is optimized for people to buy in bulk.

'Never underestimate the person behind the register.' was one of the lessons we took away from a Point-Of-Sale system installation in a fast food restaurant. When the first customers came through the drive-through, we were surprised that the teenagers taking the orders had calculated the tax and order total, to the penny, in their heads. By the end of the day, we'd developed our rule, confirmed by further experience in other stores and other states.

Were they calculating it or had they "just" memorized the vast majority of common product combinations?

I ask that, because I worked at 7-11 in Oklahoma for awhile, years ago. The Ok 7-11's are their own separate corporation. We didn't have scanners for anything except cigarettes, and it didn't take long before you knew total price, including tax, someone would have to pay for various combinations of standards prices (.99 + .99 + 1.05 + .59 or what have you).

Mostly just a pedantic difference, but I thought I'd throw my experience into the mix.

Still pretty crazy when you get someone that's been there awhile and knows basically all of them.

I think my closest experience to this was when I was an order picker at a warehouse with no computers. We had guys on forklifts that seemed to know where every single item was in a warehouse with thousands of bays, and could tell you not just where something was, but what the number of the bay was. Pretty crazy.

I wouldn't be surprised in this case if they were just memorizing the final price of different combinations of orders. I imagine this has a lot to do with the intense time pressure. Often the time to check the computer loses you 5-10 seconds, which in a fast food order environment would make the difference between slow and fast.

We saw order pickers that just memorized their pick sheet when it was printed out for them and never looked at it again until they dropped off their pallet. They would also reorganize the pick order in their head for the most efficient route so trying to keep looking at what was an out of order pick sheet was a big time sink for them. So while we were thinking of trying to print the items out in the most efficient order, we realized they were already doing it themselves and wouldn't look at it anyway.

When they finally did get barcodes they wrapped around most of the product so they could just whizz them past the scanners. They're still fast, but it's a more frustrating to keep up, whereas before, you were kind of in awe.

If not wrapped, they know where the barcode in the product IS. Everytime I'm not at Aldi/Lidl in Germany, the cashiers seem to see the product for the first time and take close to forever to find the bar code. Especially frustrating in Poland, where they are so slow you start playing tetris with your products, because it takes so long. Whereas in Grmany the challenge is to outpace the cashiers.

This is one thing that I really, really like at Aldi: well trained cashiers.

It used to be mostly 3-digit numbers because for decades the inventory was kept below 800 unique products.

Highly skilled, or talented labor often has difficulty scaling.

yet, this man depended on what you view as highly skilled labor, scaled it, and was worth $20.9 billion when he died.

IIRC, Aldi's cashiers in the US were (are?) paid extremely well for a cashier. My mom mentioned to me (around 10 years ago) that the positions were infrequently open and competitive because they were paying close to $15 an hour.

Of course, two skills the cashiers were required to have were the ability to memorize lots of numbers and trustworthiness to handle large amounts of cash. It was likely worth it to pay employees enough to make getting fired enough of a deterrence to theft.

I made over $14 as a night clerk in Oklahoma 7-11s. It was an entirely separate corp from the southland 7-11s.

Most of the workers I knew there were pretty hard workers, and the 7-11's there were more similar to Quiktrips than 7-11s elsewhere. They usually didn't have a problem keeping people on point because it wasn't hard to replace you with someone good at the $13 or so even a normal day shift was making.

I wonder if they have any data on what the accuracy/mistake rate was of the average Aldi cashier doing it by memory as compared to with barcodes. Be interesting to know

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