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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anotheryou|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dandermotj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_dev|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] eru|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jankassens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germanier|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matt4077|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinbartlett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
Edit: more details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goda90|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artumi-richard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingnothing|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jglauche|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tuna-piano|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] pingec|9 years ago|reply
Seems like something Zizek would use when talking about ideology :)
[+] [-] jernfrost|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elchief|9 years ago|reply
Costco could probably save some money by putting barcodes on every side of everything.
[+] [-] jonknee|9 years ago|reply
That's easier said than done because Costco doesn't sell only private label items like Aldi.
[+] [-] skrebbel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coredog64|9 years ago|reply
I do this at WalMart when I'm in a hurry.
[+] [-] return0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herge|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeanutNore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arundelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdtransier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermontdevil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donjh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rzah|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noipv4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] joshvm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germanier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckystarr|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mk89|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tikumo|9 years ago|reply
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..
[+] [-] lordnacho|9 years ago|reply
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.