Aldi's Barcode Strategy

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/aldi-has-very-impressive-barcode-strategy

by curtis • 10 years ago

213 265 10 years ago

anotheryou2• 10 years ago

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.

nacho2sweet• 10 years ago

Buying groceries Germany Aldi's and Lidos was the most stressful part of my time there.

skrebbel4• 10 years ago

Why?

bluedino2• 10 years ago

> where many pay cash and you get every cent back in change.

Aldi just started accepting cards in the US a short while ago

mhurron• 10 years ago

*Credit Cards. They have accepted Debit Cards for several years at least.

lorenzhs4• 10 years ago

They accept both credit (Visa and MasterCard, by far the most common in Germany) and debit (EC)in Germany. Credit was a recent addition

draw_down• 10 years ago

I always go for least people. The bottleneck is not the cashier, it is the dolts who seemingly have no idea how to pay at the grocery store, despite ostensibly having done it their whole lives.

mdip6• 10 years ago

Up until a few weeks ago Aldi in the United States only accepted cash, EBT or Debit.

Your strategy, especially at Aldi, is the way to go. I read an article about a decade ago that was challenging grocery store "express lane" speed. Since groceries have been using the same kinds of scanning mechanisms at every chain for a very long time, the barcodes are usually optimally placed to allow for the "scan/bag" to happen quickly[1]. The article identified that the bottleneck was more often the transaction times and not the time to ring up an order meaning that an express lane with three people in it would take longer than a lane with one person and a cart full.

Granted, this was a decade ago and many things have changed since then, including the "super store" which includes a lot of products not optimised for scanning in the first try.

[1] Cashier experience plays a roll here, as anyone who's shopped at Walmart can attest. At Aldi, though, solves this by having the barcode occupy almost the entire length of one side of the package, making it harder to miss the scanner than hit it.

seanp2k23• 10 years ago

I also look for older people who are more likely to spend a few minutes filling out a cheque. I also notice how slowly most people interact with CC terminals, as if they've never used one before and have to figure out every single interaction.

noipv4• 10 years ago

I wonder if this system can introduce miscounting or double-counting of an item? Maybe that is why the cashier at Aldi moves through items so quickly.

germanier20• 10 years ago

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.

joshvm• 10 years ago

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.

Slartie• 10 years ago

This is exactly how it typically works. There's a time that needs to pass before the scanner accepts the same barcode again, and any other barcode scanned resets the lock for the previous barcode (so you could scan two different items over and over in very quick succession, but this doesn't work with just one item). The time is configurable on the scanner and typically in the 1-2 second range.

As I work in cash register software development and sometimes wanted to perform performance tests on real hardware and without mocking the scanner away I have developed a few tricks around this rescan prevention delay. One involves a wheel with different barcodes printed on the side that is attached to a battery-powered screwdriver machine. The more sophisticated one is a belt made of paper with different barcodes on it that is always being rotated around using wheels in a little machine built using LEGO Technic parts. It is pretty awesome how mind-boggingly fast those bigger laser barcode scanners can scan barcodes when they are presented to them by the LEGO scan robot :D

mdip6• 10 years ago

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).

luckystarr• 10 years ago

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.

jankassens• 10 years ago

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.

germanier20• 10 years ago

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.

markokrajnc• 10 years ago

And they ordered the POS software from two companies - at the same time. When the two companies finished the development, they paid both of them but choosed the better one which is now in production...

konschubert• 10 years ago

I was born in 1990 and I have never seen a checkout without a scanner. Do you have a video how the procedure looked like at Aldi Nord and Aldi Sued?

tamana2• 10 years ago

A grocery store with only 800 items seems absurd to me. That's 10% the variety of a USA grocery story.

matt4077• 10 years ago

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).

kagamine3• 10 years ago

Each product in the database will have a barcode (GTIN, EAN) and a PLU which is often a 4-6 digit code assigned internally. The PLUs are used as lookup codes when the barcode fails (usually because the product is not entered in the DB). The codes afaik were never prices, you would use prices for that.

gumby2• 10 years ago

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!

zeveb• 10 years ago

Oh shoot, that means that when the local Sinclair station sell gas for less that at a nearby Chevron, Trader Joe's & Aldi are going to engage in a price war which will somehow end up bankrupting Safeway, ultimately resulting in a nationwide A&P hegemony. Or something.

tricolon• 10 years ago

It was the three sons of the son of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun

gumby2• 10 years ago

Thanks, memory can be a bit leaky at times.

herge• 10 years ago

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.

donjh• 10 years ago

You have to bring your own bags over here too - not sure if they sell them, I haven't been to an Aldi in a while.

joezydeco3• 10 years ago

They do sell bags, from cheap plastic ones to sturdier paper ones for $0.10. You can also buy reusable bags right there as well.

sdtransier• 10 years ago

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.

joezydeco3• 10 years ago

Finding empty boxes is an artform.

Aldi has no problem with you reshuffling the stock on the shelf to create an 'empty' box out of two partially filled ones. I've gotten really good at this.

When you think about it, it also keeps the shelves a bit more organized when people are walking away with the cardboard that would normally have to be recovered and packed up by the employees.

PeanutNore• 10 years ago

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.

vermontdevil• 10 years ago

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.

bluedino2• 10 years ago

> And it seems these stores have only 2 or 3 employees at any given time.

Interestingly, Aldi's starts the payscale at double the minimum wage, or about $18/hr in the US

arundelo• 10 years ago

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.)

Broken_Hippo3• 10 years ago

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.

dandermotj2• 10 years ago

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.

s_dev• 10 years ago

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.

res0nat0r2• 10 years ago

Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in front of it. You unlock the cart by sliding in a quarter so you can use it while shopping. Since people want their quarter back they have to return the cart to the store. Great solution to eliminate a bag boy sweeping up carts from the lot all day IMO.

Also way back when ALDI didn't even have barcode scanners to save money. There was a person typing all of the items manually into the computer with some 4-6 digit code when you checked out. It was crazy as they were incredibly fast.

anexprogrammer2• 10 years ago

At least in the UK that's not true any more. Both Aldi and Lidl have moved out of bottom end discount and now also have premium lines too. So now for many lines you'll find discount, mid and premium versions - all still private label, all still styled to match equivalent brand or competing supermarket range. Lidl's premium meats are suspiciously close to Tesco premium range branding for instance, but vastly better. Still far fewer lines than Tesco or Sainsbury, but a heck of a lot more than five years or so ago when it was typically one of each thing.

Quality wise they beat the other supermarkets by a long way, except Waitrose or Co Op, on most things. There are exceptions, Aldi cheese is awful.

StudyAnimal3• 10 years ago

I come from a country where there are always plenty of open cashiers and no lines. If I saw a queue there I would leave and not go shopping because its either overloaded or some system was down. When I first came to Germany I kept seeing the queue and thinking "oh, I will come back later when it isn't so busy". But I have noticed the reverse occurs too. If there is an idle cashier no one goes to them. They assume, due to the absence of the queue that it isn't open yet or something, so they head straight for the queue.

open-source-ux• 10 years ago

"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.

germanier20• 10 years ago

The race to the bottom in Germany has created a market where food is of good quality but not great. Larger supermarkets do have quite a bit of selection but it's not as good as the stuff you can get in a French or British store. You can get a fair selection of spices in stores other than Aldi or Lidl but sometimes I have the suspicion that it's only the third-class that is left after the stores in neighboring countries have bought their supply.

In Germany Aldi is known as the hardest negotiator and the price setter for basic food. When they lowered the milk price by one fourth to 46 cents recently (which is way too low to cover production cost) all other chains responded within a few hours for their store-brands.

dandermotj2• 10 years ago

From Ireland, so I know what you're talking about. I suppose my point was really that Lidl and Aldi have swept into an market over the last 10 years, where customers are hard fought for, seemingly with ease. The Tescos of the world definitely can't compete at with own brand quality or price.

I don't know about the UK, but in Ireland Aldi and Lidl are proliferating across the country. The growth is so extreme, they're hiring grads at €60k plus an Audi in order to train them up as shop managers. I mentioned case study because they've taken a fundamentally different approach and it's working. Their low cost structures across supply chain, product base, building construction and shop design are how they're carrying out this coup.

eru13• 10 years ago

Shouldn't the milk farmers who can't meet cost of production leave the sector instead of guilting people into supporting their lifestyle?

Shivetya• 10 years ago

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

tobltobs2• 10 years ago

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 buy those items in large amounts very cheap. People love those "bargains" and can't stop to buy it, even if they don't need it at the moment. And they are not randomly, they are seasonal and they do repeat every year. In Germany you get a weekly flyer for those bargain items in your letterbox and I would guess that it is the most read "publication" in Germany.

eru13• 10 years ago

I can't wait for Lidl to come to Australia, too. The local incumbents are no real competition for Aldi.

makomk• 10 years ago

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.)

schoen• 10 years ago

Kind of akin to https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf (representing a machine-readable pattern as a graphic element in artwork).

Edit: more details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

colinbartlett• 10 years ago

If you enjoy this sort of curiosity, checkout https://reddit.com/r/barcodeporn

elchief• 10 years ago

I noticed at line in Costco the cashier's assistant rearranged by stuff on the belt to have the barcodes facing up and in the same direction.

Costco could probably save some money by putting barcodes on every side of everything.

jonknee• 10 years ago

Costco could probably save some money by putting barcodes on every side of everything.

That's easier said than done because Costco doesn't sell only private label items like Aldi.

germanier20• 10 years ago

In Germany Aldi has such a market power that even for the few name-brand item they stock[1] they can demand different packaging from the manufactures. That includes not only barcodes but sometimes even more explicit ingredient lists.

[1]: Recently they started to stock more name-brand items due to a strategy shift. The other chains are not very amused.

nedwin• 10 years ago

They have enough buying power - they could probably mandate it

DrScump• 10 years ago

They have their own Item Number system. Even general-retailer items sold elsewhere often have the (Costco) Item Number on their packaging.

choward• 10 years ago

Costco could just print their own and add it to the packaging.

AjithAntony• 10 years ago

Costco certainly asks for custom packaging. No other retailer is going to put an SD card or bottle of vitamins in a 2 sqft blister pack.

skrebbel4• 10 years ago

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.

coredog64• 10 years ago

It's pretty easy to do this yourself as you put the items onto the conveyer, with large items in the cart at least getting the UPC code up.

I do this at WalMart when I'm in a hurry.

return0• 10 years ago

Off topic, but private labels are in many ways reminiscent of the state-controlled labels in former communist countries.

atomwaffel2• 10 years ago

Interesting, is that a common connotation? I grew up with Aldi and Lidl in Germany and I've never made that association, but I suppose I can see why you might if you're used to branded products.

pluma2• 10 years ago

Well, I can see how drinking some Ja![0] branded beer after eating some Ja! branded crisps feels a bit like drinking BEER branded beer and CRISPS branded crisps...

But luckily Aldi and Lidl generally have less bland packaging than that. ;)

[0] http://www.freshcom.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/...

kw71• 10 years ago

The "Price First" house brand at Walmart has many items with huge barcodes on all surfaces. I wonder how this experiment will work out given that these ugly packages compete right next to pretty ones.

ams61102• 10 years ago

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.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

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.

kingnothing• 10 years ago

I was in one a month ago out of curiosity and that's exactly how I would describe my experience.

goda90• 10 years ago

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.

mdip6• 10 years ago

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.

artumi-richard• 10 years ago

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.

jernfrost5• 10 years ago

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.

Zpalmtree• 10 years ago

I agree they are sometimes too fast for you, but when you're a student the savings are well worth it, often half the price of a normal supermarket

VLM• 10 years ago

often half the price

How's the food inflation nowadays? A couple years back it seemed like all the frozen items were huge boxes with lots of empty air in there.

So I eat junk food occasionally, usually end up regretting it ... unlike the local supermarket at an expensive $3.33 for a bag of 40 name brand pizza rolls, I could buy a large box of generic pizza rolls at Aldi for only $2.50 ... woo hoo sounds awesome ... containing 17 rolls. Oh maybe not so good of a deal. It was funny to look at frozen appetizers where there would be this big box of breaded mushrooms and in tiny print "qty 5" and so on. I seem to recall a big box with 3 mozzarella cheese sticks.

BTW I don't photographic memorize prices, the above prices were verified via google.

Much as I'm not rich enough to shop at walmart, I'm not rich enough to shop at Aldi.

Admittedly, the produce had little selection (food desert style) but what little was there, was good quality and cheap, so its not all bad.

atomwaffel2• 10 years ago

It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being there.

Can I ask which part of Germany you've been to – or rather which Aldi (Nord or Süd)? There's a surprising amount of difference between the two and I've always found one of them far nicer than the other.

foxylion3• 10 years ago

Aldi "Süd" is the more modern one.

jernfrost5• 10 years ago

I was in Berlin

jschulenklopper4• 10 years ago

... I can't help hating those stores. It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being there.

Then why go there? Normally, you enter most stores by choice, so after a couple of (negative) experiences, just stop visiting them.

Can't speak for all Aldi and Lidl stores (not even in all of The Netherlands), but in my hometown a new Lidl store is actually better than just looking cheap and barebones. Wide aisles (sp?), less garbage of empty boxes and packaging material, friendly staff, great parking space. And still you're not paying for additional services and special/luxury items (which aren't there).

jernfrost5• 10 years ago

Sure, and I don't go there. But why can't I still hate them? Does me having a choice mean that I should like them. I hate opera too, and I don't go watching opera either. But am I required to like it because I am not forced to go there?

Anyway in Germany there is not much of a choice whether to enter Lidl or Aldi as they are everywhere and there seems to be little else.

I've lived several years in the Netherlands btw and I really like Albert Heijn. That is more like my kind of store. The Aldi I went to in the Netherlands wasn't actually that bad.

In fact it sort of bothered me that Germany wasn't more like the Netherlands in shopping experience. Germany seems so ultra focused on cheap, plain and efficient.

Someone1234• 10 years ago

Reads like culture shock to me.

I am not dismissing your concerns, but I've had the opposite issues going to the US where everyone is super chatty, seemingly needy, and slow.

You go into a store and they yell at you "DO YOU NEED SOMETHING" uhh, no, I'm sorry I came in to look around, is that a crime? The waiting staff return to your table every 30 seconds, and the cashiers are more interested in your life story than how you want your bags packed.

Aldi and Lidl are hyper-efficient. Sure, there's no bells and whistles, but all that stuff does is distract you from the goods on display that seem to rotate much more frequently than typical supermarkets (so you cannot just shop mindlessly).

elevenfist3• 10 years ago

This made me laugh, you'll get used to it and start to enjoy it eventually. It seems like things are more relaxed wherever you are in the us compared to wherever you were previously.

When it comes to the "Do you need something," it's part of their job, if you're looking for something specific it's good to know that there are people available to help you. They're not asking you if you have a reason to be in the store, hah. Just tell them "I'm just looking around, thanks." And they'll tell you "If you need anything, [specific] let me know."

randallsquared2• 10 years ago

I dislike both extremes. I agree with your parent post about Aldi being depressing in character, but it's not just the bareness and speed, it's the herding. I've been in an Aldi recently only once, and had gone in just to look around and see if I wanted to shop there in the future. Once inside, I realized that there was no path back outside except through a cashier. Look around and leave? Oh, no, you will buy something in order to be allowed to leave, the design seemed to say.

After I realized that Aldi didn't want to let me leave without buying something, I was determined to buy nothing, and finally waited by the entrance until someone coming in opened the door so that I could leave to the entrance side of the airlock/lobby, and then again for the outer door. I expected this procedure to look very odd and for people to stare, but it must be common enough, since no one seemed to notice.

jernfrost5• 10 years ago

Hehehe I think you assume I am American. I don't really like the American experience either for many of the reasons you state. I come from Norway, so we have a all together different system. Like Germany we can't afford to have bag packers and such. However we solve the problem different from Lidl and Aldi. Usually there is a collector behind the conveyer belt, which has two different areas where it can send your stuff. Thus two shoppers can collect their items at the same time. That means you don't have to hurry to pack you stuff before it falls off the conveyor belt like Lidl.

Another common way in Norway is to simply let people scan all the goods themselves while they are shopping. Then you don't need a conveyor belt and cashier at all.

Norwegian grocery stores are also usually quite plain, but not as insanely cheap looking as Lidl and Aldi.

joezydeco3• 10 years ago

There are other more "western" grocery stores in Germany, like Edeka and Rewe. These are also self-pack, but there's room at the end to do it comfortably.

foxylion3• 10 years ago

And they are much pricier.

droopyEyelids• 10 years ago

I felt this exact same way through my whole childhood, but then as soon as i had to start paying for my own groceries, it was like a revelation. Now I adore the harsh fluorescent lights of value

Symbiote2• 10 years ago

I'm not in Germany, but the same pattern repeats across Europe. I wouldn't choose the budget stores, except there's one on the ground floor of my building. I still don't like it -- it's obviously extremely convenient for me, but the goods are arranged badly, and the whole shop stinks of stale beer from the bottle return.

If I want food to do proper cooking, I walk two-three minutes to a nicer supermarket :-)

It is like you are subject to some German Blitzkrieg or something

Given it's in Germany, a British firebombing would have been the more-likely cause...

majewsky6• 10 years ago

the whole shop stinks of stale beer from the bottle return

Which is probably why Lidl moved the bottle return to a separate entry which is not connected to the aisles. Yes, it stinks of stale beer in there sometimes, but you only have to be in there for a few seconds to return your bottles.

greenspot• 10 years ago

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.

tuna-piano• 10 years ago

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?

IneffablePigeon2• 10 years ago

The benefits only get really apparent when almost everything has easy to scan barcodes.

Also, presumably these suppliers will be supplying to competitors of Walmart, so it doesn't make sense for Walmart to fund their shared efficiency gains. Everyone would end up making the same gain, and Walmart wouldn't end up any further ahead of the competition.

nickpsecurity2• 10 years ago

The suppliers consider the packaging to be a form of marketing/branding. They want it to look a certain way with key information, regulated or marketing, on various parts of it. The goods at my local grocer are packed with all kinds of info and graphics. Store brands often do the same thing. Customers love it much like they love variety on the shelves, symmetrical presentation, and interesting displays.

Aldi, like Costco, aims for a "no frills" segment that basically doesn't care how they place looks. They want to go in there, fine exactly what they need, get it cheap, and get it fast. This lets them do things like just drop boxes instead of neatly arrange products or cut beauty/info out of packaging in favor of barcodes. Ugly stuff that gets other segments to stop shopping at a place.

So, there's a few tradeoffs that apply before we even think about a company pushing vendors to do it.

Note: "Walmart offers their suppliers." They're same suppliers in many, but not all, cases. There's one or more companies that literally do nothing but put different names on the same stuff to make it look otherwise. Dirty, industry secret. ;)

Spooky232• 10 years ago

Walmart doesn't care about your happiness. They only care the labor as a percentage of hourly sales.

They figure once you invested an hour marching around a football field sized store you'll happily wait 45 minutes to check out.

jcrawfordor• 10 years ago

I've actually just started seeing boxed products at Walmart where the UPC barcode runs up the entire side of the box, so they do appear to be grabbing this strategy. I can't remember the brand-name of these products, but they're rock-bottom cheap and come in pretty plain blue cardboard boxes.

eb0la• 10 years ago

That's also the reason supermarkets love contactless (rfid) cards: they reduce the time needed to pay to a half :-)

mdip6• 10 years ago

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.

shostack• 10 years ago

The sitting thing is common in England (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe). It definitely stood out to me when I was visiting.

agentdrtran• 10 years ago

It's the standard in Germany as well, at least for grocery stores.

mdip6• 10 years ago

It's so rare here I can't think of another time I've seen it. I've always wondered why: comfortable people tend to be less grumpy and the typical cashier job involves "not leaving a very small space for a long period of time". This small space is about the size of ... a chair.

I think the perception of people standing in line is more likely to make them feel that the cashier is working slower because they're sitting[1]. Aldi's lightning quick cashiers would prove that wrong, but perception tends to be all that matters in these scenarios.

[1] People routinely over-estimate their waiting times in situations like this. This became apparent to me when talking to the helpdesk manager at my old company. He would get an e-mail from time to time from a person complaining that they were on hold for "20 minutes". The call stats for the day indicated a maximum hold time of 5 minutes.

stuaxo• 10 years ago

Yup, basically all food stores are sitting, but clothing shops all seem to be standing, weirdly.

pouetpouet• 10 years ago

standard in France and Germany too. I don't think cashiers usually stand anywhere.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC3• 10 years ago

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.

mdip6• 10 years ago

Interesting - Part of me wonders about what their accuracy rate was with that kind of system. 1,000 different 3-digit numbers is still a lot to remember. It's possible, but it would seem to add a pretty big barrier for a lot of people who would otherwise be fine as a cashier, elsewhere. Though when I worked at CompUSA in the early 90s, we lacked barcode readers and each product had a 6-digit SKU which meant only being able to remember a handful of them for the most popular products[0]. It was also horrible for accuracy because each SKU was assigned in order, so fat fingering any of the numbers would result in the wrong product being rung up. This was often caught, but if it was the last or second to last digit that was missed, it was likely to end up being a different version of the same product (more RAM, different CPU, etc) and it would be missed[1] resulting in either the customer paying more (unlikely - those were not missed) or paying less (likely, because the cashier wouldn't notice and the customer was less likely to say anything if they happened to actually notice and the result is them saving a few hundred bucks).

[0] We did have one cashier that I'm fairly certain had well over 90% of the products in the store memorized (we'd grab random things trying to throw him off, but he was like a machine). He had brain surgery a decade prior or so and said the way his memory worked changed shortly afterwards.

[1] The worst case I recall was a $500-$600 memory upgrade kit for an Compaq laptop that was fat fingered, resulting in the generic being rung up. It had an identical description but was half the price. A few days after inventory was done, they traced it back to a single customer who bought every one we had in stock in one transaction. The customer probably knew the price was way too good and decided to buy them all as a result (it's unlikely even he knew it was a cashier error since the product looked right on the receipt).

rsync• 10 years ago

"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."

Hmmm ... so you could populate an Oh By Code[1] with your list of grocery codes and just give them that single code, which they could look up and parse ...

Well, provided your grocery list was not longer than 4096 characters...

[1] http://0x.co

carlob• 10 years ago

I wonder if there is some information theory paper to be written here. On one hand you want the most common products sold to have low Komogorov complexity codes (111, 123, 147, …).

Then there is the question of the distance between similar products and similar codes: is it better to have similarly priced products have similar codes, so that errors don't amount to much in the final tally, or to space out similar goods so that confusion is avoided?

Maybe there is a whole phase diagram of optimal strategies that depends on the error rate. But then again one has to have a good error model. Do errors come from mistyping or from misremembering?

kevin_thibedeau• 10 years ago

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.

jboles3• 10 years ago

This is so true. I worked as a supermarket checkout operator at a large Australian chain of supermarkets for a few years, and the PoS systems were redone while I was there. Before were old Fujitsu machines running an old version of OS/2 with mechanical keyboards. After overhaul, Windows xp embedded machines with touch screens. The touch screens were a massive step backwards, especially when it came to punching in produce codes (many of which I can still remember today).

That and the 'express' lanes being physically smaller used a different, smaller model of scanner rather than the larger scanner built into the counter. The smaller scanner, though removable which was helpful when scanning large crates of soft drinks and other heavy items (would pass the scanner to the customer so they didn't have to lift those out of the trolley) was slower and laggier for everything else and had a smaller "field of view"

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 10 years ago

So true it hurts. My go-to grocery recently downgraded to the CC chip customer-facing-POS. I used to be able to swipe my card ahead of time and generally be on my way within about 6 seconds of the last item being scanned. Now the system has no pre-swipe ability and far more lag. Like, the first few times I used it I messed up and hit wrong buttons because there was ~1000ms of lag. It works sorta-alright if you use the CC chip, but it's trash otherwise.

I just don't understand how that big of a fuck-up is possible; they were clearly losing money with much longer lines. Everyone complained about it, and I know I don't make quick stops anymore because it's too much hassle.

cm3• 10 years ago

I've heard that in the UK there are bag boys who even carry it to your car. Is that true and are you then supposed to tip?

IneffablePigeon2• 10 years ago

That's not true in any of the Aldis I've been in here. If it were true, I doubt anybody would tip them.

In the UK it would be considered very odd to tip anybody you're not already paying directly.

peteretep2• 10 years ago

No, that's the least British thing I've heard of.

eru13• 10 years ago

Not to mind the least Aldi thing, too.

vierja• 10 years ago

I look forward to the day RFID tags become so cheap you can just scan the bags/cart and be done with it.

spdy• 10 years ago

Waiting for this too. The day 75% of all cashiers in big chains lose their jobs

Rzah• 10 years ago

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.

pingec2• 10 years ago

This thread shows how different the shopping culture is in various countries. I love it :).

Seems like something Zizek would use when talking about ideology :)

jglauche• 10 years ago

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.

spinchange• 10 years ago

Aldi checkers used to key everything in, from memory, at lightning speed.

numanuma123• 10 years ago

Seems like they need something like the Digimarc barcode?

tikumo• 10 years ago

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..

mk89• 10 years ago

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.

lordnacho• 10 years ago

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.

wingerlang• 10 years ago

In Sweden* (and surely other places) you borrow a portable barcode scanner when you enter the store and scan your own products. At the end the cashiers take the scanner and do something and you're done.

I think they do random "bag checks" as well every now and then. And you might need to have the stores credit/debit card (but I am not sure because I never used this system myself).

Here are some pictures https://www.google.co.th/search?q=ica+bar+kod+skanner&source...

* In the main brand supermarkets at least.

Broken_Hippo3• 10 years ago

I know of one chain here in Norway that does this, but only in a few of their larger stores. I believe you have to set up a card with them that is connected to your bank account. They have regular lines as well for the folks that don't do this.

I somewhat assume that when this becomes cheap enough, some version of it will be in all the places, probably in conjunction with something that weighs the cart or basket to see if it matches up to what you have scanned.

stereo• 10 years ago

Because you couldn’t easily tell if a bag of crisps has already been scanned, or if I bought two.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

That seems to be a limitation of the barcodes themselves. Why don't they have three additional random-ish digits? Then the two-item/double-scan confusion would have a 1/1000 chance.

jgalt2122• 10 years ago

If a regular cashier is $10 an hour and an Aldi super cashier is $20 an hour, is there any net benefit to Aldi other than the extra floor space freed up by less check out counters?

kwhitefoot• 10 years ago

Upvoted for the cat serving suggestion!

nfriedly• 10 years ago

I love Adi. I once got a $40 chainsaw there that I still use. (And, of course, tons of inexpensive food.)

For the longest time, they didn't accept credit cards here in the US, and I may be the only one, but I totally respected that. I suspect the recent change is related to the fact that US laws now allow for the credit card fees to be added to the bill separately.

Aldi's Barcode Strategy

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