I'm an industrial engineer and geek out about Aldi frequently. Here are a few things I've noticed (and researched) which differentiate them from others.
-they have barcode on 5 or 6 sides of their products, and they're typically huge! They nearly never need to orient a product to scan it. Their scan speed is far faster than any other supermarket I've been at.
-if two products are very similar, they'll change the packaging in an obvious way. Blueberry and blackberry yogurt typically look very similar, but the lids are obviously dark and light purple at Aldi. They can glance down and count how many of each, scan one, then hit the number pad for the quantity. I haven't seen the number pad used extensively at any other grocer.
-they combine varieties (like flavors of granola bars) of product in the same box. This greatly reduces the shelf space required.
-depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
-they keep product the box from the manufacturer. This eliminates labor from unboxing and facing product.
-they don't have plastic bags. You can grab boxes (normally a waste stream) and take them home with you.
-they don't list a phone number for their stores. With as few as 2 people on site during the slow times, they can't afford to have anyone on the phone.
-their conveyor belt is far longer than most stores. You should be able to get your entire cart worth of groceries on the conveyor at once. This minimizes the slowness of people handing one item at a time to the next checker.
-They're big on turning inventory over. If they trial a product and it doesn't sell well enough, they have no problem simply not carrying it anymore. You can't always get everything set Aldi, but you can get 85-95% of items you need there.
-they wanted to avoid vendor lock-in, so they had two POS vendors develop solutions simultaneously, awarding the contract to the one which provided the best solution.
I feel quite a few of those things are pretty standard in Europe, so I wonder if ALDI is just exporting european practices to the US. "Coin for a cart" e.g. is almost normal. I noticed that barcodes on all sides of a product is becoming more common, particularly in stores that allow self-scan (ALDI doesn't, but it obviously makes things easier also for customers that self-scan).
That was my thought as well. I live in Denmark, I think ALDI is one of our least efficient supermarket chains which is why they’ve had to fill the niche of low-quality-low-price.
I never knew American supermarkets were so terrible. I mean, you read about the Amazon grocery stores and get the picture of Europe being far behind.
I think ALDI being low quality is mostly a myth, just assumed because of their low prices. The only thing I don't but there is meat, greatly prefer the local butcher.
In some cases the cheaper Aldi products is the same as the more expensive product from another store.
When I was younger there was no difference between olé’s chocolate and Leo with the exception of the package. It was the same taste and factory producing them.
> There are two ALDIs as article mentions and they differ in quality
At least in Germany, where there exist both Aldi and Aldi Süd, quality is not a trait that people would claim that these two differ (they would rather say that the difference lies in assortment).
> Internationally, Aldi Nord operates in Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain and Poland, while Aldi Süd operates in Ireland, Great Britain, Hungary, Switzerland, Australia, China, Italy, Austria and Slovenia. Both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd also operate in the United States with 1,600 stores as of 2017.
Euro here, I don't think chasing the bottom of the barrel is worth celebrating. Also, Germany has the worst standard of grocery stores (I'd prefer grocery stores in general from neighboring France, Switzerland etc) due to their assortment and quality of products - and Aldi and Lidl are responsible for that.
Cheap medium-quality food is not really just an Aldi/Lidl thing, it's culturally a German thing. Germans just don't care about food quality as much as e.g. French people, so competition values price over quality. I'm German and also this way, that's why I'm generally happy to shop in Aldi/Lidl.
It's also diet and food choices. For example I shop in Aldi here in Ireland and this week a standard problem happened. I went with a list of ingredients to make an Indian curry from scratch and only managed to get about 70 percent of what I needed there. The same thing has happened before when doing a Thai or Chinese meal. Comparatively a normal sizwd Tesco would nearly always have everything. In particular Aldi would have a lot less options for things like spices etc.
One thing I do find funny though is the Lidl (and Aldi) practice of selling loads of random items in one or two of there aisles. Many is the funny story I or friends have of going into the shop for milk and bread and coming out with a unicycle, power welder and night vision goggles instead :)
That's my experience as well as an Aldi customer in the USA. I just go to see what they have rather than with a specific list in mind because their selection is quite sparse and at least 20-25% of it changes regularly.
At least here in Houston my Aldi is in the middle of an economically depressed area, so despite the poor selection they're still better than the small convenience stores which have little to no fresh food of any kind. Everything is prepackaged.
I’ve heard They call it three tiered shopping here in Germany - 70% in Aldi, the rest in an upper level discounter (sic) and the delicious or rare stuff at a specialist store or a marketplace.
That would explain why Aldi can be successful in the USA. Even after more than a decade living in more than one states, and I am still not used to the generally poor quality of fresh produce.
Seasonal gardening and local farmers help, but it's not cheap at all. I grew with up with seasonal farmer's market having higher quality at the same or even slightly lower price than the grocery store, but not in the US, higher quality but at fancy price, although they receive the same subsidies and it does cost them that much more.
Germans who can afford it buy only basic stuff at discounters. Fresh vegetables are bought at traditional grocery stores or markets, bread is bought at a bakery, and meat at a butcher, etc. though these latter two professions are heavily in decline in the last 20 years. Comparisons with France and Italy are unfair; these are in a league of their own with respect to food quality (at a price, though).
Living in Switzerland, I often choose to shop for groceries in Germany! Better prices and (much) better range in Hieber. (Although agree that France usually has both beaten.)
Assuming you mean the Hieber in Weil am Rhein, they really do offer a superb shopping experience, but it's vastly above the standard. I wish more supermarkets would adopt the self-scanning devices, it's perfect when buying single-digit items.
In Lithuania food is so expensive that there's a joke that it's cheaper to drive to Germany to shop. That's a bit of a hyperbole (German border is about 1000km away), but it's definitely cheaper to shop in Poland.
I don’t know about the quality it’s not particularly bad as they also have a brands but Lidl is certainly not all about efficiency. Not those here in Belgium regardless where you go to the Lidl.
I really dislike going there. They have 8 cash registers and open only on or two. The reason being that they are understaffed and employees have a gazillion of tasks: baking, unloading, stock, cash register,...
In Germany most newer carts take 50ct, 1€, and 2€ coins. The older ones took 1€ (or 1DM before the introduction of the Euro). Abandoned carts on the premises aren't much of a thing anywhere I lived except for maybe the odd lazy person with a plastic coin in it (some.people carry those around e.g. on their key chain for when they don't have coins on hand).
And honestly, if there was two euros going for simply moving a trolley back to its parking zone, I suspect you would have shoppers who found it worth doing that for all of the free carts, let alone people with less money coming in to collect.
What I more often see than carts with coins lying around is people straight-up stealing the carts. If they live in nearby streets they just push the cart home and then use it to carry or store stuff around the yard.
You can see several such carts in the streets surrounding supermarkets.
> -they combine varieties (like flavors of granola bars) of product in the same box. This greatly reduces the shelf space required.
This is the only thing that fails about Aldi. Let's say you want their Chicken Tikka sauce. The mixed boxes mean good chance you won't see it as Tikka always goes first. You go through the whole 6 boxes of inventory, and yep, all sold - the three spaces in every box. Same for pizza - one always goes first. They don't restock until there's space for another combined box.
This looks related to something that's mystified me for years about Safeway.
Background:
- Safeway rotates every product through "sale" and "full price" periods. It's a strictly calendar-based thing; every sale price is going to recur if you wait, and every product will spend a lot of time at "full price" and a lot of other time at two or three different "sale" prices.
- Triscuits come in a variety of special flavors.
All triscuit varieties go on sale together. If triscuits aren't on sale that week, you can get whatever flavor you want. But if a sale has happened, the Parmesan Garlic flavor is probably sold out. This happens, reliably, every time triscuits go on sale, and affects only the Parmesan Garlic flavor. To get that flavor at a sale price, you need to be in the store near the beginning of the sale period.
To me, the diagnosis is obvious: Parmesan Garlic is more popular than every other flavor, and Safeway should stock more of that flavor than they do of other flavors. But though I've observed this for years, they don't. All flavors get the same shelf space, Parmesan Garlic always sells out quickly, and Safeway appears to be happy to forgo the lost sales of Parmesan Garlic triscuits that they could have made if they'd just had them in stock.
I used to work at a grocery store deli. Every week, without fail, we'd sell 75% yellow American cheese and 25% white American cheese (and that's being generous to the amount of white we sold). I asked my boss why we didn't just buy more yellow than white instead of buying exactly one box of white for every box of yellow and she just got mad and said "what, you think you can do my job better than me?"
I still deeply want to know this mystery. It's obvious to anyone who works at a grocery store that certain items are way more popular than others, but grocery stores buy way more variety than makes sense. Maybe it's for appearance in some cases, but no one can see how much American cheese we have stocked at the deli counter, and it's true for the stuff stored in the back of the warehouse, too.
My sister used to work at a super market. One of hey colleagues was tasked with checking the inventory and then restock. My sister saw how her colleague clearly saw that they still had 5 boxes of white chocolate and only 2 of the regular one (I don't remember the actual product but it doesn't matter). Her colleague ordered 3 white and 2 regular. "why the heck are you doing this? Obviously there is more demand for the regular one!" My sister exclaimed. "well I like white chocolate better!" Her colleague explained.
So I think it's absolutely possible you could have done your boss' job better. :-)
Probably caused by decouling between buy price and realised sell price.
You might also find the white is partly a byproduct that needs to be made no matter what.
And this brings me to what also is truly good at, they own the full chain and leverage it.
There are certain products I notice that only come in stock some years and it seems like they're made out of excess produce.
I.e. a cereal I like is made entirely out of these chunky things that usually go in as additives to other cereals. It looks like they only stock it when they have a cheap wheat price.
Another one is the nut bars and what kind of fruits they have mixed in.
I assume this is a metaphor. But even for products that _are_ byproducts, it seems like the correct solution is to sell the less-popular one at a lower price.
Or... not buy it, as c3534l suggested. The fact that I produce egg whites and egg yolks together doesn't mean everyone who buys my whites is obligated to also buy a proportional quantity of yolks. That would defeat the whole purpose of separating them in the first place.
It wouldn't defeat the purpose at all but it is along the lines of the point I was making.
The yolks are a by product no matter what.
There was an interview on the Daily show or last week tonight where they made fun of a guy eating a plate of fried eggs that looked like 5 yolks and 2 egg whites. My guess, the dinner sells a lot of eggwhite omelettes and makes use of the extra yolks as another option for other people to buy.
In the supermarket scenario, the supplier only has one customer and has to somehow make them buy both no matter what.
Go to a real grocery store. If you're shopping at any of the "name brand" grocery stores you're not going to get that much of any quality. Local coops and "high end" grocery stores generally have a great selection and often they have someone working there to help you understand and select cheeses.
Since 2010 or so, I've been signed up for their Just4U special discounts, based on what they know about my shopping habits, as a California dad. Recently they offered me a bonus coupon for Pampers diapers.
Not a match! Our kids have been out of diapers since the days when BlackBerry was the coolest phone in town. Maybe longer. I'm not impulse-buying diapers for anyone else's kids.
They let a week go by and then offered me a special deal on Depends, the old-people's diapers. Not in my current need list either.
Another week goes by, and they come up with a third idea. This time it's a discount coupon for Kotex sanitary napkins.
Hello? They've got about nine years of regular shopping data on me. If they still make multi-decade errors in identifying my age -- and can't get my gender right -- their data department hasn't even made it into the abacus era.
Wrt to depends, maybe their algo gradient descends on natural language first? This guy doesn’t need kids diapers anymore, lets try something less specific.
Why do you assume that retail companies are not looking at data already? Target was (in)famously able to predict that a teenager was pregnant before she herself knew based on her shopping habits. It's entirely possible that retail companies are already following a close to optimal strategy (don't sell too many items at such a low price because they're a loss leader?).
> That's not what happened, and you should reflect on what made you think such an absurd claim is true.
OK, that's not what happened, but I don't see why you're calling the claim absurd. It is unusual-but-routine for women to present with health complaints that are caused by their own pregnancy, without necessarily having realized they were pregnant. Sometimes that health complaint is "I'm in labor". (To get to that point, you have to be really fat, but it does happen.)
Sorry -- I misremembered the story. But as another commenter notes, it's routine for women to not know they are pregnant [0]. So my claim is not "absurd", and I don't feel any need to "reflect" on my actions. The patronization is not necessary.
The main intent of my anecdote is to show how retail companies are already analyzing data. And I think it's foolish to assume that we (i.e. people working directly in tech) know better than the people who are working in tech + retail. (Many retail stores are on the technical bleeding edge - Target spins up K8 clusters in each store [1]!)
Same thing happens here, except there is always a loyalty card special on some items. If you want, say, a 12-pack of Vanilla Coke Zero, well, you have to buy three of them at once to avoid being reamed at the register. But you had better get there right after it's restocked, because it's always "Buy 2, get 1 free" or worse, "Buy 2, get 2 free," and they never stock more than three or four cartons at a time.
Every time someone talks about how grocery stores are these highly-optimized retail juggernauts that know everything about what they're selling, how much to order, where to place it on the shelf, and so on, I just wish I could take them on a tour of my local stores and ask them to explain various seemingly-nonsensical practices. IMHO, there is a lot of room for efficiency improvements in the retail grocery business.
I think they know exactly what they're doing. Those soda deals are usually loss leaders, i.e. the store takes a loss on every 12-pack they sell, but make it up in all of the other stuff you buy now that you're in the store.
If they can get you to come into the store and not buy the soda, that's a great outcome. Of course, if that happens too often, you'll stop going, so it's a balance. They've probably figured out how much to stock to maximize profits -- which might seem nonsensical if you were thinking they were trying to maximize soda sales.
I don’t understand how the soda display is supposed to pull in new shoppers.
Americans tend to drive to the grocery store in my experience. To me, this means most people committed to shopping at the store long before they got there and saw the soda display.
It’s the driving aspect that adds the competitiveness. If you’re driving, a 15 minute drive can get you to a lot of different stores with the same amount of effort.
If they can get you to come into the store and not buy the soda, that's a great outcome.
No, that's a terrible outcome, because they have taught me to check the soda aisle first (and they have kindly put it near the front of the store where it's convenient to do so). If the shelf is empty, I just turn around and head for the competing grocery store down the street....
... which, of course, is owned by the same conglomerate. Grrr.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. It seems to be an impossible task to build a startup in this area as most supermarkets are far too large and have their own (seemingly sloppy) teams to do this stuff. Experience has taught me that there's probably a reason for things being the way they are.
Exactly, and no one does. So the typical outcome is a shelf that sits empty for days at a time, annoying customers and earning $0 for either the store or the soft-drink distributor.
It's not just junk food, either -- they will cheerfully leave half their organic cereal aisle empty, waiting for restocked product that either never arrives or sells out instantly. This phenomenon is observable on timescales measured in weeks or even months.
It's possible that the cereal distributor is actually leasing that shelf space, of course... in which case the annoying situation is still caused by morons with money who aren't taking care of business.
It's not just Safeway. I see the same thing at Walmart with 2 liter bottles of Dr. Pepper and Diet Dr. Pepper. I've never seen them run out of Dr. Pepper, and frequently see them out of Diet Dr. Pepper. This has been going on for years, but I've never seen them change the relative amount of Dr. Pepper and Diet Dr. Pepper they stock.
Same story at the vending machines at the office building that my company used to have an office in. The vending company stocked the drink machine with 2 rows of Pepsi and something like 8 rows of Coke. The Pepsi was consistently sold out by the middle of the week after the machine was filled. The Coke? Maybe 10% of it was sold by the time they came around to restock. But they never figured out that they should add more rows of Pepsi and reduce the number of Coke rows.
I thought my store was the only one. At Stater Bros. the Coke product 12-packs will almost always be “on sale” at either 3/10.99, 4/12.99, or sometimes even 5/14.99. (And you must buy the multiple listed to get the deal)
Every time, without fail, the Diet Coke column is nearly empty while the Coke, Sprite, and Coke Zero ones are full. Not only that, but Diet Coke gets the smallest portion of the endcap.
My only rationale for this is that these are loss leaders, and the Diet Coke is too popular to allow too much room? I don’t know.
1) they don't want to take more of a loss than they have to go get you in the door, 2) the people who buy diet coke or diet Dr pepper are statistically more likely to shop sales than the people who buy non-diet, 3) the relative allotted shelf space and display area aren't just a store manager decision, but actually a product the grocery store sells to the manufacturers, 4) (2) & (3) imply that stores in different class areas of town might have very different which product sells quickly and utterly fail to optimize stocking of the thing you noticed when it literally never sells out at the Kroger a mile away, for example.
Given their sales numbers, I’m sure the prices are spot on. The people buying a 500ml bottle of Coke aren’t looking to lug around a 2L bottle, and the people buying a 2L bottle are focused on saving money.
Me, I like cans. They’re about 35¢ apiece. That’s cheap enough to not worry about, and way better than getting a fountain soda at a fast food restaurant.
2L bottles are just way too big unless you have multiple people drinking or a serious habit (in which case you really should just cut back). The problem is the soda goes stale so quickly once opened.
My ideal is soda fountain machines, but of course I'm not gonna have one of those in my apartment, so the next best is cans.
Companies will often sign shelf-space and display agreements with supermarkets when it comes to displaying their brands' products in-store. There very well might be an agreement between Safeway and Nabisco when it comes to their inventory display.
I don't see how this could lead to the observed results. Nabisco shouldn't be any less interested in selling more Parmesan Garlic triscuits while selling the same quantity of other triscuits than Safeway should be. There is no party who gets a win out of just not ordering/selling the triscuits; this is a pure loss for everyone involved.
Safeway might be required to devote equal shelf space to each of the 24 varieties of Triscuit [1], or perhaps at least the same minimum amount of shelf space to each variety. Nabisco doesn't want some competitor to grab that shelf space. And maybe Safeway doesn't find it worthwhile to train its stockers to restock one variety more frequently than the others.
Brands went on a diversification kick less than a decade ago. If a customer prefers Triscuits Flavor #5, but stores only stock popular Flavor #3, that person might not choose to buy the brand at all when they go shopping. They could reach for, and learn to prefer, a competitor's brand.
If a potential new customer doesn't like popular Triscuits flavors, but sees a newer but a less popular flavor, the availability and visibility of the less popular but still desirable flavors might convert them into a customer.
> If a customer prefers Triscuits Flavor #5, but stores only stock popular Flavor #3, that person might not choose to buy the brand at all when they go shopping. They could reach for, and learn to prefer, a competitor's brand.
...this is exactly the situation I'm complaining about, except that the customer prefers Popular Flavor #3, which the store doesn't stock, to Unpopular Flavor #5, which it does.
Most likely, the sale is to move the products that don't otherwise move (eg, everything but the parmesan garlic). Clearly you're willing to spend full price on those, so there's no incentive to sell more of them at a lower margin.
Assumes grocer’s primary customer is consumers. What does the product manufacturer or the distributor want? Not the same as what the consumer wants. Who pays what to the grocer? Ever seen 3-5 people staring at shelf space and taking notes? Guess what they are buying.
> All flavors get the same shelf space, Parmesan Garlic always sells out quickly, and Safeway appears to be happy to forgo the lost sales of Parmesan Garlic triscuits that they could have made if they'd just had them in stock.
Imho this is probably due to the fact that they make more than enough money during the sales periods.
If somebody shows up during the sales period, with the intention of getting Parmesan Garlic, they very likely will still end up buying another flavor even if Parmesan Garlic ain't in stock anymore.
This is easily justified if somebody went to the store just for the Triscuit sale.
The sales aren't announced. They just happen. There have been many times when I specifically went to buy triscuits, and couldn't do it because they happened to be on sale.
Those are some really weird sales then, what use is the sale if nobody knows about it?
In Germany, most grocers have little leaflets where the majority of sales are announced a bit ahead of time.
Aldi makes a lot of consumer goods business with that, when they sold their first desktop in the mid-90s, all of them built by Medion in the UK, it was a huge deal with long waiting lines even before the stores opened and them running out of stock in a matter of hours.
> Those are some really weird sales then, what use is the sale if nobody knows about it?
OK, it's possible that there's a low-profile outlet for releasing news of upcoming discount periods, and I just don't know about it. However, I can list several effects of the sale that occur whether or not shoppers know about it in advance of coming to the store:
- You might choose to buy more of something than otherwise, since it's cheaper right now.
- As a special case, you might have planned to buy zero of something, only to increase that amount when you notice it's on sale.
- You might choose to buy a discounted item in preference to the non-discounted item you were originally planning to buy.
In addition to that, there are psychological effects. You go to the store and find things unexpectedly on sale, which makes you want to go back to the store. Then when you do something else is on sale, which pleases you again and reinforces you coming back to the store.
The fact that one $3 thing you bought was unexpectedly on sale but every time you go to the store you spend $200 on other stuff is a thing that the store is aware of.
Maybe the causality works in reverse and Safeway discounts triscuits only when they run out of Parmesan Garlic. It would make sense if the supplier only provides equal amounts of each special flavor.
> Parmesan Garlic is more popular than every other flavor, and Safeway should stock more of that flavor than they do of other flavors
Or they should increase the sale price relative to other flavors, so that it still sells out, but near the end of the sale period, maximizing profits.
Or, they are doing the right thing, and you aren't the only person who has noticed it, and the sales drive people to the store at the early part of the sale, which is why the Garlic Parmesan sells out, and Safeway has other means of taking advantage of that, like merchandising high margin complementary products in conjunction with it.
or people just goto amazon/online retailer that does stock it and order the product there. although infuriatingly companies seem to have caught onto this and don't sell some products online, in which case my contrarian brain just rejects the product entirely instead of accepting the artificial scarcity
I don't know how it works at other stores, but at the grocery store I worked at Christie handled all their own products. One of their reps came in to stock the shelves, do orders and take away expired products. Their products came in a special order and sat in the warehouse until the Christie Rep came. It was like that for all their products, triscuits included.
Our local Publix does this for a few items we buy. The one that's currently biting us is Coke w/ Splenda. Every single sale the shelf is empty, and even sometimes when it's not on sale. And yet they never order additional amounts of it. Most other varieties are full on the shelf at all times.
Well, think about it. Safeway makes less money when the product is on sale. And people are used to the popular flavors selling out when the product goes on sale. (The exact same thing happens with ice cream, especially Ben and Jerrys).
Safeway's job is to maximize profit, not maximize number of units sold at sale price.
Not true - when products go on sale the brand is giving the store a kickback per unit sold or a discount on the cost of goods. The store often makes more on sale items.
Nabisco is a DSD vendor. It's own sales associates and merchandisers are responsible for ordering and stocking the shelves. These people are on site (in-store) at most once per day (depending on the unit volume of the store and delivery schedules). Data gets funneled to the sales associate to make their own judgement calls about ordering (though they may be on auto-ordering depending on how close of a relationship the store/chain's snack category management has with Nabisco). High volume stores get 2-3 Nabisco orders in a week.
Sometimes there isn't great communication between sales reps and grocery/store management because of how little involvement is necessary on the store's end. As a manager at a full assortment grocer, unless you have a very specific interest in Nabisco, you may not even notice a SKU is out of stock. Reps will hide shelf tags, and increase other product facings to make it seem like they're fully stocked. Unless a customer brings it up to you, you may have no idea. From a data perspective, an out of stock issue is virtually indistinguishable from a slow-moving SKU as the granularity of sales data is usually only at the "day" level (and due to shrinkage, generated inventory counts are unreliable). So a large demand for parmesan garlic triscuits may not be evident for whoever is reviewing the data.
Also, your reasoning is a little flawed. Parmesan Garlic being out of stock does not necessarily indicate it is more popular than other flavors. It indicates simply that they ran out of their allotment, which (for big sales) is usually centrally planned according to production and previous sales figures. Your store could be in the midst of a negative feedback loop, where previous out-of-stock situations deflate sales figures and affect future allotments, which simply makes the parmesan garlic SKU go out of stock before other "more popular on-paper" flavors.
Another way to look at it is that the margin on triscuits is so low (and even lower when on sale), that caring too much about the extension SKUs is not worth the time/effort. As a rep, you'd mostly be worried about keeping the primary SKU in stock, occasionally juggling other stock from store to store when management gives you a hard time (if they even notice). As a grocery manager, you're probably oblivious if the vendor is actively trying to hide the problem.
Some brands that have an owner-operator type DSD model (where the reps actually work for themselves and own their own routes) are usually more conscientious and concerned with maintaining a full assortment. Ironically, they tend to not have as much frontline support as the corporate DSD behemoths (like Nabisco) so they have to work much harder to cover more stores (but at least they reap more of the benefits of their hard work, potentially). These are usually more regional or local products.
TL;DR
Safeway probably doesn't care or doesn't know, Nabisco also probably doesn't care. Best way to deal with something like this is to submit something to Safeway corporate that a specific SKU (include the UPC) is always out during a sales period at a specific store (if you can find out the store number, even better). The most direct approach would be to find the Safeway snack category manager on LinkedIn and shoot him a message.
Source: Was a Grocery Manager for Wegmans for several years
I have almost nothing more to add, but I'll mention that I recall reading about Wal-mart's practice of making shelf stockers responsible for deciding which products get how much shelf space, and even for ordering the appropriate products -- the theory being that the shelf stocker is the guy in the best position to notice which products are or aren't flying off the shelves. (Whereas, according to what I read, at a standard grocery store, the shelf space itself is sold to a supplier, and they get to dictate what goes on it.) And when I read that, it made me think of the triscuits issue, and imagine that what was happening was that triscuit varieties were being stocked without bothering to look into whether they were popular.
If you have further things to say in this area, I will certainly read them with interest.
In my experience, it's only really the end cap displays that are bought and sold, rather than the inner aisle space. For instance, Nabisco or Keebler/Kellog's (though they have recently moved out of DSD) might pay to get a permanent end cap space contract across a chain with certain stipulations (must be facing the cash registers, in the front of a high traffic aisle, etc.) and then they'll merchandise that space with whatever their sales items are. To compete with Walmart, many retailers eschew selling this end cap space anymore, instead electing to have vendors/suppliers put that budgeted money towards decreasing the overall cost of goods sold. Instead, retailers plan the endcaps themselves based on seasonal focuses and promotional pricing.
The inner aisles are usually planogrammed (the retail nomenclature for the diagram of where stuff should be, height of the shelves, how many facings, etc.) according to the priorities of the category manager i.e. the person in store corporate offices responsible for that particular product group. You'll notice that categories and subcategories inside of a grocery store are organized into shelfing sections of multiples of 4 feet (most commonly). Each of these sections is assigned to a category manager, and managers usually have multiple categories. So Category Manager A might be responsible for 16' of soup in one aisle and 20' of canned vegetables in another aisle. (The layout of the aisles and which categories go where is a separate discipline referred to as "Space Planning").
So this space isn't necessarily "sold" per se, but the category managers usually work with what's called a "category captain", an individual or team that represents a dominant brand in the category, and they influence the planogramming process. They are supposedly unbiased and are merely providing expertise and insight on their respective industries, but that's a pretty naive view as they clearly get to advocate for their products directly. However, the strategy of the grocer will determine how much influence they actually have. Wegmans, for instance, has a strong focus on private label so Wegmans brand products tend to get the most shelf space no matter what.
I should add that after looking into the current situation of Nabisco, it looks like Mondelez (the current corporate owner of the Nabisco brand) is actually considering ending DSD in favor of warehousing i.e. distributing through a grocer's own supply chain.
I know only knew a little about this industry from dating someone who was a merchandiser, this filled in so many gaps in what I knew about those jobs! What a great comment
Aldi's where I get 90-100% of my groceries most months and I've had this experience with stuff like the teriyaki sauce and some of their granola bars, but I've learned to live with it. It's still so much a better experience and cheaper than any other grocery store in Pittsburgh. Aldi "gets" how I want to shop for groceries so much - no bullshit with multiple brands, membership cards, self-checkouts, having to buy in bulk to get a discount, etc.
There are a lot of local businesses that I love but have one gripe with, like a great restaurant with an awkward wait procedure (Gaucho if anyone's familiar), or my favorite barbershop that's only open late one night a week, but I've accepted that they know more than me about how to run, and maybe it just has to be like this to be great overall.
Maybe if you went to an Aldi you would change your mind. I generally prefer self checkout as well for a few reasons, all of which are not relevant for Aldi:
1) It's faster for self checkout because the line moves faster (one line for multiple checkout stations) and because I can scan my items faster than they can. However, Aldi checkout lines move ridiculously fast, so this ends up not mattering much.
2) I get to pack my own stuff, most cashier employees don't pack things to my liking (eg cold items should all go in the same bag so they help keep each other cold, but they don't always do this). At Aldi, you pack your own bags anyway, so this is not an issue.
3) Talkative cashiers. I don't care to talk to a random person I'm never going to see again, but at Aldi you don't have to because you'll be so busy trying to load your items on the conveyor belt trying to keep up with the cashier that they won't have time to talk to you (see #1, and no I'm not joking, it can be hard to load up the belt fast enough to keep up with them if you don't have a significant head start).
I actually just like scanning my own stuff. Ya, and avoiding cashiers, eye contact, everything else. Also, I’m urban, so wind up buying just a basket full every one or two days.
Surely that sort of thing is relatively easy to identify and use the data to adjust the relative quantities per pack?? All this flavour sells first, lets put more of that flavour in each box for people to select their purchase from?
Maybe, people return to get the Tikka, resulting in more sales??
Good question - mostly I guess no as they sometimes seem intent not to refill until other levels drop too.
Mostly this averages well enough. Yet for a few things - like tikka where ratios seem consistently wrong. As Britain's favourite curry, you'd expect a few extra jars of that in every box. Or Cumberland sausages up here in former Cumberland - just forget about whatever the other things in the box are. :)
Probably means going the other way that when they drop something there's a chance 1 of the 2 or 3 actually sold well.
They basically don't do this for perishables. And they don't seem to restock if there's still some on the shelf. I'm pretty sure they can't afford to waste 30% of a product!
On that note, they finally moved their cheese away from that model- their new cheese packaging isn't as great for what we use it for, but it does make getting slices out easier, and it's almost always there, which I care about more.
Re barcodes, in Germany, in the beginning, the cashiers were trained enough that they could actually enter the UPC from memory faster than scanning the item. Later, they added the barcodes on all sides which increased the speed even more.
The quarter in the cart thing is very common in Germany even at high end supermarkets. The higher overhead compared to the US makes it very hard to higher people for this kind of job -- the minimal gain in customer acquisition doesn't pay for it.
Back then they had much less variation in inventory and very limited price groups: all products fit into the ~10 tiers they had, ranging from 0.19 to 3.99 or so.
The increased variation in inventory and the scanners came at about the same time, and they only did that when they figured out how to keep their famous checkout speed. (and it's still slightly slower than it was back then)
Yep, during peak hours you feared Aldi checkout back then.
When the queue was full the best cashiers would really stress you by observing you putting stuff onto the belt and already starting to enter prices ahead of them reaching their area (where now the scanner is). Half way through loading the stuff into the cart again the cashier would urge you to pay and the next customer's items started bumping into yours. It was very efficient and stressy, best you were two guys to share loading/unloading and paying (back then payment was only possible in cash).
Not really. I worked in a Winn-Dixie in high school during the pre-barcode era. The products were marked with a price gun that applied a sticker. But of course, sometimes the can of corn didn't get a sticker or the sticker fell off, so you learned what the price was to avoid holding up the line while you called for a price check.
Side-effect: I would have cleaned up on "The Price is Right" if they'd let a kid on the show, since I knew what everything cost.
Yep. The most notable thing about Aldi (and similar competitor Lidl) from a UK perspective is that they pay above average for comparable supermarket jobs and reduce staffing accordingly.
But I remember putting coins into slots for a trolley (and reclaiming them!) when I was young enough to be sitting in the child seat nearly 30 years ago, long before Aldi was a factor in the UK market. Is this really an innovative concept in the US? Are Americans going to be even more impressed when somebody over there invents the magnetic wheel clamps which discouraged taking trolleys back to our university campus? (even when comparatively poor we'd have happily sacrificed the coin...)
I've never seen it anywhere. I have heard of it, but in the two regions I've lived (Northeast and Midwest), never seen it.
I wonder why it hasn't taken off. My son used to work at Walmart after school making around $15/hour to do little more than round up carts in the parking lot and bring them back into the building. Considering how cost conscious Walmart is, I'm surprised.
However, Aldi is putting up a building across the street from my local Walmart, so we'll see what happens :-)
I saw this happen back in 1995. Back then people would leave carts just about anywhere in the parking lot. Then they introduced the concept of the quarter and having to return the cart to the stand. Soon enough it became a habit. And the practice continues till this day.
You'd be surprised at what all counts as an "innovative" concept in the US. Coming over here from Europe as well, the country is 30-40 years backwards in many areas.
The US has that stuff in bad neighborhoods. The wheel clamp is probably pretty standard in the urban areas and/or poor areas. Out in the well-off places where there aren't wandering street people, wheel clamps would be pointless. The expense, including repairs and downtime, is not justified.
The U.S. has that stuff in good neighborhoods too. It turns out the problem is less homeless people, and more affluent people who can't park close by and are too lazy ass to ever bring those carts back.
(I mean, seriously, Tarzana is neither urban nor a bad neighborhood. It does however have an entitlement surplus at the local Whole Foods)
This is an important distinction in general. Many of the ills Aldi attempts to combat generally are non-existent in other grocery stores in some places, thereby only serving to inconvenience those customers for no gain.
The main reason I have always heard mentioned why they have a deposit is that shopping carts are really expensive and they don't want people to take them home, have teens do silly things with them etc.
Maybe that's not so much a problem in the US, where I imagine supermarkets may not be in the city center but mostly reachable by car and thus less foot traffic to take the carts?
But maybe the deposit here in Europe is just silly? I do know many supermarkets lock their carts up for 1st of May for example and anyway, one euro or one of those plastic discs is not hard to come by, so it is not much of a detriment.
> The main reason I have always heard mentioned why they have a deposit is that shopping carts are really expensive and they don't want people to take them home, have teens do silly things with them etc.
I'm sure the deposit is just to encourage people to put the carts back where they belong, reducing the amount of work staff need to do outside the store.
If you're going to steal a shopping cart, the quarter won't factor in.
Yes, they have egress locks activated by magnet that locks the wheels, or they have another physical lock system, at each pedestrian exit to the car-park of my local supermarket -- that's one reason they are really inconvenient for pedestrians accessing the site, they want to have trolley controls.
The exits are narrow with soft soil and low hedges bordering the paths. You can lift a trolley over, but you need some muscle, especially if your trolley is full of shopping.
Push the cart quickly enough and you can defeat the magnetic locking mechanism. Just push it really fast past the boundary where it would lock and keep going until you’re out of range.
Dunno if that still works, but I enjoyed defeating the locking mechanism at Safeway when I was a kid even though I didn’t even want the shopping cart.
And yet... haven't you noticed that supermarkets in posher areas are less likely to have the coin slot? (Asda and Tesco are two whose policy varies by location).
And in supermarkets with large car parks there are return stations all over the car park. Which means you still need to pay trolley herders...
I am not in America, I can't therefore share your observation. But it is not news that crime of all sorts is lower in "posher areas". Of course it is. What's the point you want to go for?
Also, most those large stores just outside of town have vast parking lots, enough so that I bet that a lot of people would decide that it's not worth $0.25 to take the cart all the way back to the building.
In denser cities where it's just not practical to put your supermarkets impractically far away from literally anyone who might sometimes want to buy some food, what you typically see is some sort of system where the wheels automatically lock up if you try to take the cart outside the parking lot. Which, compared to the Aldi system, always seemed to me like a $10 solution to a $0.10 problem.
Having somebody collect the trolleys creates a job, having somebody pack the groceries creates another job, just like having somebody do the refueling of your car at the gas station.
They are not especially demanding or well-paying jobs, but the shift to service-driven economies isn't a new thing nor particularly exclusive to the US.
That's one of the biggest differences between the US and Sweden, and probably most of Europe; access to cheap labor. Too cheap, if you ask me. You could never employ somebody as a greeter here, or to pack your groceries, or to pump your gas, or other extremely menial and near useless jobs. Can people really support themselves on those, or are they forced to work multiple jobs?
It's actually becoming relevant here, because of our recent influx of largely unqualified people/immigrants. There aren't enough simple jobs that can be done without any education, and so politicians are discussing what to do about it. Personally I think it's a big step backwards to have people do extremely basic stuff as busy work. Most stores are removing manned checkouts and replacing them with self checkouts.
> You could never employ somebody as a greeter here, or to pack your groceries, or to pump your gas, or other extremely menial and near useless jobs.
Well, not full time.
Some German grocers have started to employ very young people during Fridays and Saturdays as packers. They look young enough to be still in school, also collect tips with little boxes, but they are not full-time employees but rather "mini-jobbers".
Which is just such a weird transition considering that many of the jobs I did in my youth have now been turned into their own weird job sectors like that.
While delivering papers is now something exclusively done by adults in cars, as an extra income stream for unemployed on social security. I don't know how that can be economic but I see it happening all the time.
> Personally I think it's a big step backwards to have people do extremely basic stuff as busy work.
Some would argue that's been happening on a rather massive scale for a while already. Our productivity constantly increases, so do our numbers, as such it's only a matter of time before we end up with a whole lot of "surplus" humans in terms of labor demand for keeping everything going.
That's odd. In the UK and Denmark, you get youths who look about 16 working in supermarkets, doing the normal tasks: restocking and tidying the shelves, running a checkout. They certainly don't get tips!
The more expensive shops employ more youths, I think the budget stores don't use enough staff to have an older person nearby if the teen is stuck somehow.
A colleague of mine was in our India office once and he said that they had a:
- person that pushes buttons in elevator (at office, not some exclusive hotel)
- person that you ask to to copies at xerox machine in the office
We don’t have any minimum wage in Sweden. What we do have however are strong unions and free higher education. Somehow I get the feeling that as a nation, we care a lot more about the little guy and his social mobility than the US does.
Over here it is very common to have a plastic or metal coin shaped objects attached to key rings for releasing the trolley without a coin, most of those devices can be pulled out immediately, without connecting the trolley back to the trolleys on queue.
I think the concept just doesn't work as well in the US. Parking lots are larger than in Europe. You'd need a guy to move the carts from satellite collections points back to the store anyway.
That’s the same in Europe, there will be a collection point every 50m or so, then they drive round with carts to trail them back to base. I don’t necessarily agree with you for parking lot size, some of the hypermarkets here in France are huge
In the article it actually discusses this - the article states that a lot of US grocers tried to have the coin carts in the ‘80s and ‘90s but there was apparently enough of a consumer backlash to them that they took them away. So it’s more of a cultural thing it seems.
Anecdotally I think it’s not as much of a problem with Aldi today because
1. The Aldi parking lots in USA are all pretty tiny
2. People generally know what they are signing up for when they go to an Aldi
Generally I think that there would still be a backlash today if Walmart implemented coin carts, for instance. Which I really despise because as someone who worked as a cart pusher as a kid it’s unnecessarily infuriating for me to see the pure laziness of shoppers who can’t be arsed to walk 5 meters to drop their cart into the return location and instead push it onto the median next to their car.
Side note I want to take this chance to say that I absolutely love Aldi. There’s one that’s just far enough away from where I live to make it not worth the drive and the second they build one closer I will immediately do all of my grocery shopping there :)
I do my shopping at Auchan and I often opt for the basket because I don't have the right coin on me. They probably lose more than they save because people are buying less. Given the prevalence of contact-less payment in Europe, hypermarkets should consider dropping it.
The system makes more sense for markets the size of a Lidl or Aldi.
I visited a Target store in Madison Wisconsin and that was the first place I ever discovered magnetic wheel clamps on shopping carts. So it exists in the US... it's just not super common.
Living on the West Coast I see carts all the time that have the wheel locks, they just don't do anything.
As a person that has been a cart pusher, carts suck. The wheels, especially at the front where they put the wheel locks are the first thing that break. They barely touch the ground and spin in circles all the time. Stores rarely ever invest in fixing or buying new carts.
I firmly believe that many places in the US simply gave up on it, because what happens instead is people still try to steal them, drag them a great distance damaging them, and they have to go get it anyways. I think we had maybe 3 good carts at the Sam's Club I worked at our of like 200 or 300 carts.
As someone who was hired to literally take carts in from outside, yes the concept of a quarter deposit to use a cart feels innovative to me. Would have saved my back a bunch of pain.
Magnetic, electronic wheel clamps are becoming more common in the US, but yes, they are relatively new to metro areas, promulgating in the last decade.
The only "innovation" with the trolleys is that USA used to be a wealthy enough country that it was OK to pay cart collectors. It's not a stupidity thing, it's a poverty thing.
I would actually say it’s a sign of income inequality. There is that much of a wage gap that your customers are basically paying someone to return their shipping trolley. Apparently this business model works in the USA, Im sure it would work in India or China, but definitely not in France or Sweden
That's an entirely incorrect premise. Every Walmart store has cart collectors. You can see them working throughout the day, collecting carts. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world and employs by far the most people, and they still do it.
Besides, the US is inflation adjusted wealthier today than it has ever been at any other point in its history.
On the poverty front, US poverty is dramatically lower than it was in 1960, and homelessness is near record lows. If you go back to ~1960-1973, the falsely perceived peak of US wealth, it was much worse to be poor in the US. In every possible regard a poor person was worse off in the US prior to 1980, than they are today. That's due to a massive expansion of the US welfare state over that time, which has led to many improvements. That includes healthcare (universal healthcare for the bottom 25% didn't exist; even in the 1980s far fewer people were covered), housing, food security, disability programs, et al.
When Lidl came to Sweden most people didn't like to shop there because of their short conveyor belts after the cashier [0] relative to the regular Swedish ones [1][2], so you felt stressed when shopping there. There were no room for your groceries. Usually you put your stuff on the belt, the cashier scans it and moves it along, you pay, and then you pack it in your bags.
It took them four years, then they changed to the same ones everyone else uses.
I know a few stores in Europe that have a wall separating the conveyor belts in two parts [0]. The cashier can basically chose if the product will end up on the left or right end of the belt, giving the customers time to pack their things while already serving the next customer on the other side.
American grocery stores are so comically bad and poorly managed it's hard to imagine for a European until you move here. Trust me, it's a shitshow. The only one that works is Trader Joe's for completely different reasons and personally in my first couple years I was completely obsessed with it, now a little less.
Trader Joe's is garbage though? The produce and meat are poor or almost nonexistent and afaik they don't even have a bulk section so I can't buy spices, rice, beans, etc
I lived in Ann Arbor for a couple years and shopped at Meijers. Not good for European standards. The one on Saline Road (just in case you're familiar with the area) had comically large isles that took forever to scan, the vegetable section would be the standout in the store for sure, much better than Safeway / Vons for sure, and the beer / liquor section was something to behold especially thanks to the local craft brew culture but everything else was just done poorly. Checkouts were INSANELY slow and while there were baggers that would look darts at you if you tried to bag your own groceries, they would routinely forget stuff out and I would drive all the way home to discover I wouldn't have my steaks, or something else...
Sorry, before you say "you haven't tried x regional chain in the US", spend some time in Europe. French chains (Auchan especially) have raised the bar for everyone else, it just hasn't happened in the US yet but I suspect someone at Amazon will look very closely at that model and repeat it here.
I get online, select the stuff I want, and then go pick it up (to save delivery fee) that beats all this efficiency stuff about cashiers and aisles and people and UPC. I don't have to worry about any of that. Just a leisurely drive and then they load up my trunk.
A lot of clever efficiency improvements & innovations look obvious in retrospect. I have come to believe that "obvious in retrospect" is actually a clue suggesting it could make a good patent.
A couple of things I've noticed here at Aldi in Ireland. Particularly interested in the psychological aspects:
- The packing area (after the till) is quite small. This means that if you're not packing quickly and putting items back into the trolley then the till operator will have to stop scanning because of the backlog. They will often make subtle eye-contact (with a smile) when they have to stop, this puts the shopper under pressure to pack quicker. I'm a fast packer so it doesn't affect me but I've seen it with other people.
- The till operator will ask you "Cash or Card" before you have finished packing. Another nudge to hurry you on to the next stage.
- They will open a new till the second the queue goes beyond the edge of the conveyor belt. Often they will open up the till for just one customer and then close it again as the queues have subsided. I've seen a large variance in this though, some Aldi's are lazer-like, others are more laid-back.
This is not the packing area though. In Aldis you are generally not expected to pack at the till at all. What should be happening is that you put all your shopping right back into the trolley, then take it away and bag your stuff at your pace at the window ledge, getting out of the way of next shoppers.
I don't know about Ireland, but in the UK there's been obviously some backlash from the customers who aren't used to this model. I've seen arguments break out.
This is not the case in my home town, Enschede, less than 5 miles from the German border in The Netherlands. The lines are terribly slow there compared to other supermarkets. I usually spend more than half of my time waiting in the line. (I only go to Aldi for a few products they carry.) There are more and more shops where you do the check-out yourself either at a scan station or with a hand-held scanner. I guess in the Netherlands the price/efficency difference between the various supermarket chains is less.
> They can glance down and count how many of each, scan one, then hit the number pad for the quantity. I haven't seen the number pad used extensively at any other grocer.
I spent a lot of time in Germany in the 90s. Aldi (and Lidl) hadn't switched to barcode scanners and the chashiers were still typing in product numbers by hand.
I was always super impressed with the speed with which they typed and it certainly felt faster than the cumbersome bar code scanners found in the UK at the time.
At the ALDI's I used to shop at in Tennessee, the cashiers sat. It was an appropriately high stool, sort of like the other poster mentions. (but they were definitely seated.)
They stuck to it for a long time and the argument was indeed speed and to some extend ergonomics (the cashier doesn't need to lift up items). There is a system to it (100-199 is liquor, 400-499 dairy etc.), so it's fairly easy to memorise it.
It's not practical to use them in the long run, you pretty much have to memorize them to be able to meet the company standards for till speed. And memorization is expected by the management. At least that was the case when I used to work at Aldi's (in the UK, quite a while ago).
In the United States carts are free. You collect a cart at the entrance to the store, and return the cart to a cart corral in the parking lot next to your car. Then a worker from the store periodically goes out to the corral to collect the carts and return them to the store entrance.
In California you run the cart up a curb, leave it in an empty parking space, or maybe give it a gentle push and let it roam free. Corrals are depots for broken and rusted carts.
I really hate trying to turn into a spot that's flanked by two SUVs only to find a cart in the way. People are incredibly lazy. I love the ALDI's quarter scheme… it's just enough of a nudge to get people to do the decent thing.
I find that funny because we were taught growing up that leaving your cart out keeps the cart-collecting people employed, kind of like refusing to use the self-service checkout -- a different decent thing!
The carts still need collecting. And at least when I worked at K-Mart in the 1990s, there was no dedicated cart collecting person; it was the task of whoever had the free time, usually someone handling stocking, typically junior, and especially someone young (though these days they have the electric carts).
What you were told sounds like one of those slightly tongue-in-cheek excuses people sometimes use to justify behavior, though that doesn't necessarily make it insincere. For most of high school I worked dishwashing jobs. A typical task for a dishwasher includes picking up trash in the parking lot. People throwing trash in the parking lot weren't doing me or anyone else any favors.
I never heard that one but my mom refused to learn how to use ATMs because she wanted to have tellers. Same with any sort of self-scan groceries. And Oregon is one of two states where you can't pump your own gas.
Do you do that consistently now that you're an adult? Do you bus your own tables at local restaurants (small business owner) but not at franchise restaurants?
It's been a quarter for at least the last 18 years. You'd think with all the inflation that's happened over the years they'd have to increase the deposit at some point.
The coin thing is free too, it's just so people have to put the cart back to collect their coin (usually 1 or 2 euros). I wish we had it in the US, people are freaking idiots and leave carts all over the place in the parking lot.
In germany, paying with hard cash is still very common, having some change is basically the norm (you can also use plastic tokens instead of real coins, you can get those for free from a lot of places here, including the shop themselves, either as promotion or if you ask)
Today for the first time in two months I went to a retailer that was cash only. I haven't carried my wallet with me for two months - I just leave it at home and use Apple Pay for literally everything, including public transport.
But then, I also don't shop at Aldi or need a trolley.
Credit card fees are included in every purchase. I typically end up with 20 to 100 bucks every month. If I use that for travel I get even more. Twenty dollars in cash tends to last me an entire month.
Quite right; my family has a few plastic "coins" that work just as well.
Here in the UK, shopping carts used to take a £1 coin, which incidentally had very similar geometry to the Indian 5 rupee coin (worth about 5 pence) - that was a great little find for our family, who always had a few 5 rupee coins lying around from our time visiting family in India. Sadly they updated the design of the £1 coin, so this trick no longer works.
One thing that enables this to work for Aldi is their parking lots are much smaller than most grocery stores. You're walking maybe 100 ft round trip to return your cart, whereas it could be several hundred feet at larger stores with giant parking lots.
There are a few corrals throughout the parking lot where customers are expected to deposit their carts. The store then has someone who goes around from time to time to retrieve a row of them and push it back to the front of the store. It's often a job given to somebody mentally handicapped who can't do a lot of other things at the store.
Publix gives the job to the bagger/loader, who is usually a friendly person. This person bags your groceries, then offers to take them to your car and help you load them into your car. If you accept the help, then as they return back to the store they bring in the carts.
As others have said, in the US you leave it in the parking lot, hopefully in a cart return thing.
Honestly, having to put a coin in to get a cart would mean I would likely never get a cart. I never pay with cash, and thus I never have coins with me, so I would be limited to whatever I could carry. This is obviously bad for business, so I think businesses just eat the cost of having an employee round up the carts.
Then again, I hate seeing carts everywhere, and sometimes find myself returning a few because they're such a nuisance. If this solves the problem, I might consider leaving a coin in my wallet to shop at Aldi instead of my cart-ridden local grocery store.
Most people in Europe have a coin in their car for this purpose (usually a plastic one that the supermarkets give out). You park and grab the coin before leaving the car, simple.
The alternative, which was current when I was growing up in Germany, was to just have no such mechanism at all. People would just behave.
This thing was introduced in France, because the French customers had another attitude to it and that got extrapolated by the huge French hipermarché concept.
Most of the IKEAs I have been to in Germany don't do this. They have a couple of poorly payed workers who do nothing else all day than collect carts from the parking space.
Tho IKEA works on a different scale compared to most grocers in Germany, their stores are always extremely busy, particularly on Saturdays and they handle a lot bigger wares which means customers having a trolley, sometimes even multiple of them is a more regular occurrence.
With that kind of throughput and the involved logistics of bigger pieces handed out on a trolley at the order counter, introducing the money deposit for the trolleys would massively slow down everything, possibly creating waiting lines at trolley stations as they sometimes happen during busy times at grocers.
At least the employes collecting the carts have electrical little pushing cars, enabling them to push impressively long "snakes" of trolleys.
In the US I have never had to deposit any money to use a cart. I'm not sure how that would even work, is it some automated machine that spits out a cart?
Put a coin in the drawer and close it, the chain of the next cart pops out the back and you can take it. On return, you push the chain back in, the drawer pops open and you get your coin back.
Store employees just occasionally balance cart numbers between the corrals, if there's multiple.
No, it's much simpler than you are probably imagining. The cart locks to the one in front using a short chain with a plug between a device attached to the handlebars of each cart. It comes out of the back of one and locks into the front of the other.
Put a coin(or any coin shaped object) in and a simple mechanic latch releases the chain, plug it back in and you get your coin back.
Theres a coin activated mechanical lock on each cart, carts are stacked and chained together by these locks.
To get one, you insert a coin (or a plastic token - these are usually given away as freebies by many companies if not the stores themselves) and that unlocks the chain.
It's not about the money, no one earns anything from this. It's about putting something that you own (can be worthless, the emotion counts) in the cart which you can only possibly get back if you return the cart to any number of bays on the parking lot or next to the entrance.
The handle of each cart has a lock and a small chain. Initially the carts are stacked inside each other, with the chain locked in the lock of the next cart. If you put a coin (or other round flat object like the handle of a key) into the lock you can remove the chain and use the cart. When you return the cart you insert the chain from another cart and get your coin back. It's a very simple and robust mechanism.
You insert a coin into a slot in the cart, and a chained key releases the cart from the next cart it's chained to. When you want your coin back, you return it to the line of carts, stack it and then insert the key from the next cart into yours. Your coin is released and the store doesn't have to pay someone to collect them.
It's similar to the "SmartECart" luggage cart kiosks you may have seen at airports. Sliding a cart in locks it in place on a set of rails, depositing the money releases a mechanical catch on the end, allowing you to pull one cart out.
Trader Joe's has a yellow line beyond which you are not supposed to take your cart. I was always wondering how this works so I pushed a cart behind the line. It immediately
locked its wheels so it got stuck there. I guess some employee knows how to unlock these carts.
Usually there are return bays spread throughout the carpark where you can theoretically return trolleys/carts and they'll be taken back en-masse by a store employee later.
Often this results in them being left all over the place or stolen though.
In most supermarkets in the US you just leave your cart in the parking lot after you load up your trunk. They have people who then come and collect the carts.
No it's a common courtesy to put them in a coral or return them to the entrance (if it's a small lot). You aren't supposed just leave them in the parking lot just drift and bang into people's cars and block spaces. That's just lazy.
In my experience, people leave their carts in the designated spot, mostly well nested. And a store clerk has to come out for about 5 minutes to bring them back every hour or so.
I don't feel like that amount of labor is a tremendous cost for the supermarket.
I worked at at supermarket when I was young. Even when people left the carts in the best possible locations, it was still way more than 5 minutes per hour that we spent out there. Sometimes 2 of us would spent 10 minutes each per hour, but more likely one of us would be our there for 20-30 minutes per hour, especially during busy times.
And that's when the cart collectors were being quick and not just out there fooling around.
In addition, if things got busy inside and we forgot to collect carts for a while, we'd run out and customers would get upset that they didn't have a cart to use. This was especially likely during rain when no customers would return carts or bring carts on their way in.
Yes. Essentially every traditional Walmart and Target store in the US does it that way, regardless of high employment and minimum wage.
Walmart as one example has a motorized cart mover. The employee collects and stacks the carts into a line, backed by the motorized unit, and then can just gently guide the whole flock of carts and it moves along with little human effort. It enables the employee to move dozens of carts at a time across the parking lot without very much physical risk of injury.
> -they have barcode on 5 or 6 sides of their products, and they're typically huge! They nearly never need to orient a product to scan it. Their scan speed is far faster than any other supermarket I've been at.
On a historical note (I am old enough to have shopped before bar codes existed):
Generally stores had little price tags attached to every single item. Which was labour intensive twice: First someone has to attach the tag to each item and at the checkout it needs to be found somewhere on the product, read and the price to be entered into the cash register.
With only 1000 products (back then, IIRC) and no weekly offers at all it took only 2-3 days for a new cashier to learn all prices by heart and easy for the store to skip the stickers altogether and just mark the price at the shelf. Typing prices without having to search for a tiny little sticker somewhere on the product was super fast and efficient compared to the competitors. Cashiers just dropped the product into the cart with one hand and typed with the other.
Aldi introduced bar code scanners several years after the "full assortment" competition. At some point probably the better inventory book-keeping started to outweigh the costs.
(Edit: clarified that Aldi had no price stickers at all)
There's a store called Bulk Barn here in Canada where cashiers still do this. Everything is sold in bulk (flour, nuts, candy, etc.) out of giant tubs with scoops, that customers use to fill clear, unlabelled bags. The cashiers have this spinning cylinder thing that lists all the prices, but I've never seen them use it. Instead, they plop each bag on the scale and type in the code, which takes two seconds each.
I don't know how they tell the difference between all the generic powders that look the same, like white flour and rice flour, but they do. And if they don't, I suppose they just ask the customer.
Aldi cashiers didn't type the prices but numbers for the products. The register would lookup the prices. Cashiers would quickly punch those numbers in without picking up the items for many items and then swoop 5 to 10 items over the register part of the counter at once. I think Aldi held on to the system longer because it was indeed more efficient than scanning. But there is a limit on how fast one can bag the items, so I guess a little inefficiency can be tolerated.
Not in the 1970s and early 80s. Do you know what computers costed back then? 1 KB of memory was as expensive as the whole cash register used by Aldi/Lidl. And there was no computer networking whatsoever, not even between multi-million super computers. When the German railways introduced computers at the ticket windows in the 80s all ticketing data was stored on 8 inch diskettes. And if you bought a not so common ticket the agent had to swap the diskette first.
I don't think Aldi/Lidl used diskettes at their cash registers. Maybe when scanning started in the mid/late eighties, but they certainly didn't have to swap during the day.
The article critical piece of the old scheme is tar before computers, no one had a use for tracking whether the correct price was actually charged. And thanks to inflation, the range of possible prices was smaller.
As an admitted traditionalist concerned more about consumer comfort than company, some of these are the reason I don't and wont shop at Aldi. It's funny because depending on who you talk to, some of the same things that are seen as inconveniences to some are seen as beneficial to others. It's also funny to watch some of the same people laud inconveniences in one company and bemoan some of the same inconveniences in another.
I find it hard to shop at Aldi because of the almost brutal aesthetic. No signage, no colors, no nice lighting, just industrial meta shelves on an industrial floor with bare fluorescent lights overhead and everything jammed together. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
I will however still occasionally run in because although they run out quick almost every day, when they have grass-fed meat and some organic veggies, they are about twice as cheap as any other retailer around here has them for.
Depending on where you’re from and how impoverished you were, being able to go to a store full of food, putting one or more of a large sample in your cart, and only pay at the very end, can be quite an “experience”.
I’ve observed that this effect can last for decades if your formative years didn’t involve enough food.
Also a lot of restaurants run by (and mostly for) immigrants. They aren't into fancy decor with statues and paintings from the appropriate country the way ones aimed at Westerners tend to be. Cheap tables covered by plastic tablecloths and folding metal chairs work just fine.
True but even that tends to be driven by a certain 'idea' of authenticity - look at all the restuarants in here that would like to upgrade the decor and food (and prices!) but immediately get dinged as 'in-authentic' when they make those changes
There's a middle ground between a fancy luxury market and flickering green-tinged fluorescent bulbs that always make you feel slightly ill. Signage & organization also serves a function aside from "experience".
> they combine varieties (like flavors of granola bars) of product in the same box. This greatly reduces the shelf space required.
I don't understand how this reduces shelf space, but there are no Aldi stores anywhere near here (nearest is 804.18 miles away, according to their store locator) so maybe I'm not understanding what they are doing. All I've got for comparison are the variety packs that manufactures often sell at the stores we have here (Walmart, Safeway, etc).
For example, if a bar comes in 3 flavors, and is sold in boxes of 6, a box takes up the same space if it has 2 of each flavor or 6 of one flavor.
The box they are talking about is the box that comes from the factory. By mixing all of the flavours you only need the shelf space of one box. They place more boxes behind that one.
If they needed one for each flavour, then they would need three boxes, side by side taking up three times as much space.
And for some reason, stores rarely have an online system for checking inventory. I really don't understand that, because it's literally the main reason I go to a given store, and it's already digitized so it wouldn't cost them much.
The only time I've done that in the current century is to confirm holiday hours when not made explicit on the web. eg. If it's New Year's, "are you open today, what time will you close?"
If the store is clever they will leave a pre-recorded message announcing holiday hours.
If you are picking up catering from say Whole Foods, being able to call is essential. Also helps a lot to call and see if X item is out of stock that is almost always out of stock.
Calling is handy to ask what price an item is and whether it's in stock, or order something prepared by the deli or bakery that you want on a certain date/time.
So much of that is standard in Ontario (or all of Canada, I don't know). I hate coins for carts. I don't carry currency. Now I have to carry coins. Also they're irritating to handle while also handling my kids. Finally, they make me feel untrusted. Because some classless people walk home with carts and dump them in a ditch, I'm no-longer trusted not to do the same.
You forgot another important bit: the pickup area after their conveyor belt is one of the shortest out there, which forces customers to pack in a hurry so as to keep up with how fast the cashier is going.
Speaking for myself, it's the part that annoys me most when I shop at one. I get why they designed their POS it, but it's just obnoxious for the elderly and for parents with by small children.
It would seem simple enough to solve, too: just add two such areas.
> It would seem simple enough to solve, too: just add two such areas.
Many (most?) Australian Aldis have that -- each cashier has two 'lanes' they can run groceries down after scanning, and customers alternate between the two.
I don't have Aldi where I live, but we do have a place called WinCo. At WinCo, there are two conveyer belts after the cashier, and the cashier switches which conveyer belt to use by switching a gate. So, once you pay, you go over to your conveyer belt and bag up your purchase, and the stuff from the next customer goes to the other side.
It works pretty well and I actually prefer to reload myself, as opposed to other stores that have someone there to bag for you.
I've been to quite a few Aldis and the flow in all of them is that the items get scanned and immediately placed in a cart, then there's a separate bagging area (a large counter along the wall near the exit door, a couple feet across from the cashier section) to actually move the items from your cart into your bags however you please. Are there Aldi stores which don't work like this? I can't imagine trying to bag fast enough to keep up with the cashiers...
In all countries I've seen, except the U.S., Aldi cashiers move items into a small buffer area, and the customer then transfers them back into their cart, in sync with the cashier. In some non-German countries (e.g. UK), customers often don't cooperate or are slower than the cashier, which reduces efficiency. The U.S. system is different, where the cashier directly pushes items into the cart, and also there seems to be a weird cart-switch going on, where you get the cart of the person who used to be in front of you. My guess is that Aldi couldn't educate U.S. customers that they have to work in sync with the cashier, and then they came up with this solution.
My thought is that, although much of this is common sense, retailers have largely lost the will to live. They waste a lot of money on typical corporate money pits, but tend not to try improving the retail business itself. From what I gather in what people say, having only been to one Aldi before (so I don't really have enough experience to say much); I think Aldi has bucked the trend, and is trying to do a good job, and that is why they are succeeding.
> depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
I've seen Americans remark specifically about shopping cart deposits a couple of times on Hacker News; I never thought there was anything special about it.
I think the vast majority of retailers and grocers who offer shopping carts, in the three Canadian provinces I've lived in, use coin deposits for shopping carts.
They still end up in rivers and alleyways on occasion, usually stolen by vagrants and hooligans, but the customers at least tend to comply.
The coin thing is psychological. If you want to avoid carrying bags by hand, melt it for scrap, push your friends around, or get to your car 2 minutes faster, foregoing a quarter is great value.
Unfortunately for them/me, if I’m coming by chance by bicycle, I usually don’t have a coin and reduce my shopping to the necessities without a cart.
When you feel the weight of each item, you think more about every item you buy.
I don't have a coin ever because I never use cash. Requiring a coin deposit would just discourage me from getting a cart most days. If I regularly shopped there, maybe I'd consider putting one in my wallet or something to guarantee I have one, but I'd have to be sold on the place first.
Requiring a coin is a hardship, especially in a plastic-oriented culture.
If you go ask at the service desk they tend to give out special branded cart-coins for free, they come with a little quick disconnect hook for on your keychain.[0] It's still cheaper for the stores to do that than to hire a specific person to gather carts.
>depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
Years ago when I read the bit in Freakonomics about the daycare that instituted an additional charge for picking kids up late to discourage the practice but found that the rate of late pickups increased instead because parents felt like they were paying for the service of extra daycare thus alleviating the guilt, I immediately thought of Aldi carts. Do Aldi carts get stolen more per use than Price Cutter carts because people have to pay a quarter for them? I know that's both not what the quarter is for and not what it is attempting to discourage, and I'm not claiming it necessarily does have this effect... I just wonder if people can somehow rationalise taking carts easier when they have to pay something for it.
I've seen it work! If I hadn't, I might question it. My comment wasn't wondering whether there are more carts left in the parking lot of an Aldi or a Price Cutter, it was wondering if more carts get taken off property entirely and used for other purposes. If that's your goal, a quarter is pretty negligible. Years ago I worked at motel near an Aldi and a WalMart, and saw a good number of both companies' carts left in the parking lot. More WalMart carts, for sure, but they also get more traffic. I used Price Cutter as an example instead of WalMart because I think some people have a special hatred for that particular company that might make stealing from a WalMart easier to rationalise for other reasons (I'm not making a value judgement about that, just stating it as something I've anecdotally observed).
Putting aside your classism and focusing on the observation of human behavior, I've seen people do this who regularly used the same stolen cart to get groceries (sometimes from different stores). I've also seen people use a cart to get their food back home and then just leave it nearby without the intent of further ownership, even bringing more carts from the same store and putting them more-or-less next to each other rather than push an empty cart back to the grocery store.
> they have barcode on 5 or 6 sides of their products, and they're typically huge! They nearly never need to orient a product to scan it. Their scan speed is far faster than any other supermarket I've been at
Scan speed is never a bottleneck of a checkout process. Packing and payment are. They might be saving millisecond on scan time, but the paper and printing of a label cost money too. Not sure if it’s the best showcase of efficiency here
> depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
It also makes people not want to go there if they don’t have spare change. And if they go without a cart, they will definitely spend less
> It also makes people not want to go there if they don’t have spare change.
Aldi doesn't have a membership fee, but it has a culture and following akin to Costco or Trader Joe's. It works for some people, but not for others. The barrier to entry isn't that big, it's just a bit different.
>Scan speed is never a bottleneck of a checkout process. Packing and payment are. They might be saving millisecond on scan time, but the paper and printing of a label cost money too. Not sure if it’s the best showcase of efficiency here
I entirely disagree with this point in the context of grocery stores. Convenience stores I'm likely to agree because people typically buy a couple items and the payment time is effectively identical to that of a grocery store.
I should look up metrics to see if it's tracked, but the scan speed makes a huge difference! They don't bag at Aldi at all, when they're checking out, the employee is pulling a cart around, scanning, or waiting for payment to process. I can pretty much guarantee they process more customers per hour and can complete more scans per minute than any other grocer in the US.
The marginal cost of printing barcode is effectively 0. They are already printing the packaging and black and white are always on the color palette for the single barcode.
One more item I forgot to list above is that they print their receipts one line at a time, so you never wait to have your 3 ft receipt printed after your payment is processed. They do a great job at eliminating the non-value added tasks in the entire store, cross training employees, and reducing overhead.
On the topic of printing receipts: the cheapest models of receipt printers are capable of spitting out half a foot of receipt every second, so even if you did wait until after scanning to print the receipt it'll hardly take more time than it takes customers to pick up their stuff anyways.
>It also makes people not want to go there if they don’t have spare change.
I think it fits the philosophy. They aim at customers that have a mindset to go out and save. They are prepared. They're willing to work a bit to save money, but hope to compromise a bit less on quality.
I believe they also source their own branded items from multiple vendors to avoid lock in. If one fails to deliver, they have another source. Keeps everyone one their toes at all times.
I wonder if one can pin a camera on the ceiling looking down at the conveyor belt, scanning all barcodes at once? Better than doing them manually one by one. If every box has barcodes on every side it should be possible for the software, knowing the size of the box, to get an idea if everything was scanned correctly or if an item had the barcode obscured. Maybe 2-3 cameras under different angles.
Cameras are cheap, and recognition software scales well.
There is a European sports store called decathlon that uses RFID. Put a tennis racket, running shoes, football, horse bridle, socks, ski goggles, bike tyre etc (they sell everything you can think of) in your basket, go to the till, place the basket in a blue outline at the till and it reads everything in your basket immediately. No scanning!
I was really impressed. I did some prototyping with RFID a few years back and reading multiple cards in unpredictable positions (e.g. overlapping, side-on) was quite challenging but looks like decathlon have worked it out.
It's also great for returns. Their backpacks have 10 year warranties. When I returned one, they were able scan the RFID to get all the details up and refund me.
Is checkout speed really limiting factor in grocery store growth though? Like are people that sensitive to the few extra minutes (at most) at the checkout counter they'll switch where they shop?
I personally can't see myself switching from my local store even if it takes like 3 more minutes to check out. Maybe I'm just lucky though to think it's 3 minutes extra at most?...
You don't speed up checkout because people care about faster checkout, you speed up checkout because people care about lower prices and faster checkout reduces fixed costs, or increases revenues allowing you to lower prices.
If checkout lines are supply constrained (eg. there are always lines) then increasing speed increases throughput which increases revenues.
If checkout lines aren't supply constrained (eg. there are empty checkout lines) then you can reduce the number of open lines without increasing wait times, reducing your headcount and driving down your labor costs. If you lower your labor costs you reduce your semi-variable costs and you can keep the same contribution margin and lower prices.
> Is checkout speed really limiting factor in grocery store growth though? Like are people that sensitive to the few extra minutes (at most) at the checkout counter they'll switch where they shop?
Have ever been inside a walmart? There's only ever like 2 checkouts open and massive lines, that's a long time to stand there.
Waiting in line at the grocery store I thought was one of the most common annoyances people have?
-their conveyor belt is far longer than most stores. You should be able to get your entire cart worth of groceries on the conveyor at once. This minimizes the slowness of people handing one item at a time to the next checker.
As others have pointed out, this isn't particularly innovative: this is the norm in large European supermarkets, regardless of brand.
One other thing you didn't mention is that they don't accept credit cards. Debit or cash only, to avoid the extra fees. Although I've heard this may have changed recently, but at least for a while all the ones I went to never accepted credit cards (now I sadly don't live near one).
All cashiers sit in Europe, at least in the countries I've seen. But there were quite some scandals of how Lidl (not Aldi) handles toilet breaks and humiliates women cashiers on their period by having them wear bracelets so the manager knows they are allowed a little more toilet breaks.
> I haven't seen the number pad used extensively at any other grocer.
The thing I do see at HEB is they'll scan the same item n times when they see I have n of the same thing, so they do effect roughly the same efficiency. They might not as intelligently differentiate the packaging, though.
decades ago there was a story, how the shelves at aldi looked cheaper, but where actually more expensive, and just gave the impression of looking cheap. in hindsight, i now think that while true, those shelves are probably also more efficient to use (allowing them to put up products in their boxes, hold more weight, etc)
aldi was also selling products for less than what they paid for. this is common practice in some places but in germany it's actually illegal, and they had to stop that.
Here's a fun fact to add to the mix: Aldi's gin is one of the best in the world, and cheap to boot. And they're pretty good at various other spirits and beverages too. Do they carry those in the US?
I've never successfully purchased anything at aldi. Generally what happens is I'll walk in, grab what I want, proceed to the checkout, notice that there's only one register with at least 10 people in line and I'll drop whatever it is I went in to get and leave. I can't be bothered to wait that long to save 14 cents on eggs.
On the other hand my wife goes there somewhat frequently and is able to buy things in a reasonable amount of time so maybe it's just me.
I'm my experience if there's a long line of people like that they are great about opening another line. I've had that experience at multiple Aldi stores so maybe yours was just understaffed or something.
Didn't you save time on finding the eggs? I shop at Aldi and Lidl, not for the low prices but for the convenience of getting what I want and getting out quickly.
Scales to weigh fruit/veg? No at leas not in Germany. The scales are built into the barcode scanner of the register. They only have scales so you can double check when you are shopping.
I assume you're vegan, you don't own a car, you never travel by airplane, you don't use heating or air conditioning, you only take cold showers, you wear your clothes until they're worn out beyond repair, etc. When somebody takes environmentalism that seriously, it might actually make sense to worry about a few grams of plastic.
1. Plastic bags often don’t really get destroyed, but get shipped to poor countries and land in the ocean.
2. Paper bags or boxes do the job as well, unless you are driving home your stuff through a long walk under rain or bike. But pedestrians and bikers usually have enough bag capacity with them.
I’m only using plastic bags every couple months, because I know keep bags and boxes in my car trunk. Easy, 0 impact for me.
Well, the problem with plastic bags is that when I need them, I usually don't have the last trip ones. If I prepare for my shopping, I don't take the plastic bags because I prefer my cloth bag.
My sister has worked in Aldi in the UK for 15 years. She loves it.
She started as a normal member of staff - they expect people to pitch in - you're on the checkout, moving boxes, helping deliveries, etc. Nobody is immune from having to do work.
She's now an Area Manager and still pitches in when visiting a store - she doesn't walk around with a clipboard, she helps the staff to do their job.
The wages are so much better than other supermarkets in the UK, but they expect you to work for them. Our local Aldi has been closed for 5 months while they rebuild it. I miss it so much. The Tesco nearby is far more expensive and has staff just chatting. The Lidl is more austere but is more efficient and cheaper. As soon as it opens again i'll be doing 90% of my shop there.
I was running a table at a graduate fair for my company and stood opposite the Aldi grad scheme guys. The grad salary ofter 5 years (if you are accepted on the programme) was great (£75k) and they expected you to be managing multiple stores in an area. They had quite a queue of students.
I find it so weird how in the UK and much of the rest of europe, store managers and lots of blue collar jobs get paid so much more than software developers, even at large companies.
No, I live in the US. But from what I've heard about software engineer salaries in the UK, even at most large multinationals (except only Google?), it seems someone with 5 yoe as a store manager at Aldis in the UK makes (afaik) more than basically every software engineer with 5 yoe in the UK
I don't see why an area manager for Aldi stores shouldn't be getting paid a lot of money. It's not exactly an unskilled job, it just doesn't require extensive qualifications. You're managing large numbers of employees over several different stores.
Some days I feel bad about how much money I make as a software engineer. It's an easy job. All I do is sit at a computer and write some code for a few hours a day. I don't have to manage employees or stock or anything like that, I just listen to music and hammer away at a keyboard.
Maybe it’s easy for you and many HN readers, but it’s hard for the average person. There aren’t many people that understand how to program, and there are much fewer who understand how to program well.
At my tech company of around 30 people, even the most technically inclined employees don’t really understand programming. And I think my developer colleague is in the category that cannot program well. (I would optimistically say that I can.)
Well their jobs are typically "easier" for values of hours worked and overtime expectation and holidays given plus really nice things in close walking distance. the quality of life is better and the money paid equals out. Living in the US is harsh in comparison in my experience
Most of the stuff they're doing seems to be entirely commonplace for the supermarket chains we have here in Norway.
The coins for the carts.
Stacking crates instead of individual items.
Training every employee for everything (it's not uncommon to see a store manager operating the cash register).
Expecting customers to fill their own bags and charging for those bags.
Smaller selection.
The only unique part seems to be the tendency to promote the shop's own brand over name brands.
On a related note: Lidl tried and failed to get a foothold here in Norway with similar tactics. It didn't work. Perhaps because our mainstream store chains are already so similar to Lidl, except our domestic chains offer actual name brand products and the Lidl stores didn't, and I think that's why they failed. Also, people who are really desperate to save money can just go to Sweden to shop. It's not a very long drive.
It helps if you just imagine that every large brick and mortar chain in the Nordic countries operates kind of like IKEA. Lots of self service, spartan shop interior, and also, since labour is expensive here and you can't fuck your employees over with low wages like you can elsewhere, store owners tend to want to cut down on the number of staff.
There is no minimum wage, but salaries are bargained for via collective agreements. So everywhere but the smallest shops and temporary jobs you get paid a decent wage.
The Nordic countries are not big on service, because you're a big boy and can take care of yourself. The reason IKEA came from Sweden is because that's the attitude here. Shop clerks aren't there to be your servants. They are your equals. Foreigners often complain of the awful service they get here, but it's a deliberate part of the working culture.
>Shop clerks aren't there to be your servants. They are your equals.
I love that attitude. I've always felt a bit weird in very high end establishments where the staff are overly deferential.
> Foreigners often complain of the awful service they get here
In addition to your point, I think this also has something to do with people from Nordic countries being a less likely to smile at strangers than people from smiling cultures.
One time when I was the last customer to shop before closing (yes, our stores close over night) a store employee bagged my groceries while I payed for them. It felt extremely awkward and I felt embarrassed and didn't know what to do. So I just stood there, watching as somebody else packed my stuff, smiled, said thank you, and left feeling really weird. I don't know how other people do it regularly.
Hmm.. It is not that we dont care about service. It is more about what kind of service you can get. If you go to IKEA and say ”Hey, I am a student what is the best sofa for my budget?” they will help you find something without upselling you. If they cant help you find something they will usually refer you to OTHER stores. Service is more than just being a slave to the customer.
I've actually experienced much better service at aldi/hofer and ikea than at other stores in europe. Staff are very happy to help answer questions and track down hard to find items.
> On a related note: Lidl tried and failed to get a foothold here in Norway with similar tactics. It didn't work. Perhaps because our mainstream store chains are already so similar to Lidl, except our domestic chains offer actual name brand products and the Lidl stores didn't, and I think that's why they failed.
I don't think that sounds like the most likely reason. I have seen Lidl's arrival to Finland. And at least with respect to prices Norway and Finland are very similar, namely exorbitantly expensive if you compare to central Europe.
Also in Finland price competition did not use to be very fierce. They are only few players and it was an unwritten agreement that business is more comfortable to do without any price wars, consumers pay...
So when Lidl came there was massive pressure on suppliers not to sell to Lidl. If you sell to Lidl (with initially some 20-30 stores) you will not sell to us any longer (with many hundreds of stores). For several years Lidl had to ship nearly every product from central Europe. Which was not only expensive, but also were the products partly exotic to the consumers. For me as German living in Finland Lidl was better than the finest specialty shop, lots of products you could not buy anywhere else and very cheap. After a couple of years the supplier boycott started to fade away, consumer acceptance grew and my specialty shop was no longer :(
Could it have been a similar story in Norway?
Finland was also hit hard by a recession from 2008 - 2017. I understand Norway was doing much better these years and salaries are high. So the demand for low price options might have not been so wide-spread, making their market entry even more difficult.
Without knowing it exactly I have an idea that Norway might be a harder nut to crack because it is outside the EU and some rules don't apply there. I seem to remember something like a butter (?) crisis over there some time ago. That could never happen in a country that has fluent trade with its neighbors.
> Without knowing it exactly I have an idea that Norway might be a harder nut to crack because it is outside the EU and some rules don't apply there.
Norway is a member of the common market, it is said to be the most integrated non-member. Aldi/Lidl seem to be successful in Australia, USA, and Switzerland so I don't think EU membership is a requirement for their business model to succeed. Without being an expert in the field, I'd say it's more important to find the right balance between the aggressive company model and some local practices you better do not attack. Some local managements seem to be better to find the right middle ground than others. As also mentioned in the article Walmart failed in Germany. But Mc Donald's or Ikea haven't, so it can't be generally impossible in Germany.
However, being a member of the EU inner market does not apply for agriculture in the case of Norway. I guess this means if you have are sourcing frozen french fries you can get them on the EU market, but potatoes you need to source locally or pay potential customs. But I am not sure how the border line between agriculture and everything else belonging to the common market is actually defined. Nor do I know how relevant customs on agriculture are.
> I seem to remember something like a butter (?) crisis over there some time ago. That could never happen in a country that has fluent trade with its neighbors.
France had a butter crisis in 2017. Your search engine will bring up many articles. But France is in the common EU agriculture market and France is in the Euro. So I don't think your argument really holds. Whether Norway had a any butter crisis is beyond my knowledge.
yes, reading this article as European (that never visited the US) was a weirding experience. I lived in 4 different countries in Europe, and that's exactly how every supermarket work.
And to be fair, I thought that every supermarket in the world worked like that...
Can you imagine when the Americans will find automatic counters instead of cashiers? :)
Self check-out seems even more common in the US than in many European countries.
No offense, but it sounds like you need to travel more if you assume that businesses everywhere work like in a few European countries. Consider the vast differences in many Asian countries, to start.
If the automatic checkout counters even look like they have a scale I won't waste my time. Not once have I made it out without the machine requiring an override, no matter how carefully I place and scan items. Thankfully it seems the scales are becoming less common.
If I'm physically able to do it, would otherwise need to wait longer to get through a cashier line, and don't have anything else to do with my time while waiting in the cashier line it seems like it's to my benefit to use the self-checkout on principle. It saves me time and costs me virtually nothing.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Scandinavians are big on DIY and minimalism, and not big on service. This is a common complaint from foreigners who visit, but it's the working culture here. You, the customer, a a big boy and can take care of yourself.
I mean... that may be the attitude, but that doesn't make it good.
The last time I went to IKEA, their website had said they had 50+ of an item in stock, but there were 0 where it was supposed to be. I had to spend 10 minutes with an employee for them to find where the entire box had been misplaced by another employee, in another aisle.
When employees mess up (which is very common, we're all human), you can't take care of yourself. You need another employee to fix it. It has nothing to do with being a "big boy".
Based on my experience that's pretty standard for european grocery stores. No cashier in Europe is ever going to bag your groceries.
Despite bagging your own groceries being a universal experience I haven't yet seen a local properly use a self-serve checkout kiosk. Instead of scanning an item and putting it in a bag on the weighing platform they instead scan the items and put them on the weighing platform, then pay, then put the items in the cart, move the cart towards the store exit and then bag their groceries.
I tried to, but it's impossible to resist temptation to rearrange stuff in the bags on weighing platform. The machine then seizes with complaint about unexpected stuff in bagging area. So I gave up on that.
The first two times I used the self-serve kiosk the machine complained constantly about unexpected stuff, and I noticed that I had placed my bags up to the edge of the platform. Now I place them in the middle of the platform and the machine seems happy. Either that or the store adjusted the sensitivity on the machines, hope that helps.
After my first experiences with the "bag-as-you-go" strategy causing the weighting platform to lose track of items I've scanned I gave up on that. Placing on the scales directly simply works more reliably.
Here in Sweden stores have started to switch to self scan without scales. Cheaper to buy, uses less space and no nuisance for the customers.
Or even better the stores that do self scan with a hand held scanner, just walk around continously bagging in your cart, put the barcode scanner in the holder when you exit and pay with NFC.
I just did that a few hours ago. It somehow feels like playing Frogger and Tetris at the same time, and I'm having trouble managing the multitasking. At least when the cashier does the scanning, you still have a bit of time to plan how to divide the load over the too few bags you took up front.
I guess I'm a weirdo who likes shopping there. Compared to Kroger or HEB I usually walk out of Aldi with a bill 50% cheaper than the other stores. We have our own bags and a picnic like basket thing we keep in the truck for Aldi stops. Yes it's "generic" but my uncle worked for a big food company that made big brand food and "generic" is often just a label change over the brand name. I can see why the rich people would think it's like shopping for food at the salvation army. No selection, a quarter to get a cart, 4-6 isles, no in car delivery, you have to bag your stuff yourself. I'll take all of those inconveniences if it means I spend 50% less per trip to the grocery store to feed us.
the crazy part about Aldi isn't just their food prices but the odd things that just show up dirt cheap. An example, a full 10x10 Gazebo that you assemble. Not with cheap like poles for full on L corners and netting. It was under $150 and just blows away stuff twice or more.
The order of pricing in my area is Aldi < Wal Mart < Target/Kroger/Publix < Drug Stores. What Wal Mart is in pricing to Kroger/Publix/etc Aldi is to Wal Mart. H Though to be honest, Aldi's brand of cinnamon rolls in the refrigerated section are amazing. The pricing on fruit, like a pint of strawberries and such is just so confusing, their price is nearly half of what the big box grocery chains it just seems that no one can profit off of it.
So usually for us its Aldi when we are near for the basics, Wal Mart for some name brands, and old retail for BOGOs. Yet for many it is the luxury of time which gives you opportunity to shop around
I spent ages ignoring the aisle of crap for being so cheap it clearly can't be any good. Then one year we found some sleeping bags for £10 or £12. Bought one and it turned out to be better made and designed than "proper" outdoor brands selling for £40 or £60. So went back for another before the offer switched. They're lasting much longer than the brands ever have too.
We've had some absurdly priced bargains in the years since.
Tesco and Asda (Walmart) have own-brands that cost more and are consistently simply crap, and to be avoided. So you learned to mostly avoid them, unless broke. Sure, Aldi do a few things badly, and a few things to avoid, but mostly they cured us of any remaining interest in preferring brand names over supermarket's own. So many brands got bought and became rubbish themselves anyway. The tiny few we do care for still, Aldi seem to stock.
Yours is a fascinating anecdote in the history of private labeling, which originated in the U.K. recession in the early 80’s wherein retailers began store brands to lower prices out of necessity to keep customer loyalty.
Having spent the last 4 years in sourcing, I can say I am excited to try store brands because I know most of the time marquee brands are more expensive because of their unit cost of marketing. I strongly speculate this is the main reason for Kraft Heinz’s struggles.
I forgot that's what kicked store brands off in the first place.
> unit cost of marketing. I strongly speculate this is the main reason for Kraft Heinz’s struggles
Accidentally so revealing: Kraft have aimed a bullet carefully and precisely at themselves, Heinz are indistinguishable from Aldi and have nothing unique to offer but expense.
Asda and Tesco own brands were always how not to do it, or almost do it. Corn flakes that had the wrong texture or were somehow too thick or hard, always with the odd burnt one. Beans that had the wrong texture or were again too hard, bread somehow devoid of flavour and texture, biscuits that had as much grit as crunch. They weren't nice, they were for students and other times of being poverty stricken. Sainsbury's managed a bit better.
Own brand beans or sauce were easy and instant to distinguish - the taste was wrong, the texture was wrong, they tasted of cheap cafe and poverty, even as they got the sugar content as equally insane. I simply can't tell the difference between Aldi and Heinz at all, even the beans with sausages. Aldi beans are stupidly cheap - 25p a tin or something, and far cheaper than Tesco, Asda and Heinz up near £1 a tin. The sauce is as cheap. There is simply no point Heinz existing.
Kraft take over Cadbury's and immediately set about ruining it - closing the factory they promised to keep open, within weeks of takeover. Throwing away Green and Black's Fair Trade element. Changing Cadbury's recipe so it has that greasy cheap American choc texture and doesn't taste or feel like chocolate any more. Reducing sizes and proportion of chocolate in choc bars and snacks. Then lying that they did none of these - and being easily proved to be lying each time - usually with viral social media photographs. I think half the UK is boycotting them to one degree or another. The degree of UK resentment they have achieved is comical.
Aldi start to make chocolate that tastes as Cadbury used to. Just about perfectly. For 90p! While Kraft not-Cadbury-any-more charge nearly £2 for comparable size. I mostly prefer Aldi's "posher" choc, but every now and then I need that childhood Cadbury fix. That's now only available from Aldi and not at all from Kraft Mondolez's often Polish made, Cadbury-in-name-only. Go figure.
They don't always manage. They admitted defeat after years trying to match taste and texture of KitKat, their Swiss muesli is an inconsistent poor substitute. They have never done British tea very well. Of the few brands in Aldi and Lidl PG and Yorkshire tea were among the first.
As final example of completely missing the point, Tesco responded to Aldi and Lidl's runaway success in the UK by launching their own discounter "Jack's". Not by suddenly trying to match quality, but by taking a distinct step down from their own-label brands, and so arriving at impossibly cheap and nasty. They were immediately ridiculed by most of the media and panned for awful goods. How could they possibly think this was the Aldi/Lidl USP? They will fail hard.
The upmarket own brands in Tesco are good. Usually cheaper than the brand name but made with proper ingredients, like Pesto made with olive oil rather than sunflower oil.
It is interesting how brands have just completely hollowed themselves out through milking profits and producing at substandard quality. If a brand doesn’t stand for quality what does it stand for? Many have gone for nostalgia and marketing, and they will die as a result.
Yeah some of those Finest and Taste the Difference were great. Often much nicer than brands. One or other produced the only shop bought cake I ever encountered with a taste and texture of home-made.
Amazing there ended up so much space beneath brands there could be 3 or 4 (with organic) distinct ranges of own brands.
I've bought two pairs of boots from Aldi - one pair about a decade ago and are still my favourite pair, and another steel-toecapped safety shoe that I wear whenever I need to go to one of our manufacturing sites. Super comfy. And I think they were about £20 a piece.
I bought a warm reflective work safety jacket from Aldi a few weeks ago -- I've been wearing it while commuting on bike, it's great. Warm, high quality materials, cost about AUD 30.
This week my local Aldi is doing a big sale on snow gear as we approach snow season -- I expect the store will be crazy with people trying to fit out the entire family with new ski jackets, etc.
A few years ago my dad and I got hiking backpacks from Aldi, as well as "hydration packs" and light cycling bags for a grand total of about $50 for the two of us. We promptly took the hiking packs and water bladders with us to the Philmont BSA reservation, and they held up just fine.
We bought some more the next time they were available, and they were even better than the first generation. I love those backpacks.
Ha,my dad is obsessed with Aldi for this reason. He'll come home with say 50 rolls of dental floss or 12 jars of marmalade as they were on sale one week, knowing they wouldn't be available again potentially for months.
The article does cover all these points about well-off people shopping there, too. In fact, it points out that "Aldi’s core shopper tends to make more money and have a slightly higher education level than the overall grocery shopper".
Yes, I don't know if that's a German thing somehow exported with it, but here in Germany ALDI was always one of the places that was somehow classless, where you could meet anyone from the chancellor to bank executives to someone scraping by, everybody likes cheap and quick shopping I guess.
Their streamlined checkout is the secret. Much better than waiting 10 minutes in line at Wal-Mart for the privilege of checking yourself out and then exiting past the "greeter" who assumes you're a thief.
That and consistent placement that isn't constantly rearranging the whole store or order on shelves based on which brands they want to push hardest this week. Nor having 244 brands of everything competing for attention. You can load the things you do want so much faster. We mostly know exactly where stuff is going to be - as it's always been there.
Sure it breaks sometimes when they add new items, or switch in the Xmas range, but compared to the majors - very rarely.
Hmm, more like 25% cheaper, imo. But I guess it depends what you need to buy and if you go after sales/specials and what not. Aldi does have great prices, for sure.
I still love HEB though. Their bakery section is amazing (especially the fresh warm tortillas), their produce and meat is excellent, and the prices are still pretty good. HEB also has prices online with specific aisle locations for many products (was helpful when looking for frozen yuca/cassava a bit ago).
It is funny how a person's geography can shape what the view of a normal life is. I read that thinking, "In-car delivery? What the hell?" But the comment indicates matter of factly that rich people will find the lack of this to be like shopping at Salvation Army.
The US is the epitome of bullshit, bureaucratic jobs. Medical billing, for example, is someone taking the list of procedures a medical office performs and plugs that into a computer so that the "codes" the office uses can match the "codes" the healthcare provider uses.
I know what you're thinking, that describes a LUT (lookup table). Yes, you would be correct, a LUT is an actual profession in the USA.
I’ve never encountered an example of a real “bullshit job” (but have encountered a lot of ignorance about what different jobs entail.) Dealing with medical billing codes is not just a table lookup. It’s actually quite fuzzy and some judgment is required because the codes don’t match 1:1. (Not does the procedure the doctor actually did match perfectly to any code.) (And you can be criminally prosecuted for not doing it correctly if you’re talking about Medicare or Medicaid.)
Grocery bagging, likewise, is hardly a bullshit job. I shop at whole foods precisely so I don’t have to bag my own groceries. (And a good bagger can do it far better than I can.)
In my experience they’re faster, pack the bags with less wasted space (but not heavily, just good at fitting things appropriately), and importantly they’re not distracted by dealing with the cashier for payment or coupons or whatever other questions may arise.
Well it's not just that, your medical coder must try different related codes to see if the insurance will take a different code if the first proposed code isn't accepted by the health insurance company. 98765 not covered? Try 98764, that might be a covered procedure...
I’m sorry but this doesn’t bely my point. This sounds like insurance companies and healthcare providers have made healthcare needlessly complex. If they are the same procedure why should 2 codes exist at all?
There is a tremendous amount of tech in medicine and considerable investment at larger healthcare systems. If medical coding were such a simple automateable problem it would have been done (I mean it’s freaking billing... absolutely the strongest and direct financial incentives to solve).
The first mistake/flaw you’re making is that the healthcare provider uses codes. That is most often not the case. Even if they do, it gets more complicated with submitting claims.
There are plenty of LUTs in healthcare that are managed by the EMR, billing ain’t one.
> If medical coding were such a simple automateable problem it would have been done
This profession exists only in the US. What are the other modern healthcare systems doing so they don’t need a coder? I’ll leave that for you to discover.
Out of ~80M hourly wage workers, only ~500k of them are paid minimum wage. Given the size of the workforce and the fact that starter jobs do exist, that's not 'so many' at all..
People outside the US tend to not understand how unbelievably wealthy the country is. I’ve posted stats, you can check my history, but accounting for cost of living and taxes there are no states as poor as wealthy EU countries on average. If you ever find an Italian, talk to him about life in small towns. People are just tired of hearing about the USA because of our cultural domination, and because the media only plays bad news.
Except in France it’s a Euro to get a cart and you can definitely get car delivery. Most of the Carrefour/Super U type stores do that. And many of their stores are at least as big as a US store. Seems like both cultures are converging.
Also in the rare case that a cart is abandoned someone will quickly bring it back or use it themselves. The person abandoning the cart basically pays the finder
I remember people used to do this in Germany when I was a kid ~20 years ago at bigger shops. They would walk up to people loading their cars and ask if they can return the cart for them. I always perceived it as a form of begging. Nowadays I don't see it anymore.
It definitely is! You can also get these coin thingies you can have on your keychain for it. You push it in to push out the link to the other carts, and have to put the lock back in to recover the coin.
I remember Aldi from Missouri, twenty-odd years ago now, and I don't have any negative memories of it. It's Poor Person Costco: They spend nothing on looks and it shows, but they don't have the bulk or the high-end products.
The only reason I wouldn't shop there now is that I don't usually carry any pocket change these days. Maybe I would if I could walk to one where I live.
I'm a new member to Costco. I started describing Aldi as like a dollar store version of Costco. It wasn't and definitely isn't after the remodel: it's smarter than Costco on product side. It's like an evolution. That I can get more stuff from Aldi at lower prices with acceptable to great quality proves it. What Aldi is doing, selling products singles in cases, is what Costco should be doing in majority of situations. They're already doing a version of it for those special, treasure-hunt-style items like people describe for Aldi. A lot of them are way overpriced, though, compared to some upscale competitors. I'd adjust it to balance giving people brands they can brag about but aiming for more sales growth.
Also, I can't tell you how many times I'd have bought something at Costco if it wasn't a megapack, humongous size, etc. Some corroboration for my hypothesis in the fact that most of Costco's food doesn't move quickly in my visits there vs Aldi, Kroger, Walmart, Dollar General, etc. The latter stores have whole sections of shelves wiped out with lots of individual items going low. Stockers are usually all over the place stocking those isles with hardly any stocking at the Costco outside clothes and perishable foods. Even perishable they're mostly date or quality checking. Although it could be key to strategy, I'd like to see them at least experiment with smaller sizes on meat, bakery, prepared items, and common non-refrigerated.
Exactly. They make it seem so hard, esp "don't carry cash folks." I keep about $2 in quarters in my car. At least one is for Aldi, most are for air if I need it, and an extra few on whatever might come up. The latter are often drink machines.
Yes. They've been asking for more quarters lately, too. Some will give it to you free (complementary air) if you buy something in the store. Others stay extra greedy.
What kind of stuff? I usually buy raw ingredients from Aldi, maybe except curries and pre-cooked rice packets if I'm very lazy. I haven't found the pre-made stuff especially salty
The only products I encountered it so far are the frozen microwavable meals. I don't get it why they're that salty - stretching them with rice or noodles to 200% makes the saltiness acceptable.
It's quite impressive how things have turned. Not long ago Walmart was about to disrupt the German supermarket landscape. They even tried to cut prices to below market cost to conquer Aldi, Lidl, and the other big discount supermarket chains. After a couple of years they gave up and left. Now Aldi appears to be "fighting back" successfully in the US.
The history of Aldi's efficiency [0] is pretty impressive. It actually started with two brothers nearly going broke with their small grocery store. Then they realized that if they'd reduce the diversity of goods they offer and instead sell only the most common goods in bulk, they could undercut the competition's prices. This concept was so successful that it led to a multi billion dollar business which is still dictating the prices of common groceries in Germany.
Still there are other supermarket chains that have adapted to the Aldi strategy and are actually causing growth issues for Aldi. Their concept is to offer basic goods at the same price as Aldi does, then upsell more special and higher price items while offering a better shopping experience. I guess that's what's going to happen in the US as well eventually.
It's not uncommon in Germany to go to Aldi first, then buy everything that you could't get at the "full service" more expensive super market next door.
It's the only reasonable thing to do. REWE / Edeka / ... also have standard groceries (yoghurt, cheese, pasta, cans of tomatoes, corn, etc) from their discount brand which cost exactly as much as the Aldi product, but they are usually vastly inferior in taste and quality. Just go to REWE and buy a can of ja! corn. It tastes like somebody yellow-painted puffed rice.
On some level I rather like the idea that Aldi, after fending off Walmart on their home turf are now making successful inroads in America in an effort to take Walmart's lunch.
You're giving undue credit to wallmart. It was already illegal and it's been for a long time. I can find articles on Aldi, Lidl and Wallmart paying fines for that in 2000. My German is not good enough to browse the laws.
So, "Aldi" actually means lots of different things. Two German brothers (Karl and Theo Albrecht) formed ALDI in 1946. In the 60s, they split the company in two, resulting in Aldi Nord (Theo) and Aldi Süd (Karl). In the '90s, the brothers retired as CEOs and transferred ownership to family trusts.
The companies operate in different geographical areas. Originally, the brothers split across the Rhine, but now Aldi Süd includes North America, Australia, and half of Europe. Aldi Nord operates in the other half of Europe.
The same trust that owns Aldi Nord also owns Trader Joe's (acquired in 1979), and they use similar operational values: (minimal advertising, limited selection, private label goods, work ethic, etc)
Back to Aldi: it always surprises me that the two Aldi’s don’t get accused of forming a cartel. It is fairly clear that they agreed to split the market. I guess that doesn’t get them into trouble because a) there are other large players and b) they can’t be accused of doing it to prevent a price war.
AFAIK when it comes to (German) competition/cartel law, they're in some ways considered as if they were a single entity. There's a rule treating companies that openly strongly align like that as if they were commonly owned, so they can't pretend to compete with each other, presumably if one tried to buy an actual competitor the market position of both would be taken into account, ... So yes, it'd be trouble if they in sum started to dominate the market etc.
This is mentioned in the article along with the tidbit of "the brothers [splitting] the business in two, reportedly over a dispute over whether to sell cigarettes" and the "dividing line between the two in Germany known as the “Aldi Equator.”"
In addition to being the cheapest, I'm often impressed by the quality of some of Aldi's pantry staples. Specifically, I'm blown away by their onions. I buy a bag of onions every 1-3 weeks. Since I can't individually inspect every onion in the bag, I'm resigned to the fact that anywhere from 10-30% of the onions will be unusable when I start to cut into them and find the rot. This is true of pretty much every grocer I've ever shopped at, with some faring worse than others (I remember almost half of the onions I'd get from an average bag at Target were unusable). Not so at Aldi's. I can buy a bag and every onion in the bag will have a nice, firm skin that feels fresh and tight when peeled, rather than old and slimy.
I suspect it's probably shelf life more than anything else--if they keep just enough stock of them that they're constantly being bought and restocked, they don't have time to sit on the shelf and wilt.
A friend of mine worked for a logistic company and he told me many times that dealing with Aldi was a nightmare for them because they were extremely demanding:
very thin profit margin, tough quality checks (when delivering the items to the warehouses the checks were done on many more samples and in a much more detailed way than what other supermarket chains did) and if the truck arrived at the warehouse anytime after the agreed delivery time you were basically screwed (ranging from at least having to provide a discount to the whole delivery being rejected therefore having to find another chain willing to buy it or just throw it away).
All this might as well explain (additionally to your "shelf life") the good & cheap onions.
I'm an onion lover - Go onions! :)
(ps: this is just a neutral comment - so far I mostly ignored Aldi, excluding the exercise bike I bought from them which is still working perfectly ~3 years later)
The attention to detail isn't always a good thing, though. Sometimes, they see the tree (wow, a thinner display cable) instead of the forest (this hinge has to flex thousands of times). Other times, they'll see a much thinner keyboard, but miss that debris could break the mechanism entirely. Even other times, they can forget to enable proper thermal controls or network drivers. Or, they can make sure your phone doesn't charge unless it wakes first. Bugger.
I mean, compared to $400 HPs or $200 Samsungs, there's definitely more attention to detail, but that isn't exactly a very fair comparison.
I'd argue that the whole consumer electronics industry is negligent, including Apple.
Most markets here sell onions loose, so one is able to select only nice ones. The stores in the city are small and heavily trafficked, so the onions tend to turn over quickly. I suspect the stocking crews also eliminate the damaged onions before putting them in the bin.
Kind of an interesting comment because growing up the comment I always heard from people was "Avoid fresh produce at Aldi" because it had a reputation for being bad.
If I have learned one thing in a lifetime, it's that freshness depends on each shop. There is no consistency even for a chain of supermarkets in the same city. It's like each one has its own supply chain.
I think the point that this article drove home to me is that a lot of Aldi's "bare bones" mentality actually leads to a better experience for most shoppers, even separate from the lower prices. For example, the comment from a customer about the store layout making it easier to get in and out with kids in tow. The Aldi store brands have a reputation for good quality without the "50 kinds of salsa" paralysis of choice. The register lines move faster because there is no bagging. Store employees are more helpful because they are cross-trained, etc.
I think this contrasts with a place like WalMart where employees are often less-than-helpful, so much of the products are low quality, etc.
The "50 kinds of salsa" paralysis is so real. Some shops have a great selection, everything looks tasty, exciting, worthwhile to buy but you can only buy so much. In Lidl, there is no problem of choice, because much less to choose from, you are relieved from having to choose. I prefer it for staples.
Fun fact: one of the founders of Aldi was kidnapped in 1971. A ransom of $3M was paid. After he had been released he fought a court battle to classify it as tax deductible business expense.
As a German, I frequently enjoy tourists being unable to cope with the speed of Aldi cashiers. They have the possibility to begin scanning the products of the next customer while you are still paying, which adds additional stress if you are not used to it. If it takes you longer than one second to answer the mantra-like "Bar oder Karte?" ("cash or credit card?"), the cashier will stay friendly, but get visibly annoyed, because if you quickly say "Bar", she will actually begin to count out the change she expects you to receive while you haven't even opened your wallet yet (for example, if it costs 17.95, she will expect you to pay with a 20 and count out 2.05)
I think Aldi is the best supermarket in the world, but it certainly is an acquired taste :)
In the last year in my neighborhood Aldi and Lidl have opened up stores across the street from each other. Lidl announced they were building a store and the following week Aldi announced they were opening their store across from them in a space which used to be another grocery store.
Aldi should have been able to open long before Lidl but the renovation of the space took forever. Whenever I drove by the were ever at most a handful of workers and for periods of time no work got done.
Lidl had to wait until their proposed building gained zoning approval to start construction which was several months after Aldi began construction; however, whenever I drove by the Lidl site it was full of construction workers. They managed to open only 3 or 4 months after the Aldi when it should have been at least 8 months after.
During the 3 months before Lidl opened Aldi did good business due to their low prices but no one I spoke to was thrilled with the place. The inside was dark and uninviting. The vegetable and fruit selection was poor and in very bad condition. Often it was moldy or wilted. The selection was awful but everyone assumed that was part of what you traded for the low prices.
Lidl opened and the building is full of light and welcoming. There is a frequently changing selection of quality fruit and vegetables. In almost all product categories Lidl has more selection with prices similar and frequently lower than Aldi.
The Lidl has remained constantly busy since opening and the Aldi has become a ghost town. If the experience here is typical than Aldi is going to have a tough fight on it's hands as Lidl expands in the US.
> Lidl announced they were building a store and the following week Aldi announced they were opening their store across from them
long ago, that was supposedly Burger King's strategy too: wait for McDonalds to spend the time and effort to research where to put one of their restaurants, then open a Burger King across the street.
I live in Aldi's motherland and even if I could easily afford to buy groceries in other stores from major brands I usually go to Aldi first, buying the 10% they do not sell later somewhere else. Why? Because I blindly trust them. What they sell is usually good quality with a good taste (I even do not look at the prices). The juices they sell: perfect. The fruits they sell: mostly sweet (there is a fruit quality problem in Germany, as the country usually only gets second grade fruits because of the low prices eveywhere). Milk, joghurt, cheese: best quality. And I can actually remember where stuff is! So shopping is fast. This is in stark contrast to most other retailers who try to trick you into buying more by hiding stuff in unexpected places. Many years ago, someone told me something from behind the scene at Aldi. She was working for a producer of toilet paper and similar. She said: in contrast to other clients, we are not allowed to produce one lot without some people from Aldi being present. Before they produced for them, they had to call Aldi so they could have engineers at the factory to oversee everything that was done. She said no other customer did this.
This really reinforced my trust in their Quality.
At least in the U.S., TP is one of the few things that's differentiated--they have 3-5 different ones, each a clone of a different brand like Charmin Ultra or Quilted Northern or Angel Soft. There's a little thing in the corner of the packaging that says "Compare to Cottonelle" or whatever. I took a photo of the one we like so I know which to get next time :)
The only things I don't care for from Aldi are their canned sodas and some of their yogurts due to the sugar contents being somewhat higher than many typical name brands.
IMO, what Aldi succeeds in is doing more with less. Aldi's aisles, stores, and product ranges are smaller compared to big grocery stores. However, Aldi leverages a 'curated assortment' of products to offer good quality items at a lower price than other grocery stores. There's also 1 "Aldi Finds" aisle in the stores which seems like it's to beta test potential items or offer short-term deals on limited items (? - just my guess).
The German discount grocery chains are really taking off in the US with Aldi and Lidl. I would like Rewe to come to the US next.
If I go into my local Tesco, which isn't a huge ones, they've got about 15 types of coleslaw. The Lidl has 2. But they're nice ones. The cheapest is not awful, like the cheap Tesco one. The most expensive isn't ridiculously priced, but it is superb.
Baked beans - one type at Lidl, their own brand, but it's nicer than Heinz these days. The dishwasher tablets are half the price of the branded ones but better in my dishwasher.
I honestly love both Aldi and Lidl. They do have their gaps (you need to do ~10% of your shop in Tesco for these) but for the rest...
Other than a couple of wobbly bicycle racks out the front of the local store, Lidl UK are entirely car-orientated, in every aspect from location of the store to making pedestrians walk through the car park without pavements. That surprised me for a European chain.
My other main gripe with Lidl is that they don't do home delivery. I'm not going to walk 25 minutes to their store, dice with cars and then haul groceries home when Tesco will bring shopping into my kitchen for £4.
I was happy when they opened a lidl half way between my home and the local massive asda, I can go get the few bits I need from ASDA then hit lidl on the way back for the majority.
LIDL's meat is amazing compared to asda's and they get a lot of cheese and stuff off the continent making it excellent quality for less than ASDA sells a block of bright orange 'Red Leicester'.
Maybe Tchibo and German whole-foods chains will be more novel in the US (but I don't know really). Tchibo is originally a coffee company focussing on quality and price (with whole-beans-grinding at the store) but they've long expanded into selling all kinds of clothing and home/gardening stuff. They're fanatic, too - their slogan has been "every week a new world", and they'd decorate their small shops anew every week.
Aldi is famous for paying managers a lot of money. Far more than similar roles at other grocery stores. Not just 10% more, but in many cases 100% more.
Perhaps paying extra money for better brains leads to better decisions being made in the long run.
It is unusual for a business that is so cost focused to do that. Normally low margin businesses can't turn off that frugal mentality when it comes to rewarding staff.
I used to work for the UK's largest Supermarket Chain. In 2012 when an ALDI was due to open close to a store I managed, head office sent in a delegate from the small "Continental Discounter" (ALDI/LIDL) team who explain that the ALDI brand was a cleverly worked phallacy, it wasn't cheaper, the products weren't better and customers didn't like it as much as people made out.
Six years later, the impact of ALDI and LIDL have effected fundamental change in the giant, Supermarket Chain, the whole corporate strategy seems to emulate what ALDI does well and there is a pilot where some of the smaller stores are rebranded under a different name and basically modelled on a German discounter.
ALDI and LIDL have changed the UK supermarket landscape in a fundamental way and customers seem to love it.
Another thing: I'm guessing they don't have paid staff to bag groceries for customers like many US stores, but what they may have that's common in Europe but unknown in the US: the boat-tiller-like divider in the conveyor belt space past the cashier.
Customer A's things get rung up and continue to side A. When done with customer A, the cashier shoves the divider across so the belt now takes customer B's stuff to side B while customer A continues to put their stuff in their bag or their cart.
My DuckDuck-Fu is failing me to find a picture of this.
It's often not about needing to put food on credit.
Many relatively well-off people run all of their expenses through a credit card (and pay it off in full at the end of the month) - some in chase of reward points, some just for convenience of carrying a single card.
It's a combination of convenience of carrying a single card plus the rewards, plus the interest free loan plus not having to remember a PIN.
This confluence of facts led to a situation where my bank chose PINs for its customers and I didn't remember my PIN. Fortunately I had some cash, but that was a bit annoying.
Debit cards often have transaction fees associated with them that the customer pays (as opposed to the merchant paying). Even when they don't, running it as debit doesn't get you cash back or rewards or various things that running a card as credit gets you.
Your typical bank card can be run as either debit or credit (same card, same bank account). But running it as debit usually has some serious drawbacks to running it as credit. You always want to run your American debit card as a credit card if the merchant allows.
At least at the Aldi I shop at, they don't even have that. The cashier is at the very end of the line; the next thing past them is a shopping cart, and scanned items get placed directly into it.
When you're done paying, you wheel that cart away, leave the one you had in its place, and go to a separate counter where you can bag or box your stuff.
If you had a basket, you throw the basket in the cart, the cashier drops stuff in there, and you take it with you. Which, they didn't mention this in the article, but that's also nice - it encourages customers to put their baskets back in the stack by the door. Which, again, saves everyone time. Employees don't have to stop what they're doing to collect baskets and move them to the door, and customers don't have to wander around the checkout aisles looking for baskets stashed under the conveyor when the stack by the door is empty because things are too busy for that to happen.
And social rules have involved to minimise delays:
0. You place the groceries on the band "in the right order", ie heavy/solid goods first, light/fragile things last (so everything can just be shoved into the cart)
1. When your turn is coming up, you wait until the previous customer has removed their cart, and quickly put yours in place.
2. Next you help the cashier shoving the groceries into your cart, maybe arranging them a bit.
3. As the end of your purchases approaches, you prepare to pay (while the cashier is still scanning your last items), pull cash/card from the wallet, hand it over, and boom, take your cart away while the cashier starts scanning the next customer's items. (This works even faster if you are not alone.)
More like thrown into it - or if you're lucky, dropped into it, at my local Aldi. You learn not to put canned goods ahead of bread on the belt so that cans don't land on your bread.
Aldi staff are pretty high-performing at what they're paid to do. So much so that successfully shopping at Aldi may be even more skilled a profession than working there.
Our local WinCo, a US West Coast chain, utilizes checkout dividers to great effect (and employs some of the other cost saving measures mentioned in this article). People aren't nearly familiar enough with using them, though, they park their cart alongside the conveyor belt blocking the next customer instead of going to the end of the conveyor to bag their groceries. An efficient cashier can move faster than two slow customer bagging groceries, some of the local cashiers will have three customers bagging at once.
I've not seen these in the UK for a couple of decades.
Indeed they've reduced the space at the end of checkouts. Aldi have a tiny area so you can't pack easily at the checkout (you're supposed to take it to a packing area). But Tesco removed the extra space, reduced their post-checkout space, and will now both offer to pack for you, and wait until you finish before starting to serve the next person.
I'm not really sure of the rationale: I think they can fit more checkouts in if they're narrower, but also if you want to not wait you might do self-checkout of one kind or other.
No, that's not it. Those things are common everywhere. Thinkling meant that there are two conveyor belts past the cashier, and the tiller arm switches between them. See your sibling comment for a WinCo photo.
Aldis Checkout lines are always so long and everyone is buying a months worth of groceries when I'm there that i won't shop there most of the time. The staff are very fast but customers are slow to bag/move the items.
I don't shop in bulk, I buy groceries for one person and i buy a handful of items every few days.
The competitors in Australia (Coles and Woolworths) all have about 10-15 self checkout machines, so the chances that i have to wait for one to be free is small.
I accept that if i go to Aldi, I'll probably find most of the items i buy cheaper, but they are usually within 0-10c of the private label brands of the other supermarkets.
Aldis success has pushed down everyone's prices (to as low as they can get, while staying with their current setup). If you combine the faster turn around time, with the greater variety (I occasionally like trying new brands/items) of the "traditional" store, It's worth the ~10% premium (for me).
On a side note: Over here, Aldi designates only one lane (out of the two or three that are open) for purchasing of Alcohol. Can anyone explain why?
Ah, the Americans have not forced Aldi on their knees and have them change the checkouts.
Finland used to have a oligopoly of pretty expensive grocery chains and no price competition. Until Lidl (another German chain very similar to the Aldis) entered some 16 years ago and started real price competition. Of course with their efficient checkouts.
The first years Lidl didn't do so well. Then they changed the checkouts to the less efficient local models (and some other adaptations) and started doing pretty well. They just learned their lesson that in Finland you can sell the same product with a 30% premium compared to Germany and accept some inefficiency. Of course they are still a bit cheaper than the incumbants.
Finns are very proud of having defeated a multinational giant (and don't see that they have to pay for it). Like Germans have defeated Google when it comes to street view, although that price if there is any is more difficult to measure.
The best quality/price laptops I've bought in the last couple of decades were from Aldi (their brands : Medion and Lifetec) It took 5 years for the competition to reach the same offering at that price. (That was in 2002, now it's less spectacular)
I kept using these laptop for 5-7 years...
It's strange to see this hit the US only just now. Chains like these are huge in Europe. In Belgium, where I live, Aldi isn't very big. They're being outplayed by a bigger local player: Colruyt. Aldi stores are usually pretty small while Colruyt stores are pretty large. You can see the staff driving around carts inside of the store to put everything on the shelves. They also always have a huge refrigerator room instead of seperate refrigerators. It allows for them to drive into these rooms so everything is faster as well.
Colruyt also got subsidiaries that have smaller stores for city centres like Okay which is just a tad smaller because it's in the city centres. Colruyt's own stores are often in smaller cities or around towns where there's plenty of room to build a store.
The reason Aldi is not very big in Belgium is because they're perceived as being lower quality. Perhaps it's because people don't want to change brands, but want to pay a lower price. They can get the same items/brands at Colruyt, but for a lower price. From personal experience I can also say that Aldi stores aren't as pleasant to shop in as Colruyt. This is because Aldi's aesthetics are pretty old. It feels like you're walking in some old store that's from the 90s or older. Colruyt and Okay stores feel more like you're walking into a warehouse.
Just my two cents. I just went shopping to Okay today and on other days I go to a Spar, which is also a Colruyt subsidiary, but a tad bti more upscale. Though not as upscale as Delhaize in Belgium. Delhaize is one of the more expensive ones, though you also get some more upscale items like freshly made juice, fresh sushi, fresh lobsters... compared to the others. They can be either owned independently or by the chain. The ones that are owned independently are imo better because they often have "home-made" food because they've got a bakery, kitchen, and butcher and it's of good quality. (I personally adore one of the Delhaize's bakeries at my parents' house.)
Wow i didn't know that Aldi was in the US. Aldi and lidl keep opening stores like crazy in Europe, there must be like 15 of them in my city in France.
They are great on price, and the high end product are actually nice. But the rest is just average, and the cheese is really low quality (for french standard i mean) . The most annoying thing is that i can never find all the things i need. I just shop there for the basics : milk, egg, water, fruits and occasionally the tools they sell.
The really good thing with aldi (more than lidl) is that they purchase local food, and you can sometimes have really nice surprises.
For awhile I lived in a city with both an Aldi and a Trader Joes. Over all I prefer Trader Joes, but Aldi had some cheap products I liked. And it was a nice surprise when I found some random household item I needed.
Got a friend who is overseeing manager of about 5-6 Aldi supermarkets in my area.
At the end of every day, every supermarket calls him with the daily results. He writes them down, takes a picture and sends that to his manager at the national HQ.
He just uses his phone and the occasional meeting to do business, there is no computer/laptop or system on his end.
Aldi is always portrayed as brutally efficient. So I was wondering what to read into this. Best I was able to come up with is that it's cheaper for them not to have an overseeing system to manage this.
I've seen plenty of corporates automate systems that don't warrant automation. Somehow development gains a momentum which nobody is able to stop. SAP sites seemed to be the worst for this.
Yes. When the org my sister worked at was trying and failing to automate vacation tracking, I was curious and asked some questions. As a software guy, I saw the frequent rules updates, hard to codify rules, increased effort to fix mistakes, smallish headcount, and expensive consultants... and said: This probably just does not make sense to automate.
My kids are 3 and 5 and we've shopped at Aldi continuously since they were born. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Unlocking a cart takes almost no extra effort beyond what you'd expend to get one at any other store.
Unlocking a cart is a foreign concept in the US. Not sure if the parent is in the US but any grocery store that has locked carts there is doomed to fail.
> Often with a toddler and/or car seat in hand, unlocking a cart (for example) is not just an inconvenience, it’s a dealbreaker
Interesting issue. I’ve never had that problem as a parent and have never heard anyone else raise that as an issue - having carts locked is absolutely standard in germany since at least a couple of decades. Maybe people are just used to it. There are specialized carts nowadays for wheelchair users that are not usually locked, but the normal ones are. It’s so standard that there are even plastic coins to unlock which sort of defeats the purpose.
Absolutely. Mine is so worn that it barely works, but you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. The store would give me a new one for free just for asking if they can change a bill so I have coins to unlock a cart.
The best thing ever was that in the beginning, the plastic ones sold for the same price as the face value of an equivalent coin. People would by a plastic 1 DM-sized piece for 1 DM.
"One being an nicer experience for the disabled (in my case, due to being a parent)."
I think it's incredibly disingenuous to compare your parental responsibility to being disabled, especially under the guise of experiences for disabled people.
I am surprised that noone mentioned about the bottle collectors phenomenon in Germany. [1] Basicly you pay a deposit (.25 eur for plastic ones, 0.08 for glass.) for each beverage you buy and then sell those bottles back in supermarkets. This is maybe the easiest and most efficient way to force people to recycle. Are you lazy to do that or you don‘t have a place when you finish your beer walking in the street?[2] Then you simply leave the bottle next to a trash bin and in couple of minutes someone takes it to cash it back and call for a day. It‘s a serious revenue stream for a large group of low income people.
[2] In a country famous with rules and strictness, it is also surprising to see stuff which are not forbidden or no one simply cares, such as drinking on street or public transport, quite openly shopping and using drugs, smoking in bars etc. However some of these might be true only for Berlin, which became a island of freedom in the middle of Europe.
The drugs thing is only Berlin, at least in Germany. Drinking everywhere (though not at all times) is normal in all of Germany AFAICT. It's legal and nobody cares if you still behave.
Drug selling and smoking pot in the public (or even schools) is also not uncommon in other major cities in Germany eg. Hamburg, Frankfurt, Köln, etc. Hamburg has areas near the habour feeling quite extraterritorial in this respect. Munich I don't know; it's a much cleaner place than those other cities. Though drinking beer there and going to the Biergarten is kind of their way of living, and it's certainly a relaxed place with respect to nudity, love affairs, and sex.
> Aldi, which expects its customers to endure a number of minor inconveniences not typical at other American grocery stores. Shoppers need a quarter to rent a shopping cart. Plastic and paper bags are available only for a fee. And at checkout, cashiers hurry shoppers away, expecting them to bag their own groceries in a separate location away from the cash register
Interesting glimpse into a parallel universe. Everything mentioned is standard practice in the parts of Europe I know, except the trolley fee is the equivalent of two to four dollars. Where I live, that fee works as intended, but I remember living in the UK more than thirty years ago - I regularly scooped several pounds by picking up abandoned trolleys in the Safeway parking lot and returning them to their designated shed.
As for bagging, I'd quickly turn hostile if anyone attempted to handle the goods I just payed for.
Most of those things are easy to do and easy to copy.
But how do you find private label suppliers for 1000+ products, how do you know how to define great products, how do you verify that, and do you still manage prices low ?
That's a key skill aldi acquired over decades, and it's really hard to copy.
Most grocery stores have more private label products than Aldi. It isn't hard, most produces of product will put whatever label you want one (within what is legal) if you order a quantity.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Private labels can set quality levels - for a price - if they want to. Most are trying to be cheapest and so they don't.
Private labels order from the brand names. Sometimes they order a different recipe, but often it is the exact same recipe as the name brand just the box is different. If there is still more pickles in the vat after making 1000 jars of the private label they will finish the vat into 17 jars of their brand. Sometimes a batch will not meet the brand's quality standards (taste) but it is still food safe so they dump it into a private label box with lower standards.
> "New customers may be jolted at first by the experience of shopping at an Aldi, which expects its customers to endure a number of minor inconveniences not typical at other American grocery stores..."
The "unconvinces" listed are true. However, what I believe this article, and the rest of the "super market" industry is missing is that inexchange customers get simplicity and a sense of normalicy.
Aldi's success is as much about what they do offer (i.e., low prices) as what they do not (e.g., a ridiculous number of peanut butters that overwhelm your already saturated brain.)
My gut tells me there are lessons to be learned from this "trend" for other brands and products.
This might be true of the new American stores but is definitely not true in Northern Europe, they regularly have rotten fruit in the stands and I only once dared buying the frozen fish which led to a nasty case of diarrhea. This was back in my student days, when I realized paying 3% more for meat and vegs was worth the extra cost if you can avoid spending 2 days in bed because of a good price on salmon.
At the end of the day I can’t really blame the store personal, they where 2 people running everything, at a size that usually see 8+ for competing chains and the wage was the absolute minimum allowed by law.
This is my experience as well in Germany. Fruits and vegetables are also quite tasteless. Some common items are simply missing. I'm afraid same will happen in US once the initial hype and attention to the details wear off and ROI considerations kick in. Or maybe it will work out great - Trader Joe's is an amazing example of that.
FYI: those looking for quality vegetables in Germany buy at the "market" (traditional place with sellers and producers coming with trailers once or twice a week). Maybe not anymore in Berlin, where this tradition may have been stopped during the time when the city was isolated from its surrounding agricultural suppliers (west), or vegetables were only available through "Konsum"-style socialist unit stores, if at all (east).
On our farmer's market prices are usually through the roof. We buy at Lidl where cheap produce is ok and there are also more expensive but still reasonably priced tastier options for most items.
Am I the only one here who doesn't prefer self-service?
Although I definitely appreciate the idea of having options for people who do not share my mentality, my ideal shopping experience is where I have to do the least amount work.
I don't want to have to put my cart up. I don't want to do self-checkout. I'm not going to tell a robot what kind of vegetable I want. I appreciate being able to call a store to resolve an outlier issue.
As a consumer, I will always be willing to pay extra $$ for what I suppose is now becoming a premium perk.
I'm not surprised by the success, I am a bit by the praise for quality. I find Aldi has good quality....for the price, and their prices are pretty low....Aside from a handful of items I know are usually good at Aldi I find lots of items that the quality matches the low price.
I shop there for a few things but especially when I'm cooking I avoid Aldi and it seems like when I try something new it is pretty bleh. Pretzels that are basically dust with shape, etc.
I feel like the odd man out not being an Aldi fan but I suspect that has something to do with cooking.
In Australia food seems very expensive in general, so having Aldi isn't so much about getting cheap food, but getting reasonably priced food. Although I think they generally stock less healthy foods, so you have to be careful with dips and things like that. But fruit, veg, meat, milk type stuff it's a winner. They also sell a lot of homeware on a rotation basis, so one week you can buy a drill, the next and air compressor, etc. I guess this works well for them as it creates scarcity.
Want to add that the founders of ALDI, Theo and Karl Albrecht managed to stay secretive throughout their lives (especially after Theo was kidnapped in the 70s). They managed to have almost zero photos or video recordings of them in public, despite both appearing on the world's top 10 richest people list quite a few times (they were the richest people in Germany anyway). They were like phantoms.
Also, Theo Albrecht loved collecting typewriters. Just sayin', as we are on HN.
At least in the part of the US I live in, Aldi is just a much better place to shop then Walmart and the other grocery stores. I can just unlock my cart (which are never just hanging out in the parking lot), grab the food I need (which is always in the same location), check out, bag my food in my reusable bags (which Aldi pretty heavily pushes), and be done with it. The only store that comes close is the Walmart Neighborhood Market but that still isn't as cheap and nice as Aldi is.
Wait untill you get Aldi mobile provider. In my country i pay 10eur a month for unlimited calls+sms and 20gb of data. For 15eur you get same but 50gb data. Simplest cell provider, no hiden costs, and everything is resolved online. They do not have offices where you register. You just but a sim card. And then they can either charge your bank account or you buy vouchers at Aldi registers - printed on the receipt paper.
Its cheap and awesome!
WinCo Foods in some of the western US states attempts to drive down costs with some similar tactics, although not to nearly the extent that it sounds like Aldi does. Plus WinCo is employee owned, which I think is kinda cool.
In the western US states, I only see Aldi locations in southern California currently. It will be interesting to see how they affect other competitors as they expand to more cities out here.
As someone who has not worked in retail I don't know much about how "employee owned" actually manifests for WinCo employees (esp. shop floor non-managers), but it does seem like they have much better benefits than other chains. And it's quite cheap, so would recommend to Western US folks.
I find it remarkable how positive the tone is of this article compared to how a decade or two ago US mainstream media was wailing about WalMart killing mom&pop shops and corner grocery stores. I wonder why that is? If anything once this chain expands it'll drive all the remaining small grocers out of business, since it's considerably cheaper than even walmart.
Post-Walmart/2008 America is living paycheck to paycheck. It's harder to vilify those who undercut competitors if that means people get to eat this week.
The way Aldi works I wouln't expect it to ever completely take over the market. Its selection is not intended to be big enough to do so. Generally you buy 80% or more of your stuff at Aldi, then go to the grocery store right next door and finish the rest of your list which Aldi doesn't carry. Also, what does a "small grocer" even look like these days? The only grocery stores I see that don't seem to be part of larger chains is ethnic food stores, and Aldi is definitely not in that market.
I haven't seen this specifically mentioned about the carts, but the cart storage at Aldi is covered so the carts don't sit out in the weather and rust. They also don't get bent or have wonky wheels like most other supermarkets, probably because they're not getting inadvertently or intentionally hit by cars in the parking lot.
One of the things that drives me crazy at our local Albertsons is that it is very expensive in general but they change the price (reduce to reasonable) every week on one brand per category. Result is one usually (4/5) can’t buy a favorite product without overpaying ~30%.
Hopefully Aldi doesn’t do this, I know Trader Joe’s doesn’t.
mwahaha! Americans encountering our unfiltered, brutal, German efficiency ... you better start learning how to pack your groceries at the checkout at German speeds ... see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LfkwjJdITA
We have a place called WincCo here that has a divider. The cashier sends your groceries down one side and when they are done ringing your stuff up they slide the divider over and send the next persons stuff down the other side while you bag yours.
It would be nice if the US Aldi stores were similar to the current stores in Germany and Scotland I have seen. The ones I have been to in the LA area feel like how Aldi was 30 years ago in
Germany. Super cheap but crappy products. Not like the European stores where you can find cheap high quality stuff.
Fucking love Aldi. I'm pretty sure without them I would have literally starved to death. I can get food to eat for a week for like £10. The nearest Tesco to me (Crystal Palace) doesn't stock any basics stuff, and the larger stores seem to demand a car or nearly an hours walk.
I wonder if eating food from these super cheap places will shorten your life span compared to other more expensive and focused on healthy places. Basically, sure cheap is good, but how less or more healthy are these cheap supermarkets comparing them to on quality and healthiness metrics?
I'm not sure what you mean... If you're buying fresh produce, there's not going to be any difference between stores unless one of them is spraying sugar & fat onto their tomatoes. And if you're buying nacho cheese tortilla chips, you're already going for something less healthy.
The quality of Aldi products - at least here in Germany - has been assessed time and time again and the result is usually: Same quality, different packaging. That's the whole point. Aldi cuts everything that's not needed, but they don't cut corners at the product.
Great to hear! That's really good news: hopefully is the same thing in the US, about product quality! I used Aldi in London, UK but always felt weird about it, could never understand how they could have such low prices. This article and comments opened my eyes!
I love all Aldi's! The main reasons are : 1. Time - I can be in and out in 10 minutes. 2. Prices - the prices are about 20 to 30% cheaper then the other major grocery chain near me.
Also, it's the only brand that I will praise to random people, that's how much I love it.
You haven't been to the Aldi near me in the USA. They suck compared to other US supermarkets. BTW, Aldi in Ireland is unbelievable. I'm still not convinced it's the same company even though the names are the same.
The uses of the words “brutal” and “fierce” are good examples of American xenophobia. Aldi pays its low-wage staff a living wage (far above the minimum required by law) in the UK and elsewhere. Walmart, no chance.
For our family, Aldi + Instacart has measurably changed our lives for the better. Not having to go to shopping with toddlers and still paying a reasonable amount for groceries has been amazing.
I'm a huge Aldi loyalist now. Alongside the low prices and decent quality food, a major bonus is that I can do an entire weekly shop in about 20 minutes.
The difference isn't that great, though I personally prefer to shop at Lidl/Rewe. Locally there is an ALDI, Lidl, Rewe and EDEKA within a 5 minute drive, by experience, ALDI is the cheapest of them but I usually prefer shopping at Lidl since they provide more higher quality stuff (ALDI doesn't always stock actual parmesan, it's very often just generic grated hard cheese). ALDI offers everything but only one of everything, Lidl has more a bit more variety.
99.9% of my Saturday grocery run can be satisfied from any of them however, so there isn't much reason to prefer any of them over the other in my area, other than EDEKA, the prices are mostly the same.
They are very similar in size or product. Aldi has more local food products than lidl, but lidl has a more interesting "aisle of shite", with their own brand of tools/garden equipment. I keep watching this aisle to expand my toolshed :)
Here is a great website to avoid missing the famous parkside tools: http://offers.kd2.org (it also shows aldi stuff)
Yeah, the three other grocery stores in a mile radius around our local Aldi are all quaking in their boots. It's just been exhausting, wondering if every day is going to be the last day you open the doors. They've each only been able to complete one renovation in the last two years, and I'm sure they'd double the number of auto-check out lanes if it weren't for that meddling Aldi!
In other words, I haven't exactly seen anything "upended" yet.
Getting a fat car loan is much easier if your credit is good, you aren't in debt, and your income is relatively high. It's an indicator of relative wealth.
Car's are easy to repossess, it's really not too risky to lend out a car and you don't need to substantiate much more than a half decent income and history of timely payments.
>Shoppers need a quarter to rent a shopping cart. Plastic and paper bags are available only for a fee. And at checkout, cashiers hurry shoppers away, expecting them to bag their own groceries in a separate location away from the cash register.
This just described how I've been shopping here in Sweden since the 90s.
I live in a major city and 10 years ago it was like that. It's only recently, after a neighbor said it had changed, I went back. They have fresh produce there now, and it's good quality, and cheap. The selection isn't huge, but it has like 90% of what I want.
For some, I think the low cost is a reason to shop at Aldi, but I found the experience too brutal. It was like shopping at a Goodwill grocery store, too tedious for me.
For me it's not the cost and the 'brutal' is what I want, products stay where they where the last time you where in, the signage is clear and the product choice is decent cheap, good and not expensive.
It's basically what I want a shop to be, somewhere to buy stuff not an 'experience'.
Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. Interesting - I didn't interpret it that way (unfair, exploitative), as in brutal violence, but rather as stark and focused, as in brutalist architecture.
I heavily disagree. They have a selection of German chocolate that I have trouble finding anywhere. From Ritter Sport squares to that white chocolate 'n' coffee bars, they absolutely shine there.
-they have barcode on 5 or 6 sides of their products, and they're typically huge! They nearly never need to orient a product to scan it. Their scan speed is far faster than any other supermarket I've been at.
-if two products are very similar, they'll change the packaging in an obvious way. Blueberry and blackberry yogurt typically look very similar, but the lids are obviously dark and light purple at Aldi. They can glance down and count how many of each, scan one, then hit the number pad for the quantity. I haven't seen the number pad used extensively at any other grocer.
-they combine varieties (like flavors of granola bars) of product in the same box. This greatly reduces the shelf space required.
-depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
-they keep product the box from the manufacturer. This eliminates labor from unboxing and facing product.
-they don't have plastic bags. You can grab boxes (normally a waste stream) and take them home with you.
-they don't list a phone number for their stores. With as few as 2 people on site during the slow times, they can't afford to have anyone on the phone.
-their conveyor belt is far longer than most stores. You should be able to get your entire cart worth of groceries on the conveyor at once. This minimizes the slowness of people handing one item at a time to the next checker.
-They're big on turning inventory over. If they trial a product and it doesn't sell well enough, they have no problem simply not carrying it anymore. You can't always get everything set Aldi, but you can get 85-95% of items you need there.
-they wanted to avoid vendor lock-in, so they had two POS vendors develop solutions simultaneously, awarding the contract to the one which provided the best solution.