
Aldi's Barcode Strategy - curtis
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/aldi-has-very-impressive-barcode-strategy
======
mdip
I've been an Aldi fan for more than a decade, buying almost all of my family's
groceries there (four kids, it's cheap and doesn't require figuring out what
is _really on sale_ this week vs. what is _really over-priced_ this week, or
messing with Coupons). The quality of most of their products meets or exceeds
that of the name brands[1] except in a few circumstances (their equivalents to
Cheerios and Frosted Mini Wheats are _very_ sub-par, but in the case of the
Cheerios, they're about half the price for a much larger box, so we mix 'em).

I actually get a little stressed when I arrive with a cart full of groceries
and an empty line -- they ring them up at about twice the speed I can pull
them off the cart.

The Aldi process is very well thought out. They're the only cashiers I've seen
that sit in a chair while ringing things up. They needn't move, nearly at all,
beyond swiping things past the register to read those giant barcodes (on
anything store branded, which is most things). I remarked to the cashier about
their ridiculous speed and was informed they are also tracked, directly, on
their speed and have targets to meet (and incentives if they're "the
fastest").

[1] Their produce is consistently good (love the sweet, small, green grapes)
and their Frozen Chicken Nuggets are better tasting than any I've purchased,
including the organic ones at Costco.

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

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

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

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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Standing still for long periods is associated with and/or causes some bad
health problems.

~~~
jgalt212
so is sitting for long periods of time.

------
anotheryou
They are so fast, that I change strategies on which line to choose.

Usually less stuff to be checked out in front of you is good, but at aldi I go
for least people, no matter how much stuff they loaded. This might be even
more significant in germany, where many pay cash and you get every cent back
in change.

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

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

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

~~~
yitchelle
Aldi accepting credit cards in Germany? The 5 or 6 Aldi stores around me
(around Leverkusen) are still cash or EC card only.

~~~
germanier
Both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd started to accept MasterCard and Visa last fall in
all stores.

[https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/aldi-sued-a-bis-z/aldi-sued-a-
bi...](https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/aldi-sued-a-bis-z/aldi-sued-a-
bis-z/k/kartenzahlung/)

[http://www.aldi-nord.de/aldi_bargeldlos_bezahlen_321.html](http://www.aldi-
nord.de/aldi_bargeldlos_bezahlen_321.html)

------
dandermotj
Aldi and Lidl are blasting through other super market chains with their low
cost, high quality goods. If there were ever perfect case studies for usurping
incumbents in a sharply competitive market Aldi and Lidl are it.

~~~
s_dev
They also get rid of a lot of "frills" that other grocery stores are
accustomed to performing that add to cost e.g. items are still in their
transport cardboard boxes on the shelves so employees spend less time stocking
shelves, they allow people to take these cardboard boxes home instead of
shopping bags and this reduces waste cost.

They dramatically reduce their range which cuts inventory storage. You'll
never seem more than one or two instances of the same item. i.e. theres only
one type of can of baked beans.

You're expected to pack bags away from the cashier so they can get to billing
the next customer and not wasting time packing bags.

They ensure theres always a little bit of a queue so the cashiers are
constantly scanning if not they close the till.

~~~
res0nat0r
Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in front
of it. You unlock the cart by sliding in a quarter so you can use it while
shopping. Since people want their quarter back they have to return the cart to
the store. Great solution to eliminate a bag boy sweeping up carts from the
lot all day IMO.

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

~~~
skrebbel
> Also the shopping cards have a small chain that attaches to the cart in
> front of it.

Wait, there are supermarkets that don't have that? How does it work? Do people
just leave the shopping carts standing around on the parking lot? Not cynical,
geniunely wondering how that works.

Anyway, afaik virtually all supermarkets in Europe have that system. I'm
pretty sure Aldi didn't invent it.

~~~
jads
In the UK, it's not the case. Most have carts that have no such feature,
though a good proportion do. From my own anecdotal experience living in less
desirable areas, the use of the coin system tends to be in areas that would be
more likely to have carts taken/stolen.

~~~
Symbiote
I think most places used to have the coin system, but it's often been replaced
with a wheel lock. There's a wire loop at the perimeter of the car park, which
clamps a brake on the rear wheels if the trolley is passed over the loop.

~~~
Udik
The two systems clearly solve different problems. The coin system is to
encourage people to put the cart back in place; the wheel lock to prevent
people stealing a cart. A euro fir a cart is not a bad price, if you need one
to take with you.

------
jankassens
They used to type in short (3 or 4 digits) codes for the products at Aldi in
Germany maybe 10 years ago. I assume they did this because the scanner
technology was not as fast. The cashiers memorized the codes and were crazy
fast.

~~~
germanier
Aldi Süd cashiers learned the prices. They actually choose prices that were
easier to type and as few different prices as possible. Barcode scanners were
installed in 2000 in anticipation of the Euro introduction.

Aldi Nord cashiers learned three digit codes (around 800 ones). Scanners were
only introduced in 2003 because they started to sell loose produce which is
weighted at the checkout. Additionally, that allowed them to get away with
less training.

The checkout speed dramatically decreased since then. Before they had to pick
up each and every item they often entered the numbers faster than you could
load the items onto the checkout line.

6000 items per hour was the target before. Now it's around half which would
have gotten you fired back in the days.

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

~~~
raimue
The same as it is now, just no barcode scanner. With one hand the cashier
moved products from the band to the other side for you to pick up, while they
typed codes into a 9-digit number pad with the other hand.

~~~
tobias2014
And interestingly they were not any slower.

~~~
brusch64
my mother still says they were much faster.

But I think Aldi had a smaller varierty of products back in those days too.

------
makomk
Occasionally they incorporate the barcode into the artwork a little too, like
on this hair shampoo: [http://imgur.com/jx5COyD](http://imgur.com/jx5COyD)
(There's another longer barcode segment on the other side as well.)

~~~
colinbartlett
If you enjoy this sort of curiosity, checkout
[https://reddit.com/r/barcodeporn](https://reddit.com/r/barcodeporn)

------
ams6110
I'm inspired to visit Aldi's again. It's been years. I remember them as being
a rather depressing very low budget ambiance, dimly lit by a few flourescent
tubes with an awful color spectrum, and populated by a sad bunch of customers
who looked like their next option was the local community kitchen. Kind of
like the typical older Kmart that's about to go out of business.

~~~
mdip
I started shopping at Aldi because I have four children and our grocery bill
was becoming unwieldy unless I spent a lot of time preparing for the visit.
The local grocery stores play a game where they mark down a bunch of things
"with card", but their regular prices are well over the average price at
places like Walmart/Meijer. Aldi is consistently cheap and has resulted in me
no longer wasting my time couponing or checking ads to make sure I'm not
paying $5.00 for salad dressing that's normally $2.50 and often on sale for
$1.50.

I was bugged by having to bag my own groceries, put a quarter in the cart
(nearly unheard of outside of Aldi where I live) and having to pay cash (they
take credit cards now). But a few things happened: about 80% of what I
purchased as "store brands" were superior or dead on par with the name brand
(a few were misses, a few were dramatically better). The total spend on
produce and meat was significantly lower than I typically paid and I noticed
when I was purchasing the produce that the _quality_ was very consistent. My
green grapes, the kids favorites, were much smaller than I typically bought
but it turned out that makes them sweeter and there were fewer brown buggers
in the bag.

As to the bagging, I am beginning to prefer it. They always have empty
cardboard boxes and a large counter to organize things and because we
intentionally grocery shop no more than once per month, I end up with a _huge_
amount of things (we do joke, however, that it's impossible to get a
combination of things at Aldi that fills the cart and results in a bill
greater than $220 -- my current record highest). Organizing it in boxes
according to what fridge/freezer/cupboard it will end up in makes that part of
the process a lot easier (easy enough for the kids to do it without our help).

And for the quarters, this tiny little deposit results in the carts being put
back in the bay. It saves them money, sure, but it has two other benefits. The
bay _always_ has carts -- I don't have to surf the parking lot during the
holiday season because all are in use or scattered through the lot. And unlike
every other store where more than half of the carts have problems, Aldi's are
always in perfect working condition. No stuck or crooked wheel forcing me to
push the thing sideways to make it go straight and I'd imagine that has cut
down on damage to parked cars, too.

------
jglauche
I remember the pre-barcode times at Aldi in the late 1980s in Germany. The
cashiers would type in numbers into the cash register like crazy. They knew
every price of every product and had to put it into the machine. It was at
least thrice as fast as every other shop at that time.

It felt like barcodes didn't make it that much faster, but Aldi ones are still
around the fastest ones.

While the speed is impressive, it also adds a lot to stress because the
cashiers require you to get away as fast as possible.

------
tuna-piano
I wonder why a large retailer like Walmart doesn't start incentivizing their
suppliers to do this as well?

Some math.

-Assume a fixed 120 customers an hour

-Assume each customer buys 20 items

-1 minute for customer to pay + 1 minute total scanning time for all items = 30 customers / cashier / hour (4 cashiers needed)

-Assuming additional barcodes double the scanning time (seems reasonable to me from my experiences at Aldi):

-1 minute for customer to pay + 30 seconds scanning time = 40 customers / cashier / hour (3 cashiers needed)

Savings of $12 an hour ($8/hr + taxes, training, insurance, etc)

120 customers * 20 items per customer = 2400 items total in the hour

$12 savings / 2400 items = $0.005 per item savings

Obviously the assumptions were a bit simplistic, but couldn't Walmart offer
their suppliers, say 10% of the estimated savings, $0.0005, per item to add a
few more barcodes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
jernfrost
Visited Aldi and Lidl in Germany and I am sorry but I can't help hating those
stores. It all looks so cheap and barebones that I get depressed just being
there. And then the whole experience with the cashier is hyper stressful and
they are so blinding fast at scanning the groceries. It is like you are
subject to some German Blitzkrieg or something.

Interesting with the article that they explained why it was so fast. I
actually just thought Germans were super fast at everything in general.

I could't figure out how to pack my groceries as fast as they scanned them and
get time to pay without holding up the line.

~~~
Someone1234
Reads like culture shock to me.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
foxylion
You can just pass the cashier without buying anything. The cashier won't even
notice you. Nearly every bigger supermarket in Germany has only exits at the
cashier.

~~~
randallsquared
They might not have noticed, but _I_ would have noticed waiting in line. There
wasn't room to scoot by the people and their carts, and, as I said, every
other route was blocked.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
germanier
I'm not sure that the time needed to affix the label to every product is less
than the saved time due to faster scanning.

------
return0
Off topic, but private labels are in many ways reminiscent of the state-
controlled labels in former communist countries.

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

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

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

[0]: [http://www.freshcom.de/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2011/08/...](http://www.freshcom.de/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2011/08/JA_2.jpg)

------
greenspot
Known as employing Germany's fastest typing cashiers Aldi introduced this
quite late compared to other grocery stores. They experimented for many years
to get the same speed and the result where these huge and multiple barcodes
per package.

------
herge
Do Aldis in the U.S. bag your groceries? In Ireland, you would have to bring
your own bags, or buy their thick plastic ones. And then the cashier would
tut-tut you if you took too long bagging your own groceries.

~~~
sdtransier
It's the same here in the U.S, bring your own or buy their plastic reusable
ones. The locations I've been too sometimes had spare boxes you could use, but
that was pretty rare.

~~~
joezydeco
Finding empty boxes is an artform.

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

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

------
Rzah
I believe the reason for the tiny shelf you have to quickly empty is twofold,
it means the tills take up less space, which means more shop space for stuff
they can sell, and it speeds up the flow through the tills because peer
pressure makes most people just pile it straight back into their empty trolley
and sort it out after they've paid.

My strategy is to load everything onto the belt (heavy stuff at the front,
fragile at the back), and line the now empty trolly with two or three of those
strong reusable bags they sell, I can keep up with the cashier and end up with
well packed bags that are easy^h^h^h^h possible to lift straight into the car,
but then I'm a bit nutty when it comes to packing things, bags, cars,
dishwashers.

------
gumby
Thanks for footnoting Dallas. Aldi being German I thought of a different
example: that approach is how we ended up with France, Germany and Lorraine
(of the famous Alsace-Lorraine fights between F & G). It was the three sons of
Charlemagne...still very visible today!

~~~
tricolon
It was the three sons of the son of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun)

~~~
gumby
Thanks, memory can be a bit leaky at times.

------
noipv4
I wonder if this system can introduce miscounting or double-counting of an
item? Maybe that is why the cashier at Aldi moves through items so quickly.

~~~
joshvm
Given the way that barcode scanners work, as the sibling comment points out,
there is almost certainly some kind of 'debouncing' going on. The system is
acquiring data fast enough that it probably has enough time to repeatedly read
the code tens or even hundreds of times before you move it out of the field of
view. So I'd guess it triggers on the first detection and you get a short dead
time to move the product away.

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

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

------
mk89
Amazing! Now I finally understand the reasons behind that :D

I noticed these giant barcodes, but I never thought they could be somehow
useful. I mean, the average speed of cashiers here in Germany is "normal".
That's fine, I don't care if they take 10 seconds instead of 5, nor I care if
they take 1 minute instead of 40 seconds.

------
tikumo
I've never noticed that their products had more than one barcode. In the
Netherlands the skill of fast "bleeping" is lost nowadays, stores tend to hire
young girls as they are cheaper, and only if you go to the store on a weekday
in the morning you will encounter an older woman, but they are not so fast as
in the past.

The small checkout counter makes the difference in my opinion, fast in the
cart speeds up the whole process. Lots of times i'm stunned by people who wait
by the cash register to pay and let the products stack up, so the next person
has to wait till they put everything back in their cart. This is not a problem
with Aldi / Lidl.

The only thing that would make it faster is a cart thats lower on one side so
that they can make a slide for your products..

------
lordnacho
If scanning the barcode is the critical step, why do it with an ordinary
barcode scanner? Just make a conveyor belt that has multiple cameras. One of
them will definitely catch one of the barcodes. I've done barcode scanning
with ZXing lib myself on a phone, it's super easy even with one camera.

Perhaps set up the bags in a clever way so everything other than eggs falls
into a new bag.

Also, it can't be long before you just scan stuff using an app as you're
taking it off the shelf, connected to a payment method so you don't even have
to pull out your wallet.

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

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

Here are some pictures
[https://www.google.co.th/search?q=ica+bar+kod+skanner&source...](https://www.google.co.th/search?q=ica+bar+kod+skanner&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjGzby82KnNAhVGVZQKHRcMCgMQ_AUICCgB&biw=1280&bih=796#tbm=isch&q=ica+supermarket+bar+kod+skanner)

* In the main brand supermarkets at least.

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

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

------
kw71
The "Price First" house brand at Walmart has many items with huge barcodes on
all surfaces. I wonder how this experiment will work out given that these ugly
packages compete right next to pretty ones.

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

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

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

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

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

------
jgalt212
If a regular cashier is $10 an hour and an Aldi super cashier is $20 an hour,
is there any net benefit to Aldi other than the extra floor space freed up by
less check out counters?

------
cm3
I've heard that in the UK there are bag boys who even carry it to your car. Is
that true and are you then supposed to tip?

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

~~~
eru
Not to mind the least Aldi thing, too.

------
numanuma123
Seems like they need something like the Digimarc barcode?

------
kwhitefoot
Upvoted for the cat serving suggestion!

