
Karl Albrecht, Billionaire Co-Founder of Aldi, Dies at 94 - valevk
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-21/karl-albrecht-billionaire-co-founder-of-aldi-stores-dies-at-94.html
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ccozan
One thing that I found very interesting: upto maybe 6-7 years ago in the Aldi
shops there were no barcode readers at the cashier. Instead, the cashiers knew
the price of _all_ products by heart and they had an incredible speed in
typing at the numpads. I was truly amazed, it was hard to keep up puting the
goods back into the shopping cart. There were literally no queues forming,
since they took only cash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SixSigma
We Al-Di in the end.

But, to contribute positively, what brands managed to build was trust in their
name - you go to the supermarket and faced with 40,000 products, (10 new
grocery items are introduced every day) buying a brand name means less
gambling on whatever processed food you're faced with.

Aldi reduced the choice between the same item from brands and just had the
choice between foodstuffs.

~~~
valevk
They also sell brand items and no name items of a product made by the same
producer. So, people who are brand conscious buy from the same supplier like
the people who buy the no name of a product. Very subtle.

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127001brewer
I think it's interesting to note that Trader Joe's " _has been owned since
1979 by a German family trust established by Aldi Nord 's owner Theo
Albrecht._" [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's)

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Zigurd
There's an Aldi near where I live so I thought I'd check it out. I've lived in
Europe and spent extended periods in Asia so I've seen all kinds of shopping
experiences.

For a place with an reputation for being innovative, Aldi seemed very
downscale and out of step with tastes, even compared to the neighboring Wal
Mart, never mind a Carrefour or a Japanese supermarket. Heavy on canned food.
It seemed like something out of East Germany before the Wall came down. I'm
surprised they thrive anywhere.

Did I have an uncharacteristic experience? What's good about an Aldi shop?
It's weird that the same outfit operates Trader Joes.

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junto
Does Bloomberg have a problem with umlauts?

\- Aldi Sued => Aldi Süd (i.e. south)

~~~
tokenadult
Spelling a German umlaut with the letter e is etymologically correct, and it
is a convention well known to Germans and to German-speakers in the non-
German-speaking world. Most of the news reporting about the German national
team to the World Cup reported the names of the players with that kind of
alternative spelling, for example "Götze" as "Goetze" and "Özil" as "Oezil."

~~~
junto
I'm aware of this. As an English speaker in Germany this is my GOTO preference
for my US keyboard when writing in German. I was just puzzled as to why such a
large internet property chooses not to use them, or more likely, can't.

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venus
I don't understand these old bilionaires. It seems there's so much work to be
done, and possibly a great deal of low-hanging fruit, in anti-aging research.
Who's to say what Aubrey de Grey et al would have been able to deliver by now
if given a few billion ten years ago?

You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.

~~~
tokenadult
From the text of the article kindly submitted here: "Karl Albrecht established
the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which
controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research."

Any working scientist who is actively involved in anti-aging research can tell
you that Aubrey de Grey is not going to deliver with his approach. The current
Wikipedia article on de Grey is largely written by de Grey and his close
friends, and the article there about his approach to anti-aging research is
written mostly by fans of his research. Wikipedia is currently a biased
source. But I have been going to the complete journal subscriptions of a large
research university with a medical school, with updating Wikipedia in mind.
The general approach advocated by de Grey (and pursued by other researchers)
is interesting, and was worth looking at when it was first mentioned, but it
is not panning out as a general approach to reduce risk of aging-related
health problems. I think the billionaire mentioned in the article kindly
submitted here, who lived into his nineties, knew more on a practical level
about how not to age too soon than de Grey does. (Aubrey de Grey has no
medical training, after all.)

~~~
venus
Mea culpa. I didn't read the article. Glad to hear he was supporting medical
research.

And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means
a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research
dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not
panning out" \- with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't
"panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.

I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is
replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct)
new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is
something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these
"working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo.
It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win
in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first
effort.

And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end
of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can
by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he
knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or
not.

~~~
bellerocky
> Mea culpa. I didn't read the article

But then you commented anyway, with a lot of conviction and assumptions and no
mention of you not having read the article. Why?

~~~
venus
Well, because it's 1am, and as you say, assumptions. My bad.

But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive
investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like
deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible
that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.

I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when
you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget
anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space
elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If
they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space
elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?

Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that
much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some
big ideas to make a dent in the universe.

I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I
think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a
billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so
very, very rare.

~~~
bellerocky
> Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire,

I've always thought the rich man who doesn't want to die and is desperate to
beat it with wealth as a cliché actually, a sign of the ultimate hubris of
being wealthy. Desperate to forestall death while others are having a hard
time living. Death is the great equalizer, rich and and poor die alike, but in
the future I guess the rich will even escape death while some of us cheer them
on.

~~~
venus
Are you talking about yourself? Living in a first world country, access to
first rate medical care, not dying of malaria in sub saharan africa?

Because you could be.

If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm
hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about
wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?

