301–310 of 653 posts
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> depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts What's the alternative? Growing up in Germany I've literally never seen it any other way.
People leave there carts in the lots and workers collect them
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> depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts What's the alternative? Growing up in Germany I've literally never seen it any other way.
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.
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 be…
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. https://www.aldirecruitment.co.uk/area-manager-programme/our...
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What's so weird is that all those sound rudimentary rather than innovative to my european ears.
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 co…
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.
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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.
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I think I just started to understand why the US has such a low unemployment rate but so many are paid minimal wage...
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.
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.
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> 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…
Do American Aldi grocery cashiers sit? That's what I noticed the most in German grocery stores. American cashiers stand, German cashiers sit.
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 pack…
-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.
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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.
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…
...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.