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At my Aldis some of the more industrious folks will happily return your cart for you to get the quarter.
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.
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…
> -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…
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> -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…
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…
Not that we have Aldi where I live, but we do have Trader Joe’s, and I simply choose Safeway or QFC because I really really like self checkout.
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…
> -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 att…
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/02/german-cities-...
[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.
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…
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.
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…
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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 th…
This is a great comment, thanks very much. 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. (…
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.
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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…
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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.
Are you saying your software engineers make below 75k?