Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets • Hacker News Board

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#431

Post by usr1106 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

stkdump wrote: post #420

usr1106 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#432

Post by spraak » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #342

antnisp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so weird is that all those sound rudimentary rather than innovative to my european ears.

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…

Hej! What is the clear wall between the lanes for?

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#433

Post by sgift » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #403

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?

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.

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#434

Post by function_seven » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #406

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hav…

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.

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#435

Post by barbecue_sauce » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #335

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#436

Post by eredengrin » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #423

PascLeRasc wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No self checkout would be a show stopper for me, some of us actually prefer it to going to a manned register. 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.

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).

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#437

Post by tw04 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

lugg wrote: post #419

c3534l wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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…

>You might also find the white is partly a byproduct that needs to be made no matter what.

White is literally the color of the cheese. The "yellow" has food coloring and "flavor" added.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheese

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#438

Post by usr1106 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

stkdump wrote: post #424

usr1106 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -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…

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,…

> The register would lookup the prices.

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.

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#439

Post by eredengrin » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #418

froindt wrote: post #96

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…

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 e…

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...

Re: Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets

#440

Post by dingaling » Sat, May 18, 2019, 6:19 AM UTC

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #6

siruncledrew wrote: post #2

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…

The 'curated assortment' bit is interesting. 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 pr…

Lidl do have some shortcomings.

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.