251–260 of 274 posts
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Germany never had baggers. In fact, to me as a German, the job of a bagger appears about as nonsensical as that of a telephone sanitizer.
Walmart had baggers for the short time they were operating here.
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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…
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 somethi…
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The key is to just dump everything back into the cart and bag it later, on the table behind the cashiers. I sort my stuff by how well it can be stacked - pasta, cans, potatoes and the like go first, then milk, cheese, etc, and finally fruit, delicate vegetables, crisps, and other things you don't want crushed. You can just shove it all in the cart that way - I can match the cashier's speed.
What's an Aldi customer's incentive to do this? Is the cashier going to throw your groceries on the floor if you don't keep up? If not... why not take your time and bag your groceries safely?
It's also not unsafe in any way, I've never damaged anything. You have all the time in the world to bag your stuff safely after the checkout ;)
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well you tactic doesn't work that well in Austria. The peer pressure for slow people is noticeable (especially during busy times). But that's one of the things I like about that. You take a cart - put everything in the cart and pack it into your boxes / bags afterwards and don't waste everybodies time. But this may be a very German thing to do.
I bet airport security is pleasant there.
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The funny thing is how POS systems in the US have regressed over the past 25 years. The IBM registers I used in the early 90s were fast and accurate while slinging packages over the scanner. Nowadays everything is laggy and needs special care to present the UPC to the machine just so. That is except for Aldi's systems.
This is so true. I worked as a supermarket checkout operator at a large Australian chain of supermarkets for a few years, and the PoS systems were redone while I was there. Before were old Fujitsu machines running an old version of OS/2 with mechanical keyboards. After overhaul, Windows xp embedded machines with touch screens. The touch screens were a massive step backwards, especially when it came to punching in pro…
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Because you couldn’t easily tell if a bag of crisps has already been scanned, or if I bought two.
That seems to be a limitation of the barcodes themselves. Why don't they have three additional random-ish digits? Then the two-item/double-scan confusion would have a 1/1000 chance.
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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 somethi…
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.
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.
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Usually they scan items faster than you can bag them. The area after the scanner is very small and takes only few items so you have to move fast. I saw below that US Aldi cashiers put the items into a grocery cart. That doesn't happen in Germany as you are expected to do that yourself. Everyone has their own strategy of how to place items onto the line to slow down the cashier at just the right moment.
...you BAG your groceries at Aldis? I just normally grab a few of the empty boxes from the cereal section.
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Walmart had baggers for the short time they were operating here.
Did they? I remember shopping at Walmart around 2000, but I don't recall seeing baggers there.