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

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

#401

Post by c3534l »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -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…

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…

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 want to know this mystery. It's obvious to anyone who works at a grocery store that certain items are way more popular than others, but grocery stores buy way more variety than makes sense. Maybe it's for appearance in some cases, but no one can see how much American cheese we have stocked at the deli counter, and it's true for the stuff stored in the back of the warehouse, too.

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

#402

Post by scarface74 »

JBReefer wrote: post #276
djrogers wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of ~80M hourly wage workers, only ~500k of them are paid minimum wage. Given the size of the workforce and the fact that starter jobs do exist, that's not 'so many' at all.. [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm

People outside the US tend to not understand how unbelievably wealthy the country is. I’ve posted stats, you can check my history, but accounting for cost of living and taxes there are no states as poor as wealthy EU countries on average. If you ever find an Italian, talk to him about life in small towns. People are just tired of hearing about the USA because of our cultural domination, and because the media only pla…

Have you ever been to the southern US? Specifically Mississippi or Alabama or even some parts of Georgia?

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

#403

Post by orliesaurus »

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?

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

#404

Post by njharman »

mamon wrote: post #320
wahern wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the automatic checkout counters even look like they have a scale I won't waste my time. Not once have I made it out without the machine requiring an override, no matter how carefully I place and scan items. Thankfully it seems the scales are becoming less common.

I refuse to use self-checkout on principle: I am not doing any unpaid labor for some corporation, I already have a job.

So overpay for someone else’s labor?

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

#405

Post by thaumasiotes »

freeflight wrote: post #383
thaumasiotes wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sales aren't announced. They just happen. There have been many times when I specifically went to buy triscuits, and couldn't do it because they happened to be on sale.

Those are some really weird sales then, what use is the sale if nobody knows about it? In Germany, most grocers have little leaflets where the majority of sales are announced a bit ahead of time. Aldi makes a lot of consumer goods business with that, when they sold their first desktop in the mid-90s, all of them built by Medion in the UK, it was a huge deal with long waiting lines even before the stores opened and th…

> Those are some really weird sales then, what use is the sale if nobody knows about it?

OK, it's possible that there's a low-profile outlet for releasing news of upcoming discount periods, and I just don't know about it. However, I can list several effects of the sale that occur whether or not shoppers know about it in advance of coming to the store:

- You might choose to buy more of something than otherwise, since it's cheaper right now.

- As a special case, you might have planned to buy zero of something, only to increase that amount when you notice it's on sale.

- You might choose to buy a discounted item in preference to the non-discounted item you were originally planning to buy.

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

#406

Post by tzs »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -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…

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 have an office in. The vending company stocked the drink machine with 2 rows of Pepsi and something like 8 rows of Coke. The Pepsi was consistently sold out by the middle of the week after the machine was filled. The Coke? Maybe 10% of it was sold by the time they came around to restock. But they never figured out that they should add more rows of Pepsi and reduce the number of Coke rows.

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

#407

Post by bwilliams18 »

albertshin wrote: post #385
DenisM wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if one can pin a camera on the ceiling looking down at the conveyor belt, scanning all barcodes at once? Better than doing them manually one by one. If every box has barcodes on every side it should be possible for the software, knowing the size of the box, to get an idea if everything was scanned correctly or if an item had the barcode obscured. Maybe 2-3 cameras under different angles. Cameras are cheap, a…

Is checkout speed really limiting factor in grocery store growth though? Like are people that sensitive to the few extra minutes (at most) at the checkout counter they'll switch where they shop? I personally can't see myself switching from my local store even if it takes like 3 more minutes to check out. Maybe I'm just lucky though to think it's 3 minutes extra at most?...

You don't speed up checkout because people care about faster checkout, you speed up checkout because people care about lower prices and faster checkout reduces fixed costs, or increases revenues allowing you to lower prices.

If checkout lines are supply constrained (eg. there are always lines) then increasing speed increases throughput which increases revenues.

If checkout lines aren't supply constrained (eg. there are empty checkout lines) then you can reduce the number of open lines without increasing wait times, reducing your headcount and driving down your labor costs. If you lower your labor costs you reduce your semi-variable costs and you can keep the same contribution margin and lower prices.

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

#408

Post by vinay427 »

mamon wrote: post #320
wahern wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the automatic checkout counters even look like they have a scale I won't waste my time. Not once have I made it out without the machine requiring an override, no matter how carefully I place and scan items. Thankfully it seems the scales are becoming less common.

I refuse to use self-checkout on principle: I am not doing any unpaid labor for some corporation, I already have a job.

If I'm physically able to do it, would otherwise need to wait longer to get through a cashier line, and don't have anything else to do with my time while waiting in the cashier line it seems like it's to my benefit to use the self-checkout on principle. It saves me time and costs me virtually nothing.

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

#409

Post by Tomte »

sorenjan wrote: post #333
freeflight wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having somebody collect the trolleys creates a job, having somebody pack the groceries creates another job, just like having somebody do the refueling of your car at the gas station. 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.

That's one of the biggest differences between the US and Sweden, and probably most of Europe; access to cheap labor. Too cheap, if you ask me. You could never employ somebody as a greeter here, or to pack your groceries, or to pump your gas, or other extremely menial and near useless jobs. Can people really support themselves on those, or are they forced to work multiple jobs? It's actually becoming relevant here, be…

> That's one of the biggest differences between the US and Sweden, and probably most of Europe; access to cheap labor. Too cheap, if you ask me.

Another example: when you have road works here and a lane is closed and only one lane remains, temporary traffic lights are put in place.

In America you'll see a half dozen people managing traffic, where "managing" means "holding up a sign".

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

#410

Post by SllX »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #329
justin66 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main reason I have always heard mentioned why they have a deposit is that shopping carts are really expensive and they don't want people to take them home, have teens do silly things with them etc. I'm sure the deposit is just to encourage people to put the carts back where they belong, reducing the amount of work staff need to do outside the store. If you're going to steal a shopping cart, the quarter won't fa…

Yes, they have egress locks activated by magnet that locks the wheels, or they have another physical lock system, at each pedestrian exit to the car-park of my local supermarket -- that's one reason they are really inconvenient for pedestrians accessing the site, they want to have trolley controls. The exits are narrow with soft soil and low hedges bordering the paths. You can lift a trolley over, but you need some m…

Push the cart quickly enough and you can defeat the magnetic locking mechanism. Just push it really fast past the boundary where it would lock and keep going until you’re out of range.

Dunno if that still works, but I enjoyed defeating the locking mechanism at Safeway when I was a kid even though I didn’t even want the shopping cart.

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