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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite thrilled to see low price groceries like Aldi come in and take business away from these bloated supermarket chains.

After making the switch it's hard to shop at a typical grocery store. Everything is ridiculously marked up and the floor plan is ridiculously sprawling.

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How times are changing. Over 20 years ago I would go with my Italian friend to a Safeway in San Francisco at midnight, just for fun. So different from boring German supermarkets. And now you are cheering for Aldi to come in ...

Safeway is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there.

There is a legitimate use case for these types of stores, though- some people prefer a wider selection and value it over lower prices with a narrower selection. Aldi is fine but it's not a replacement for literally everything else.

Yeah. There's an Aldi's very close-by in basically the parking lot of a Walmart. Have peeked in a couple of times but basically nothing to interest me. Seemed like going back to a grocery store of a couple decades ago (with probably lower prices).

I’d encourage you to try it again with trader joe’s in mind. It’s essentially a low cost version with very similar, albeit spartan, layout.

And there is a reason for that as TJ’s and Aldi are owned by brother German companies, Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud, and both operate on the German grocery model.

But the target markets are pretty different.

Aldi's is an outstanding example of the inefficiencies of micro management / JIT. Coin for grocery cart wastes time messing around to get a quarter & lock driving away customer volume that more than pays for an employee to push carts back. Leaving the items in the container wastes shelf space & time by disallowing spring loaded or gravity dispensers & senselessly manually drags the boxes into the store as almost all of the boxes then are taken back out once noticed by an employee. Also, in contrast to the individual empowerment theme, but with the anti-customer view lacks self service kiosks & usually have 1 lane open that blocks with large volume customers & no dedicated x items or fewer lanes. The floor plan sprawls proportional to economies of scale & is divided appropriately by interest in contrast to Aldi that has random furniture between grocery.

> Coin for grocery cart wastes time messing around to get a quarter & lock driving away customer

driving away exactly the sort of customer Aldi doesn't want to deal with. this policy isn't for cart pusher wage savings, it's a soft filter to screen out a whole class of people who get disproportionately angry with minor inconveniences.

i've never been to an Aldi, so i have no experience here. i can't remember the last time that i carried change in my pockets leaving the house. i only have change on my for as long as it takes me to get home from receiving said change to put it away in the "someday i'll cash this in jar". walking up to an Aldi to see this as a first time customer would definitely sour me. it's not like a laundromat where you know well in advance you are better off showing up with change rather than expecting the change machine to be in working order.

You don't keep change in your car? What if you have to go through an unexpected toll? Or is that not a thing anymore (I haven't driven in a long time)?

you don't even need to keep change. aldi will spot you the quarter and never ask to be repaid. the point is you have to ask, which involves cooperation rather than entitlement.

the whole process is about selecting for clientele who are willing to recognize that they have some obligations as a customer to work with the model on an individual level if they want to maximize its effectiveness on a group level.

its just the same group psychology behind coupon clipping in a different disguise.

Around here you don't keep ANYTHING in your car unless you want your car broken into. Not even small change.

A) I don't own a car

B) If I owned a car, I'd have a toll tag, and we haven't used change for tolls in close to 2 decades.

I went there first time this spring. Like you, I do not carry change, and they wouldn't break a dollar unless I purchased something. Prices were not all that great and there was a laughable selection of anything. They had one cashier who couldn't be troubled to move quickly, and she was seated.

There were a few of the stores here and there and I noticed the parking lots were always empty. I guess pissing people off before they buy something is bad for business.

Why is a cashier being seated framed negatively in your comment?

I really appreciate how succinctly you’ve identified it. A soft filter is exactly what it is and right off the bat they’ve relieved themselves, and the customers they desire, of the type of people they’d rather not have to deal with.

Around here (Germany, Hamburg, inner city and western outskirts, have no other recent experience) it's often unnecessary, since the chainlocks are mostly 'cracked', broken nowadays. Just grab one. They lock up anyways, if you try to move them off of the premises via some mechanism embedded in a bulge above one frontwheel, triggerd by induction wires embedded in the ground of the parking space. Regardless of Aldi, Lidl, Edeka, Rewe, Penny, Netto, whomever...

I keep a single quarter in my car for Aldi.

> Coin for grocery cart wastes time messing around to get a quarter & lock driving away customer volume that more than pays for a young adult to push carts back.

This is a claim. Is there evidence? Especially at a reasonable wage for a human being (which is not federal minimum)?

> Leaving the items in the container wastes shelf space & time by disallowing spring loaded or gravity dispensers

Shelf space: Aldi seems to do a pretty good job of keeping everything they want to put out fronted. As for spring or gravity dispensers, I can go look around a different supermarket and the only place I see gravity dispensers is in some (not all) drink coolers and some (not all) spices. If they showed efficiency bonuses, I'd suspect that we'd see them more.

> lacks self service kiosks & usually have 1 lane open

No self-service? Sure. One lane open? Not where I am. There's usually multiple open and even when there are, with three carts in line, they call another cashier.

evidence? have fun messing with lock this winter

GP is right imo. You can literally just walk straight into Aldi and ask for a quarter if you forgot one. They’ll give you one. Takes 2 seconds. Alternatively, as illustration not an accusation, If you’re walking around grocery store fuming about the time you lost thumbing a quarter into a shopping cart, that’s a personal problem.

exactly. it's not about the 25 cents, it's about cultivating a customer base of prosocial people who aren't habituated to anger at petty inconveniences.

The coin/token lock is used in all stores in Finland, I've never had a problem with it in winter. Sometimes I'm in the store without a token (I never have coins) but there's usually a cart unlocked already, since you can get the token out without locking the cart if you fiddle a bit.

I live in Boston. I've never had a problem with it. But that isn't related to what you actually said. Do you have any evidence that the amount of customer discouragement pays for an employee?

  Store (% of $spent) (# store)  % of $spent/ # store 
  Dollar Tree    0.8 7900     0.000101265822785
  Dollar General 1.5 10000    0.00015
  Aldi           2.3 2200     0.001045454545455
  Target         2.4 1900     0.001263157894737
  Trader Joe’s     1 600      0.001666666666667
  Ahold Delhaize 4.3 2000     0.00215
  Whole Foods    1.1 500      0.0022
  Publix         3.7 1300     0.002846153846154
  Walmart         18 4700     0.003829787234043
  BJ’s           0.8 200      0.004
  Sam’s Club     3.6 600      0.006
  Kroger         8.8 1400     0.006285714285714
  H-E-B          1.9 300      0.006333333333333
  Costco         6.4 600      0.010666666666667
  Albertsons     4.7 400      0.01175
  Amazon.com     1.3 0        #DIV/0!

https://www.factoftheday1.com/p/march-21-top-us-grocers-by-s...

More upscale -> Better margins allowing for not only more employees, but also better overall employee benefits marginal that they are.

I'm intrigued on the math for things like gravity-feed dispensers. I've only seen them for a few canned items in my local markets.

I'd expect they consume a fair bit of stocking labour to feed the cans in one at a time, and possibly dealing with malfunctions or breakage, compared with "pull the front off the crate and slide it onto the shelf"

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