[jsdwarf]

Aldi pays top salaries, but also expects top performance. An adage goes that they pay you 1.3x the salary of a normal store employee, but expect the performance of 3 employees;-)

They were know for doing cashier drills in the pre-barcode age: you had to sum up a shopping cart filled with certain products and report the sum plus time needed. Even now cash desk time per customer is measured - with crazy outcomes, e.g. AlDi cashiers putting groceries in the shopping bag for elderly people so that the dont block the queue too long.

[eliaspro]

An ALDI in the region introduced something, that was unheard of them before.

Until now, there was never an area after the cashier to collect & bag your stuff, but instead there was a place to park your shopping cart, so the cashier could toss all of your goods right into it, clearing the area as fast as possible to process the next customer.

But now, an ALDI here introduced the collect & bag area with a split - just like many other super markets, so one customer can pack its stuff while the other is already getting its groceries processed.

But all this with a twist: there's a separate payment terminal for each collection area, so the payment of the first customer doesn't block the cashier and the register from handling the next one.

[ahartmetz]

I was quite astonished and impressed (as I thought about it) the first time I saw two fricken payment terminals at one cash register (Aldi Süd, Germany). Around COVID time, people started to pay more often by card, and someone at Aldi realized pretty quickly how they could use that to improve efficiency.

There are obviously some ugly failure cases, but they don't pay those high salaries to get dummies who couldn't handle that.