It is telling that Aldi is successfully expanding in the USA while keeping the same model that made it big in its home market of Germany and the rest of Europe.
When Walmart tried to gain a foothold in Germany, it hemorrhaged billions before giving up. The managers responsible covered their asses with bullshit about cultural differences or unions, but the truth is that they just couldn’t offer competitive prices. Looks like, even in the US, shoppers favor low prices over wasteful frills like greeters.
Yes please, we need more competition on groceries in rural Texas and also Arkansas as an extra special sort of fuck you to Walmart.
Greeters are literally a charitable expense (that they’ve mostly replaced with security goons) the wasteful frills in Walmart are executive compensation and benefits.
hahahah right? I was like ‘uh…I don’t think that’s where all the money’s disappearing to my guy…’
You think the managers at Aldi work for the satisfying feeling of serving their community or what? Aldi cut costs in any way possible and greeters are simply a very visible way.
Aldi isn’t really a direct competitor of Walmart. There are other more similar (hypermarket) chains in Germany that directly offered the same as Walmart. For its attempt to enter the german market, Walmart bought up a bankrupt chain of such hypermarkets. The stores were in worse locations than those of their competitors. Basically, it was unwanted left-overs. The Walmart, closest to me, was right next to its competitors but on the far side. It was just a little less convenient. If they had been able to offer better prices or quality, that might have made it worth it. But they couldn’t. There were only greeters and packagers.
And, the cashiers can sit down. Which makes sense.
cashiers aren’t allowed to sit in usa?
Only office workers and managers are allowed to sit. If you’re in a customer-facing position with a chair, you’re supposed to stand up when helping a customer.
And as we all know, middle management does so much work and therefore deserve that right over everyone else.
(sorry I vomited in my mouth a little bit)
When I worked retail, at one of the stores you weren’t allowed to drink water where customers could see you. I chose to ignore that rule and only got chewed out when the store owner happened to be nearby
Cashier stations with chairs are VERY rare, yes. The general trope is that managers/owners think it makes workers appear lazy.
In California, companies are required by law to provide them seating and let them sit down, but most everywhere else they are expected to stand.
It’s this bizarre thing. Management want them to “look busy” or some bullshit. Aldi looks busy.
You’ll see this on some factory floors too. No chairs even for the management or QA logging numbers on computers. Chairs are for break time or some such.
Depends on the company and plant. Not to brag on my Corporate overloads as they’ve gaslit employees and poisoned the global water supply, but they do a good job of making production’s life tolerable enough (above average pay for the area, regular Kaizens for them to voice their opinions, good safety culture, keeping up 5s) that people want to work for them.
Not at most places. At some point, someone told all the MBAs that it makes the customers mad if the employees look lazy or some shit.
They also tend to make them stand at the beginning of their lane when they don’t have customers. Apparently a light signaling that they are available just isn’t enough.
Edit: My bad. I’ve never seen this at Aldi or Lidl. Just other US chains like Food Lion.
Hereabouts*, the lanes each have a sign with their number. Glows red = closed, glows green = open. Super convenient, and I’ve seen it across multiple store chains, so it’s not like it’s only one store doing it.
*Southern Germany, observed across different cities, though I can’t vouch that it is universal
I have never seen that. Where I am at they will pull every idle cashier to do work before the line becomes idle.
No, and even worse “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”
Well, turns out I do have PTSD from a decade of working retail and food service. So thanks for that lol
And multiple addictions. Thanks, Olive Garden. Anybody got a bump? I’m draggin.
(to manager in response) “then why the fuck aren’t you cleaning all the time, then?”
Corporations make that decision. And our country allows (if not encourages) it.
Yes, seriously. Same goes with drinking water behind the counter.
cashiers aren’t allowed to sit in USA?
Not in any stores I have seen in my city.
Other than Aldi, pretty much no.
Aldi is the only place I’ve seen. However, Aldi recently started installing self checkout, which I despise.
I love good self checkouts. I hate bad self checkouts.
Bad self checkouts are those that alert the sole employee running around between twenty terminals of some discrepancy for every fucking thing. Weight discrepancy! Remove duplicate item! They didn’t select number of bags! Check their receit!
Just leave me be and let me scan my flatbread and leave already. Or open another cashier. Or just don’t implement self-checkout if it’s not really self-checkout.
Yeah, a good self-checkout is amazing and a competely different category from the garbage you see elsewhere.
In the Netherlands at Albert Heijn the only verification consists pretty much of occasional random checks and in the one closes to me they replaced two of the manual counters with eight self-checkouts, meaning that the queues are pretty much gone. You can also self-scan while shopping, if you want with your own phone in which case payment is 90% of the time just scanning a barcode and paying at a debit-card terminal.
And while you are not supposed to, nobody ever cares if you use your own backpack instead of a shopping basket/car, in which case you don’t even have to pack up your stuff. If you do get a random check with it, you just open it up wide and let the employee pick a few random items to scan and they won’t even say a word.
The only other delay is age-verification if you buy alcohol, which in my case means that an employee looks over from across the room and sadly decides that I’m an old enough fuck to not need my ID inspected. (Then again, being trans without legal stuff having happened yet (soon though!), it does make things easier.)
Could you steal? Of course, but you can do the same with regular counters!
We don’t have it in Australia either apart from Aldi.
Cashier stations with chairs are VERY rare, yes. The general trope is that managers/owners think it makes workers appear lazy.
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Cashier stations with chairs are VERY rare, yes. The general trope is that managers/owners think it makes workers appear lazy.
You might want to repeat that a few more times for the people in the back of the room.
“up to $23 an hour”… Doing a whole lotta heavy lifting in this headline.
How is it sane to list the maximum you can make, vs what to expect day 1?!
It reads like the minimum went from $18 to $23. So the minimum is up from $18, to $23.
Aldi announced that it it looking to hire thousands of new workers, as well as increasing their minimum wage to $18 and $23 an hour.
My read on this, is that they are discussing the minimum for two separate positions. Potentially cashier and team leader. Would make sense as they don’t have many employees on shift at a time.
Ah that could be. Either way, $23 isn’t the max
Should have kept reading:
The national average starting wages for Aldi workers will be set at $18 an hour and $23 an hour for warehouse workers.
I hope so. It would be a nice change compared to… Well… Everything.
Edit: ahhhh see it now. I read it as “up to” alone, but implied “increased to” instead.
English is hard sometimes.
It really is. The fact “up to” can mean either a maximum value, or an increase to a value, is stupid.
Sale, up to 90% off!
Where the 90% off is the triple clearance table that’s been inventory they genuinely can’t get rid of, while everything else is 10-15% off
Minimum does not mean “up to”.
That’s just being read wrong, it’s not written like a “save up to $10” kind of line. The “up” just describes the change (i.e. ‘the starting wage is going up; becoming $X’). Within the article, it’s completely unambiguous:
The national average starting wages for Aldi workers will be set at $18 an hour and $23 an hour for warehouse workers.
The article says that those are the starting wages, for store and warehouse, respectively.
good for them. that’s how you get quality workers and reduce turnover
They’re finally catching up with my local burger chain that offers health insurance, tuition, etc. Also in the US.
What burger chain?
Dick’s. You can get a bag of dick’s from a decently compensated person.
Hah! This place?
Yup
Tell us more, please.
About what part? Being able to send a bag of Dick’s to your friends or tuition health care, $26 an hour after training, sign on bonus etc? Sounds like I work for them. I don’t, but I want my kids to!
Damn. What’s next, quality fresh foods with less harmful ingredients?
I mean it is a german company, they might just standardize EU standards through out their company. At least this is a small pipe-dream I have had about them.
This is just in the USA, correct? Aldi in the EU is unaffected from what I can tell.
I don’t mean this in an offensive way or a combative one, but the post title is using $ and the source is USA Today.
Maybe it was international.
Sass
Scss
It seems like just the US
Great, now that they have bought winn-dixie, and are moving in places, mostly, where there are failed/failing regional chains, we will have even less competition.
Remember, despite saying Aldi does not discriminate based on union/desire to unionize, A LOT of their ex-management say they were straight up told to fire anyone who mentions it, and they would rather get sued for it, than allow it.
One opened in my city, only Aldi within 50 miles. It is always packed and both of the major regional grocers have raised their “now hiring” wages several dollars, run much more aggressive deals, and their parking lots are maybe 4/5ths as full as they were a month ago.
Which is great for me because I’ve been to several Aldis and realized it just isn’t for me. Being one guy with a pretty weak appetite, the actual dollar savings don’t really come out to much for me (maybe -$10 versus a major grocer if I’m really stocking up), and the “Aldi Experience” doesn’t really mesh with how I buy food. It’s still great to have them in the market, though.
Their produce is always super cheap. Same strawberries I’d get at Ralph’s (Kroger) for $4.99 I can get at Aldi for around $1.70
Their produce is great. I’d like to see them move away from factory farm eggs, milk and meat.
Aldi had me at “we let our cashiers sit down.”
And let me guess…“somehow”, they haven’t had to hack up their prices after raising wages, huh?
No but the CEO had to cut down to just one new AMG Merc per year. It’s a doggy dog world out there
Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morels are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a six cents when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go. Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn’t take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It’s clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother’s mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it’s a peach of cake.
This is beautiful.
It’s “dog eat dog world”
I would much prefer to live in a doggy dog world than a dog eat dog one, but such is life
You’re joking, but quite possibly he’d not even want to buy the one.
The owner family is very reclusive after a kidnapping in the 70s - but we know at least that the founders were living relatively frugal.
Ownership of Aldi is by a handful of “stiftungen” - and one of the more recent judicial squabbles in the family were of one side accusing the other trying to pull more money out of Aldi than necessary to live a non frugal livestyle.
Don’t get me wrong - they’re billonaires, though probably quite limited liquid assets. But based on their behaviour they have a good chance to survive the revolution.
Do the Albrechts still own the company? The current ceo is unrelated from what I can tell.
I think only one is currently still working in the company - but they do own it via a bunch of “Stiftungen”. IIRC that construct was selected back then to make sure that spoiled brats can’t fuck it up eventually.
Dog eat dog?
I’m weeping having learned this
I’m lucky to have Aldi as my closest grocery store.
I do end up going to another half the time not because I don’t want to go to Aldi, but because I just need one odd ingredient I don’t think they’ll have.
Their biz must be booming during this era of price gouging clown corpos
We shop at Aldi a lot and, anecdotally, they seem to be the most reasonably priced by a pretty hefty margin.
That’s because ALDI doesn’t cushion cost increases or sell loss leaders. If eggs shoot up in price 400% they immediately raise the price to match. Most grocery stores will try to eat at least some of that cost for some time hoping it will go down before they have to raise even further. That kind of pricing model means they need much larger margins on all their other products to afford that. Same way they sell milk and rotisserie chickens at a loss to get people in the store.
ALDI does not play those games and keeps their margins more consistent but their prices are more susceptible to spikes in costs.
Then how do they keep their chocolate so cheap? Their chocolate bars are cheaper, larger, and better than most American chocolate.
Aldi and Costco look like great places to shop at
Costco is the other location that we so most of our shipping at and I agree.
That’s more than I make and I’m a teaching assistant at a public elementary school. Good for them though!
LONG LIVE ALDI
Did not know Aldi were in the States?
Aldi Nord controlled stores in the US are Trader Joes, Aldi Sud stores in the US are just Aldi
We have both Aldi here but they’re differently named. One is just Aldi, the other is Trader Joe’s.
It’s our super low cost grocer, that has in recent years become more high quality. When I was a kid (80s-90s) it was like “never buy fresh anything there because it’s all crap” but these days it’s all pretty decent quality stuff. Not like farmstand good, but better than Walmart.
I’ve noticed refrigerated stuff and produce from Aldi tends to go bad pretty fast, but as long as you use it up within a few days it’s fine
Got one in my redneck suburb. We almost exclusively shop there.
Yeah, they’ve been in Texas at least 20 years. Looks like they are in most of the states in the eastern half of the continental US and the states along the southern border.
We have some in the Midwest as well
Yes, they’re not the most common but they’re in most places here. Lidl too but there’s far less of them (apparently only in the northeast)
They have been here in the US for a long time, I think their first american store opened in the 70s. Personally I love Aldi I shop at my local one here in Missouri at least once a week. Their price on extra firm tofu just can’t be beat its at least 1/3 the price it is at my other local supermarkets.
Look at ALDIs locations: https://stores.aldi.us/
I don’t know much about Aldi, but anything is better than Walmart.
Aldi is awesome, I wish we had them here in Canada
meanwhile Lidl keeps laying people off because they went too crazy trying to expand in the US.
