Lloyd tells me that his family shopped at Aldi when he was a kid. What he remembers about it was that it was super no-frills. They had one kind of everything, and no displays – they just plonked the pallets of stuff on the floor and you were on your own. Low selection, low staff, crazy cheap.
That’s right up my alley.
A while back, we got a couple of Aldi stores in Lincoln, and I got super-hooked. Yep, just one kind of everything, and a fantastically weird aisle of temporary oddities that they swap out each week – it’s where I got my pop-up tents. I love it.
It’s experiencing a wave of popularity now, though, that I fear will be its undoing. Aldi stuff is trendy now. It’s still super-cheap, but they are catering to the cool kids now – with charcuterie boards and homey knickknacks, and we know that’s not my place.
Anyway, this post is about their amazing bar codes. An Aldi store is little, and they only have a few employees at a time, and usually only two checkers. When they check you out, it is lightning fast! Beep beep beep – here’s your whole cart for $40. The secret to their speed?
Bar codes. Bar codes all over the boxes so no matter what side is down as it is swiped, there’s a bar code there. Sometimes, the bar code is even stretched all over the product, which I find simply delightful.