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.
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
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(to manager in response) “then why the fuck aren’t you cleaning all the time, then?”
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.
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.
Corporations make that decision. And our country allows (if not encourages) it.
Yes, seriously. Same goes with drinking water behind the counter.
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!
Cashier stations with chairs are VERY rare, yes. The general trope is that managers/owners think it makes workers appear lazy.
cashiers aren’t allowed to sit in USA?
Not in any stores I have seen in my city.
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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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!
“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
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”.
The article says that those are the starting wages, for store and warehouse, respectively.
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.
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.
Yes please, we need more competition on groceries in rural Texas and also Arkansas as an extra special sort of fuck you to Walmart.
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.
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
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/
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)
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
LONG LIVE ALDI
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.
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.
meanwhile Lidl keeps laying people off because they went too crazy trying to expand in the US.
I don’t know much about Aldi, but anything is better than Walmart.
That’s more than I make and I’m a teaching assistant at a public elementary school. Good for them though!
That doesn’t sound sustainable tbh.
If workers like their job and feel appreciated, they work harder. The job also likely attracts better people.
They might be able to hire less people as a result
I did night fill at a supermarket here in Australia once. And there are so many useless people working at them. There was never any incentive to work beyond the minimum standard
Here in Australia at least, supermarkets are making record profits, so it would simply be less money for shareholders
I’m not talking about the pay rate, I’m talking about rapidly expanding into a market and hiring thousands of people.
This is exactly what companies like Google and Amazon due to keep a continuous cycle of growth and layoffs going for optics on share value.
