Aldi Süd cashiers learned the prices. They actually choose prices that were easier to type and as few different prices as possible. Barcode scanners were installed in 2000 in anticipation of the Euro introduction.

Aldi Nord cashiers learned three digit codes (around 800 ones). Scanners were only introduced in 2003 because they started to sell loose produce which is weighted at the checkout. Additionally, that allowed them to get away with less training.

The checkout speed dramatically decreased since then. Before they had to pick up each and every item they often entered the numbers faster than you could load the items onto the checkout line.

6000 items per hour was the target before. Now it's around half which would have gotten you fired back in the days.

And they ordered the POS software from two companies - at the same time. When the two companies finished the development, they paid both of them but choosed the better one which is now in production...

At least for the last incarnation in 2013 Aldi Süd took offers from 14 companies, chose 8 which delivered a proof of concept, then chose 3 to fully implement the software which was then field tested for three months.

They also have full rights to the source code and in-house developers to do small changes.

The hardware is supplied by a different company that also has software on offer. But apparently that is not good enough.

I've maintained for years you can tell how well a shop/chain is run by how fast it processes your card, McDonald's are currently the fastest I've found generally with Aldi running a close second.

Seems logical that once people have selected what they want to buy you get them out the shop as fast as possible.

I was born in 1990 and I have never seen a checkout without a scanner. Do you have a video how the procedure looked like at Aldi Nord and Aldi Sued?

The same as it is now, just no barcode scanner. With one hand the cashier moved products from the band to the other side for you to pick up, while they typed codes into a 9-digit number pad with the other hand.

Are you sure that? My memory is hazy but I think you parked the shopping cart at the register instead of behind it and just moved your items from the end of the belt back into your shopping cart while they typed in the codes without picking up anything. I think I even remember that customers were a bit confused that they needed to move their carts behind the register which was solved by signs and floor markings.

And interestingly they were not any slower.

my mother still says they were much faster.

But I think Aldi had a smaller varierty of products back in those days too.

A grocery store with only 800 items seems absurd to me. That's 10% the variety of a USA grocery story.

That's the whole point of this store. For each type of product they usually only have one brand, mostly the store brand. They also only carry fast moving products and almost no long-tail. That's one of the reasons they can offer extremely cheap prices while maintaining good quality. In the US they have no problem beating Walmart at their own game using that strategy.

Additionally, they used the same code for things like different types of yoghurt of the same size (they still have the same barcode, makes scanning faster).

Of course we have bigger stores in Germany, too. But they are not quite as profitable.

If I remember correctly, the codes were the prices. Which meant they could not have to products at the exact same price, and had quite a few products at strange prices like DM4.32 (while almost all competitors had their kitchen-psychology prices of 9.99).

Each product in the database will have a barcode (GTIN, EAN) and a PLU which is often a 4-6 digit code assigned internally. The PLUs are used as lookup codes when the barcode fails (usually because the product is not entered in the DB). The codes afaik were never prices, you would use prices for that.

You might be mixing up Aldi Nord and Sued. In Aldi Sued they really just typed in the prices.

I was referring to the history lesson matt4077 gave in an ancestor comment.

Yes, the Aldi chains were using their own system. It's not too much of a leap: they only have a few different hundred items total, and they already control the packaging and what's printed on it.

In any case, I am really glad Aldi (and Lidl) are making great inroads in the UK and Australia. Mostly because I think the incumbents in these places can use some shaking up from their cosy oligopolies. (Tesco in the UK and Coles in Australia feel `evil' in exactly the sense that we decried Microsoft to be.)