The only major chain retail store that I know of that allows their cashiers to sit is the Aldi grocery store, a German chain. Their starting pay is also $12 an hour chain-wide.
The interior of the store looks like this so they save money on the annoying shelf restocking. Products remain in their boxes until being removed by customers. No unboxing and putting stuff on shelves, and constantly having to rearrange it. Also, the boxes make inventory a breeze as a sealed box has a defined number of items in it.
Typical American grocery stores have shelves like this
Every item has to be unboxed and neatly stacked on the shelves. If they get messed up by the customers, everything has to be rearranged back to specific rigid order. When you have to verify the inventory, every item has to be removed from the shelves to be counted and put back. Aldi’s also do not have plastic bags. You can buy reusable bags or simply use the empty cardboard boxes that are available.
Last is the carts. Most grocery stores have their carts strewn across the parking lots, rolling around and hitting cars until a store employee is sent out to collect them, after being yelled at by the manager when they were told to do other tasks in the meantime. Aldi’s chains those carts together and you have to put a Quarter in to release it. When you are done, you plug the chain back in and get your Quarter back. If others are lazy, you can collect and return the loose carts and collect the Quarters.
It stops this…
Then the employees have to do this
People don’t shop at ALDI in the states? There is an ALDI at every town in Aus. They pay their employees like $22 an hour and often employ full time (well above the minimum wage for full time service employees). They let workers sit while doing registers and will only ever keep as many registers open as they need. The food tends to come from independent providers who strike a deal with ALDI and it 9 time out of 10 really good quality. I bought my TV from there, which is wild, and it was ridiculously cheap for what it was.
Like, I’m really against supermarket monopolisation, but hot shit ALDI is the most ethical supermarket I’ve ever seen. Especially since Coles (another Aus SM) now requires applicants to pay for their own police checks when putting in a job application.
hätte nie gedacht dass ich tatsächlich mal einen Post lesen muss, der fucking Aldimärkte wie eine utopische Zukunftsvision klingen lässt. Geht’s euch gut Amerika?
