Behind-The-Scene Secrets Revealed By Aldi's Employee

Aldi is quickly becoming one of the biggest grocery stores in the world. Customers can find Aldi stores across Europe, Australia, the United States, and Asia. That global grocery domination has helped make the heirs of the Aldi company billionaires, and it's putting U.S. grocery giants like Walmart and Kroger on notice (via CNN). The big appeal to consumers that fuels Aldi's success, of course, are those low prices. 

Sure, shoppers might have to trade off the name-brand products they're familiar with for Aldi's own store brands, but that's a small price to pay for a grocery bill that might be sliced in half. Aldi has a few tricks up its sleeve for keeping those prices so low, and an Australian Aldi employee named Brooke revealed a couple of those tricks of the trade in a now-private TikTok account (via The Sun). According to Brooke, the big strategy for keeping prices low in the Aldi playbook is keeping a smaller staff in its stores than competitors. Fewer people to pay means fewer overhead costs with savings that can be passed on to the customer. 

Having fewer staff on the clock means that Aldi employees need to move from one task to the other quickly and this means checking customers out as fast as possible. "If we get more customers out at a faster rate, that means we can move onto our next task faster," Brooke explained. This is emphasized so much that Aldi employees are monitored for how quickly they scan items and check-out customers. Brooke said that while this speed may not be a huge part of an employee's performance rating, "if you are consistently slow, managers may not be a big fan of that."

To help boost speed for cashiers, Aldi products often have larger barcodes and many products have multiple barcodes on a product. The less time the employee has to search for that barcode the quicker they can scan. And unlike other grocery stores, employees don't bag customer's groceries. That's something the shopper is expected to handle. "I am willing to do the extra work because the prices are amazing," one Aldi shopper told CNN. 

A no-frills shopping experience and smaller staff are just a few of the ways Aldi keeps prices low, and according to Brooke, this means Aldi can pay its employees higher wages than other stores, which keeps the staff happy.