[OT] RUles for speed of checkout at Aldi/Lidl

Not just dowels. The product range in our stores is IMO appalling. I've been looking for a 20cuft freezer with drawers for years now, only commercial ones are available and they won't pass through household doorways. I also looked for a fridge freezer with a freezer section bigger than the fridge. It IME doesn't exist, for the same reasons you gave!

Much worse here in Lidl than Aldi. Lidl have introduced self checkout tills and reduced the till staffing still further.

The average rate of filling is made equal to the average rate of emptying only because the emptying activity slows down the whole process.

The possible filling rate is much faster than the emptying rate but the filling rate has to keep stopping when the conveyor belt stops to permit the emptying to catch up.

Emptying is the limiting factor on throughput as I well know when trying to cope with the speed of the checkout person!

Not so sure about that. The very fact that the queues are longer at Lidl suggest they are keeping costs down. The whole reason for shopping there. And luckily, some are now introducing self service checkouts too.

If you don't like ever having to queue, pay the extra to order online and have it delivered.

Andy is correct about average fill and emptying rates matching one another but his conclusion does not follow:

"if customers can fill the belt that quickly, they can put them back into their trolley that quickly too"

One interesting bit is the Lidl round here have a much larger percentage of blokes on the tills than any of the other chains.

And at the others, a checkout staffed by a female seems to be more popular than one with a male.

Never quite worked this one out. Perhaps that's why I prefer self service checkouts.

Well, quite. I do wonder if some have ever shopped at a supermarket. ;-)

Packers very rarely have the degree of OCD needed to do the job properly.

female checkout staff seem, in general, to be be much quicker.

A Sainsbury checkout girl once told us they were supposed to scan 30 items a minute. I'd asked her to slow down because she was scanning faster than I could pack the items. I don't know what sanction, if any, they face if they don't achieve this.

What, like everyone does?

Why do Lidl seem to favour males?

They're just too slow for me.

Men tend to be what we call "chuckers". They fling your shopping, even the easily damaged items, down the belt with excessive vigour. We avoid them for that reason.

I don't. But it depends. Some can pack so quickly they don't slow things down, which is fine. But some take longer than the scanning does - and then start thinking about how they'll pay.

With a large shop, I just put everything back in the trolley and pack at the car. No need to even take the bags into the shop then.

I don't like holding others up unnecessarily, so expect others to be the same.

It always seems to be a surprise for some that they have to pay.

Legally they probably should not be discriminating but as the staff in these stores when they leave the till appear to go straight onto shelf stocking tasks before they get called back to man another till, so maybe the management prefer blokes because they can handle heavier work for longer.

G.Harman

Or take less paid parental leave :-)

Owain