Aldi used to have fairly skilled labor and no barcodes. Seriously. Every cashier previously worked as a stocker until he learned all of the three-digit codes for all of the products in the store. Then as a cashier nothing was scanned, instead the cashier very quickly typed in the three digit code for everything as he pulled it across. A good cashier was faster than a scanner, as he could type in the codes for items all the way back on the belt before they got to him, shoving items by in bulk.
They were, also, paid accordingly well.
Didn’t some busy body organization last week say that sitting was worse than smoking?
Aldi still pays well above the average for retail jobs.
You can tell though when you walk in the store they are designed to run with absolute minimum staffing.
The whole world supply chain runs on bar code scanning, instantaneous data transfer and reordering. Ringing up the old way just would not compute, no matter how good their people were at doing it.