Posted on 06/28/2023 7:20:16 PM PDT by Paul R.
Well, to put it bluntly, this sucks. I was in our local Aldi store earlier today and they were in the midst of going to all digital pricing. That is, there's essentially a bar code on the shelf under each group of boxes of items, or under the 2% milk rack, etc., which you scan with a smart phone to get the price. No printed prices are on the shelves, and won't be, according to the employee I spoke with.
“It’s a pain when you can’t correlate price notices with the product on the shelf.”
Safeway is notorious for that. They put price placards by the meat products, but I’ll be damned if I can find a meat package that correlates to the advertising price placard. It drives me nuts.
We’ve got a local chain in North Idaho called “Super One” and they don’t have any of this crap — just good, low prices, excellent quality, and reasonable selections. They do run a weekly print flyer, but that’s it. I keep an eye on that.
They’ve done that for me, but TWICE they’ve made me go to another register to get the right price, once for Atlantic Salmon ($4.99/lb) and once for the wine. What a colossal time waste asking the customer to go with the manager to another register!
Any shopper can check the price on every item while keeping their phone in their hand during their entire time in the store but you know how people will start skipping the process as they tire of the tedious chore, especially when comparing the prices on all of the competitive versions and all of the sizes of the product they want to grab.
This and becoming almost entirely self-checkout makes me think the stores have a long-term plan to eventually end the in-store shopping cart process completely.
“Some poor worker has to meticulously change those things every week.”
That occurred to me looking at thousands and thousands of those “special” price tags all over the place. I think on some aisles, over two-thirds of the products have the “special” price tag (reminds me of the old saw ‘if everyone is special, then no-one is special’).
And they expect that poor worker to have 100% accuracy, too. I would go bonkers taking down the old tags and putting up the new ones every week. I wouldn’t last a day doing that.
It’s ironic — thousands of the old fashioned printed “SPECIAL PRICE” tags on the shelves, but they want you to go all digital. Make up your minds!!
For a low-margin, high volume business, they sure are succeeding in making it very complicated.
IMHO, The most effective way to protest this involves 2 steps:
1. Visit the store and personally let the manager know your beefs.
2. Let the manager know you’re scratching that store from your grocery shopping habit and that you’re spreading the word among your friends and family. Check the store every 3 months or so to see if they have relented.
The only way to hurt the store is through the cash register.
Walmart in my state doesn’t have bags. I hate it and won’t pay for one of their advertising logo cloth bags. I did buy a carton of disposable plastic bags from Amazon.
Aldi will be installing one cm. high LCD strips along the front edge of each shelf that display current prices and will be kept up to date centrally.
Never been in one...
Now I’m positive that I’ll never go in one in the future...
“Let the manager know you’re scratching that store from your grocery shopping habit and that you’re spreading the word among your friends and family”
The problem is that after one chain starts something almost all the others follow. For example, after Walmart in my state dropped plastic shopping bags the others did the same within a couple months. There might be one regional chain that still has them.
Which state do you live in? There’s still plastic bags around here.
Just lie...do not give them your correct number
I refuse to step foot in any of the Walmart's here.
All Section 8'ers and I don't want to have to return fire in such a crowded location.
So ‘accidentally’ changing a digit isn’t lying?
So far, I’ve managed to just NOT do business with them. That has seemed more useful.
Right...:*)
even better, assuming they have conventional checkout at which point you can see the actual prices, set aside the items you think cost too much and get a clerk to remove them from the checkout list ... if enough people do that, they’ll quickly put back human readable prices ...
WA
And no paper bags either at Walmart although most of the other chains still have those.
No way I would ever shop that way. I use do my bulk shopping at Walmart and quit when they got rid of most of the cashiers and were rude when I asked for one. I now purchase my groceries online where I can see the prices and have them delivered to my home. So much easier, faster, and less frustrating.
Would you prefer Target?
We’re doing most of our shopping online, as well.
It’s one of the few benefits we’ve found in the whole Covid thing - various interests found ways to profit from from the Covid mess, including providing delivery for almost anything; and it seems to have stuck as a new ‘industry’. We can have almost everything we need brought straight to our door, now.
Once in a great while there’s a problem with delivery, but generally everyone who provides this service has been excellent.
I’m sure it’s probably different in other areas, especially more rural ones; but it’s been great for us, and we’ll probably never go back.
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