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.
Maybe on average among cashiers barcodes are faster, but I’ve still never seen anybody scan as fast as I’ve seen some people key. They don’t wait for the barcode beeps, and they start keying as soon as items hit the belt, before they even get to where the scanner would be. I’ve even seen them key what’s in your shopping cart if you pull items out too slowly.