Food stories

Painful: cashierless Aldi turns out to be mostly customerless Aldi

Aldi winkel

I regularly shop at Aldi, and I think some of its products are really good – there are plenty of customer favorites among them. But that cashierless Aldi, which we recently wrote about (not very enthusiastically), turns out to be even sadder than expected.

Foto van culinair journalist Sharon van Lokhorst

Maybe you missed it, but last year Aldi opened a store in Utrecht where you can no longer pay at a checkout. In fact, you do not even have to scan your groceries. The store is packed with cameras and sensors—475, to be precise—that register everything you take with you. Payment is made via a QR code. The amount is then charged to your credit card.

I think this is awful.

Customerless supermarket

And apparently I am not the only one. There is barely a soul to be seen in the cashierless supermarket. Over the past few weeks, RTV Utrecht visited this particular Aldi several times and found that Utrecht is not exactly queuing up for this new cashless, privacy-free way of shopping.

Not exactly what you would call a fun experience

IT specialist Philip Boontje noticed that too; last December, he walked around the store with a camera. ‘There is absolutely nobody in the entire store.’ The user experience of grocery shopping is not only completely awful socially, downloading the app also seems to be quite an unpleasant experience. ‘It took fifteen minutes to install the app on my phone. While I was doing that, at least ten people walked away,’ says Philip.

According to him, the fact that you have to pay with a credit card is also useless. ‘Almost nobody in the Netherlands carries a credit card.’

Lovely cashiers

I am going to do my grocery shopping at my neighborhood supermarket in a bit. The one that always has such lovely cashiers, and where I can even pay with actual cash if I want to.

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Source: blckbx.tv

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