Aldi Cashiers Hate When You Do This At Checkout
Perhaps the biggest appeal of shopping at Aldi is the store's incredible prices. Most every facet of the way Aldi operates is designed to shave precious cents off your shopping trip, from the shopping carts requiring a quarter to use (so the store doesn't have to pay cart wranglers) to the use of shipping boxes in the aisles, which cut down on time spent futzing with displays. Both these examples illustrate the fact that Aldi attempts to cut down on labor hours as part of its overarching commitment to money-saving, which is then passed along to you in the form of cheaper groceries.
Likewise, Aldi cashiers are allowed to sit at the registers because it helps them maintain their lightning-fast checkout paces, which, in turn, mean that fewer registers have to be open and staffed. The checkout stand at Aldi is a shrine to efficiency. To that end, it really gets cashiers' goat when you try to bag your groceries as they ring you out, as opposed to waiting until the end of the transaction and going to the dedicated bagging rail as you are intended to do.
A Reddit discussion of Aldi cashier pet peeves listed this one prominently. The process is meant to work a certain way: the cashiers fly through your groceries at what feels like the speed of light, tossing them into a waiting, second buggy that you then take off to the side to bag up your items. Trying to bag your purchase as they ring probably won't actually save you any time, plus it's annoying to cashiers, who have a certain flow to their process. It will likely slow them down if they have to dodge your arms as they are trying to check you out.
As an Aldi shopper, you can do your part to keep things moving
As we discussed, most of the day-to-day operations at Aldi have been fine-tuned to be fast, efficient, and inexpensive. If you enjoy shopping at Aldi and reaping the benefits of the experience — cheap groceries, great private-label goods, and a low-hassle shopping trip — you must realize that your cooperation with the Aldi "model" helps keep the machine chugging along. To that end, do your part as an enlightened shopper to hold up your end of the unspoken contract between Aldi and its customers.
It's been said that the best way to load your groceries onto the conveyor belt in order to make life easier for the cashiers is heaviest items first and with UPC codes facing upwards so that the employees don't have to go searching for them. This isn't the time to get fussy about how your groceries are handled! The cashiers may seem brisk, even to the point of being careless, but they are seasoned pros and know how to stack your items in the spare cart so that everything survives intact.
Meanwhile, have your payment method ready and stand out of the way. Trying to interfere with the process — or, worst of all, to bag as they're going — is not only disruptive to your cashier but unfair to the customers behind you who also deserve to reap the benefits of a speedy checkout. Once you get to the bagging area, you are free to sort and bag items at your leisure, exactly the way you want.