I was praised for the speed and organisation of my packing at the checkout of my local Aldi store at the weekend – and few things have made me prouder.
Each visit to the supermarket in Tewkesbury Road, Cheltenham, is another round in the long-running challenge I set myself – to pack expertly at the checkout without causing the checkout operator to stop or get cross as the scanned shopping piles up.
Everyone knows Aldi suggests people pack at the packing shelf.
But my challenge, which I choose to accept, is to bag everything in the trolley at the speed the operator puts the food and other items through the till.
On Saturday, an operator turned to me and said I packed very well.
He also noticed how I had organised items on the conveyor belt to maximise the speed of deploying items to bags in the trolley – bag one, frozen; bag two, potatoes, vegetables; bag three; fruits, bread.
It was validation for working at a supermarket while a student and I have long waited for my aptitude for packing to be recognised outside of my immediate family.
If you want to keep up with the speedy operators, and make sure you don’t have 2kgs of potatoes crushing your grapes, here’s how to do it.
Remember, the following rules must not be broken:
- Cashier is the priority, cause them no hold-ups
- Do not let goods pile-up.
Abort your mission is either of these happen
Here is our A.L.D.I guide to keeping up with the cashier
Assess
Have you got enough bags?
What is the mix of your shopping? Will there be a lot of frozen products, tins, produce, soft items such as bread, and vulnerable items such as eggs?
If you have a lot of frozen food, you can use this as the foundation for your shopping bags and pile provisions that are chilled on top.
For example, frozen cod and broccoli florets on the bottom, with mince, prawns and butter resting above
So, as you fill your trolley and prepare to approach the till, have some idea about how to lay the goods on the conveyor belt.
Load
If you are getting a lot of tinned produce, they can happily fill up a sturdy bag.
Tins are among the fastest items to be processed through the till, so you’ll need to be swift to move them from the till point and into your bag.
Bread and produce is the hardest to handle, so it’s worth placing the fruit and veg on the conveyor belt in readiness for their placement in a bag.
You’re not going to want potatoes on top of avocados, so try to get the potatoes through the cash desk first followed by softer produce such as bananas.
Potatoes, swedes etc are great for the bottom of the bag, with apples, oranges placed on top.
Distribute
As the goods come through the till, you only have a small window of opportunity to remove the items and put into the bags.
It’s a good idea to have ‘open’ bags in your trolley and have a plan for which one is for frozen, which one for tins, which one for produce and one for random toiletries etc.
If you’ve laid out your shopping on the conveyor belt properly, you should be able to pick, move and drop with speed and precision.
If frozen goes through first, with chilled goods next, you should be able to fill these bags up relatively swiftly.
If tins and other ‘harder’ stuff comes through next, you can quickly put those away too.
Toiletries and other sundries items can come through last and can either ‘top up’ some of the unfilled bags or create a more random selection bag with few, if any, vulnerable items.
A good tip is to keep very vulnerable things such as eggs until the end – then they can be placed on top of your shopping bags.
Innovate
Don’t rest on your laurels. At the end, did you have to throw a few items into the trolley at the end? Did you work out what to do with bulky items? Did you squash the blueberries or dent an aubergine?
Always seek new ways to organise and distribute and remember, never cause the cashier to slow up.
Aldi’s business model depends on swiftly processing people though the till. You don’t want to be THAT person who holds everything up.
The priority is always the cashier.
This is an updated version of an earlier article.
