It's a stressful chore that every shopper at Aldi has to endure as the price to pay for cheaper shopping.
You've battled through the crowds of shoppers and managed to fill your trolley, but now you have to pack your shopping away at lightning speed.
It's impossible to keep up with the cashiers as they whizz through your items, and your soon left with a mountain of goods on the small space by the till.
So the art of bagging up your bargains as quickly and safely as possible without annoying those behind you is left entirely to you.
For some, this presents a challenge.
To pack your shopping at the speed of the cashier without damaging produce or causing any hold-ups whatsoever for the busy till operator is not easy.
So here is a handy guide to packing at the till and avoiding the packing shelf, reports GloucestershireLive.
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.
