Metropol

bilky asko wrote: Sun 27 Apr, 2025 16.12

Philip wrote: Sun 27 Apr, 2025 11.22B) it’s quite the edge case to have customers coming in with their mobile wallet as the only way to pay and not also have either a physical card with chip and PIN, or cash. Maybe don’t walk into a shop with only one method of paying and no back up?

But for a lot of people, their phone is their wallet. Their back-ups are the various cards they have stored on Apple Pay or Google Pay.

More fool for them to solely rely on an electronic device that's got a greater chance of being broken/stolen/flaking out.
When we did get to such a point of over-reliance on phones? And giving staff abuse because they couldn't pay.

Each to their own. I just wouldn’t go out with only one method of paying, regardless of which one.

If I’m going somewhere local I’ll nearly always just take my phone. I pay for practically everything on Apple Pay so the wallet is just clutter. In the event a shop had a fault I could always nip home and get my card.

If I’m heading to another town I’d take my wallet though as a just in case.

Pete wrote: Sun 27 Apr, 2025 22.53 If I’m going somewhere local I’ll nearly always just take my phone. I pay for practically everything on Apple Pay so the wallet is just clutter. In the event a shop had a fault I could always nip home and get my card.

If I’m heading to another town I’d take my wallet though as a just in case.

Same. It’s certainly better here than the US too - where you can never be certain if Apple Pay or even contactless can be used somewhere. I don’t think we appreciate here how good things are for universal payment standards.

Whilst I almost always carry a small card wallet with me when out of the house, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to just rely on Apple Pay etc these days. It’s convenient, accepted basically everywhere, and doesn’t have the payment limits that contactless has (although these have been bumped up considerably in recent years).

On a connected theme, the occasions that I find myself with cash these days are very rare and generally feel pretty inconvenient. For my last few European city breaks I’ve not even taken any euros out in advance and have just relied on my phone and then a credit card with no fees on foreign cash withdrawals, should it be needed. This works a treat in big European cities - the last place I went I think I had need to withdraw 10 euros across the entire trip. It did, however, prove slightly trickier when I went to the US recently, as I hadn’t appreciated that you can’t just use any ATM over there without incurring silly charges. It took a few attempts of trial and error before I managed to get cash out, so when I did I ended up overcompensating and ended up bringing some dollars back!

Philip wrote: Sun 27 Apr, 2025 11.22 B) it’s quite the edge case to have customers coming in with their mobile wallet as the only way to pay and not also have either a physical card with chip and PIN, or cash. Maybe don’t walk into a shop with only one method of paying and no back up?

I almost never take my physical wallet out with me. I rely almost entirely on my phone. If I go abroad I'll stick my wallet in my bag (and then leave it in the hotel while I go out for the day). And I don't think this is an edge case at all – I think most of my contemporaries would do the same. I have handled no cash in 2025, and barely any in 2024. I can't think of a single occasion when I've been let down by Apple Pay in, say, three years.

Clearly, if I had a vital transaction I needed to perform, or was going to be in a situation where I'd be separated from my physical card for some time, as with going overseas, I'd have a backup, but day to day? No.

Actually, I did try to visit M&S during the time when contactless wasn't working – I just went to another shop. In reality, many of those types of transactions are trivial, and I'd be fine to not make them. For the ones where it's more than an inconvenience, I'd have to head home for a card and do it another time.

Philip wrote: Sun 27 Apr, 2025 22.41 Each to their own. I just wouldn’t go out with only one method of paying, regardless of which one.

But why? Why carry around clutter all the time just on the off chance an extremely rare, once in a blue moon event like this happens? Not being able to buy a bag of shopping isn't exactly the biggest inconvenience in the world.

I've been using my phone to pay for everything since Covid and can't think of a single issue I've encountered. The only time I take a physical card anywhere is abroad and increasingly I'm finding I use my phone 100% of the time on trips too. I genuinely can't remember the last time I used cash, it's certainly been years.

As I said, I don't always find Apple Pay convenient, most of the time I find using my card (to do contactless) more convenient so I won't go without my wallet which has my cards in, which also has cash in when that's needed. Peace of mind for me at least.

I still carry some cash and change as a back-up.

This issue has been bugging me for 20+ years. Aldi have a system of putting variants (e.g. flavours) of the same item under the same barcode and shelf space.

So how do they gauge supply/demand of each variant?

Recently they launched a range of Subway-inspired sauces: Sweet Onion, Chipotle Mayo and Marinara. Almost immediately, the Sweet Onion and Chipotle Mayo sold out (probably due to TikTok shenanigans), leaving the shelf full of Marinara. It's remained that way in my branch for the last 2 weeks.

How does this method benefit Aldi or its customers? Is the data on unsold variants fed back into the system?

rdobbie wrote: Sat 03 May, 2025 08.28 This issue has been bugging me for 20+ years. Aldi have a system of putting variants (e.g. flavours) of the same item under the same barcode and shelf space.

So how do they gauge supply/demand of each variant?

Recently they launched a range of Subway-inspired sauces: Sweet Onion, Chipotle Mayo and Marinara. Almost immediately, the Sweet Onion and Chipotle Mayo sold out (probably due to TikTok shenanigans), leaving the shelf full of Marinara. It's remained that way in my branch for the last 2 weeks.

How does this method benefit Aldi or its customers? Is the data on unsold variants fed back into the system?

It's just one of the many weird ways they do things.

I imagine it's something to do with the fact they didn't have barcode scanners at all until much later than all their competitors, and instead their checkout operators would rapidly mash 5 digit codes in at incredible velocity. There was some arbitrary number of these codes their staff had to memorise, and having mixed SKUs helped with that.

But yeah that hasn't been the case for 25 years at this point; you'd have thought even if they are mixing them through supply chain to shelf they'd still like to know which variant has actually been purchased so they can modify the case makeup.

Contrast with other retailers who are now moving to 2D codes/QRs so they can track datecodes passing through the till...