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