10 ms·

I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.

forkerenok 6y ago
I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.
dna_polymerase 6y ago
In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
- verst 6y ago
  Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon? I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).
  - neuronic 6y ago
    Because the person doesn't know what they are talking about. Germans will never prefer Amazon over known local stores - it's already enough to be an American company these days. People know what that means and they don't want it. Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fake customer relations smiles, Germans find that creepy and annoying. I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster. And then comes workers rights. Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US (good luck, Tesla in Berlin). Running a business profitable in Germany is way different from doing the same in the United States. That's both for legal/bureaucratic reasons and also customer expectations. People in Germany also bring their own bags and actively don't want some slave to bag their items. It's a real skill not to piss off other Germans in a supermarket when you scramble to bag your stuff and take longer than a few seconds. In my experience, Aldi cashiers (well-paid btw) are better than any robot you could put there. Their speed is insane (remember to keep up with the bagging or you will get evil stares or comments for being a moron). The market is completely different.
    - didsomeonesay 6y ago
      > I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster. You are on to something. This is almost the classic Aldi check-out experience in Germany. Also, for not putting your cart in the correct location.
    - klarws 6y ago
      > Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US. In some areas yes, I hear that VW workers are paid well. In other areas, you have 400 Euro jobs and forced labor below minimum wage if the "job center" (formerly social security) decides that you need to be a slave. I don't understand why people here defend Europe as if it were the 1980s. Those times are long gone, perhaps folks here have a sheltered life and only listen to state propaganda.
      - neuronic 6y ago
        Yes, you are absolutely correct here but this is a very complex topic following the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s. All of this is currently on the political line and there is enormous political will in the population to "fix" Hartz IV. It helped Germany out of its labor misery when Schröder became chancellor in 1998 (5m jobless down to ~1m) but it brought new problems such as 1€/h jobs (tax-free, on top of unemployment payments), weird sanctions and brain-dead mechanisms to put people back into work. If it weren't for Corona it would likely be one of the major topics in the societal discussion right now as Hartz IV is widely recognized to be insufficient. Federal minimum wage is also fairly new and already way too little. But Corona is shaking everything up, so who knows what will happen now.
      - eru 6y ago
        Labour below the minimum wage is a fairly new thing. That's because minimum wages are a fairly new thing in Germany.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      It's true, as an American here in Munich, buying too many groceries at once is anxiety-inducing. I have to limit how much I buy at once, because otherwise it's too much to fit on the conveyor belt, such that I have to wait for items to be scanned so that I can put more things on. Which leads to not being fast though putting things back in the cart (so that I can bag separately later), which pisses everyone off. I appreciate the low prices, but it also makes buying groceries kind of stressful in a way that was never true in the US.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble. I doubt that since I think that Amazon's vision is very different from what many German customers want. Here is a (German) text of a German blogger who went to Amazon Books in the Empire State Building. His experience was not positive: > https://www.danisch.de/blog/2019/06/18/ein-seltsamer-einkauf/ https://www.danisch.de/blog/2019/06/18/ein-seltsamer-einkauf...
  - lstamour 6y ago
    That’s not how prices work at Whole Foods, and that wasn’t my personal experience at the same store in January this year. Most items had e-ink price displays next to them so they could update but they were slow to update and so price updates were generally limited to once a day. In Whole Foods, they still use the usual printed price tags everywhere, though maybe locations vary. In Ontario, where I am, there’s a Retailer Code of Conduct that most grocery stores have signed up for which says if the price in the aisle is cheaper than the price at the register, you get the item for free if it’s under $10, or thereabouts. Also as a clarification, the in store demo Amazon Echo devices are set to a variety of names including Alexa and Amazon, which one to say where is printed on the product description tag I saw. They’re not spaced far enough apart though, occasionally “the wrong one” would answer me. I had a much nicer time shopping at an Amazon Go Store, though selection was limited and I had to edit my receipt later as it thought I’d bought a pop when I had only browsed for flavours.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    To sum up: intransparent pricing that depends on your Prime customer status and may change after looking at an item, so you may end up paying more than expected.
  - bildung 6y ago
    That wouldn't even be legal in Germany (and I guess the EU), pricing has to be clearly labelled, and additionally has to have a price per common unit if the package has a different size (e.g. a 3.5l bottle of detergent would show €/litre). I wonder why they don't just use e-ink price labels? These are common around here for a decade or so.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  In the UK, discounted or damaged items have a special sticker meaning "discounted to £0.70". That sticker has a barcode on, and is what is scanned at the checkout. That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to. Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went out the door, you don't know what needs to be restocked.
  - tobylane 6y ago
    They scan the item before putting the new sticker on, then usually put the item in a known, high traffic area so it’s gone by the end of the day. Maybe they just consider it out the door at that scan then bin whatever reduced items didn’t sell.
  - Wildgoose 6y ago
    Shrinkage in the form of shop-lifting also has an effect. Having said that, if the items being reduced were scanned as part of the process of being assigned a discount sticker, then the stock-taking process should be able to capture this. (Reduced items are usually sold, or failing that, discarded or returned).
  - jon-wood 6y ago
    I don't have any insider information, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that those discount stickers aren't in fact the same. At the very least they have the actual discounted price encoded them, it wouldn't be a big leap for the label printer to register a new SKU for "Semi-skimmed Milk, discounted to £0.30" so they can still track that item's stock.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      I have just checked the barcodes, and all stickers are identical. Same barcode. Same text. Same everything. They are preprinted, not printed by a machine in the shop too.
      - 6y ago
- bflesch 6y ago
  That's the thing I tried to point out in my original comment: They don't embrace automation because it will 100% lower prices in the whole industry. In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating? Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation needed for main-stream adaption, they can get way higher margins in other categories (e.g. non-food). IMHO the perfect supermarket of the future is not food delivery, but a drive-in/pick-up model where you can go 24/7 and where your order is packed 100% by robots. Until we reach this point in terms of technology, the traditional supermarkets will not change due to the above-mentioned oligopoly.
  - turnipla 6y ago
    How does this make sense? Automation lowers prices, not margins. The prices go down because you don’t have to pay people. If it costs the same, you don’t lower prices just because you’re using automation.
    - bflesch 6y ago
      Of course automation lowers prices, but only for the customers, for LIDL it will first of all decrease revenues. Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate. It took me a long time to understand this relationship, but while discussing this with a machine learning expert hired by LIDL it suddenly clicked: this is basically why they don't innovate further in terms of offline retail experience.
      - turnipla 6y ago
        You’re talking about ecommerce, not automation. Automation is unrelated to where products are sold. Automation might just mean one fewer cashier at a regular store.
    - 6y ago
- twic 6y ago
  > In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually Do other stores not do this? I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records. As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.
  - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
    Grocery is a high-volume business with multiple supply chains of various levels of integration. Keeping actual inventories rectified with sales data depends on accurate billing/receiving through the back door of any specific outlet. Expected inventory vs actual inventory can easily get out of sync due to uncapturable or hard-to-capture behavior at the store level (theft and damaged products aka shrink) or product being left at the warehouse but present on an invoice (which is transmitted electronically) or even product misplaced somewhere in the backroom that cannot effectively be sold. There is constant drift between what should be at a store versus what is actually at a store and augmented ordering is usually used in lieu of automated ordering, where managers have shelf-level visibility on what is on its way, what is currently present, and what is projected to sell based on historical data using something like a Motorola Symbol Barcode Scanner running Windows CE.
- StreamBright 6y ago
  Ironically SAP is also a German company. I have no idea why anybody thinks that using SAP will help any company. One size fits all approach with hilarious failure stories. Still, some managers think it is great. Amazon could not enter the German market that easily, people really like to shop in Aldi / Lidl and the online retail business is not as strong as in the US.
  - bflesch 6y ago
    When thinking about SAP, it helps to imagine how bad it has been at many companies before they introduced SAP. It has many flaws, but at least people are finally using a database to store their information :o) On a side note, Amazon is unable to penetrate ALDI & LIDL's market share because they offer better prices. It's as easy as that, and it is not about whether German people love waiting in queues or driving to some shop. The savings by shopping at discounters are very real. Once you factor delivery costs into the equation, many German food retailers only offer the more expensive brand foods for delivery, and not the cheap stuff - exactly as Amazon does.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    SAP makes a ton of sense if you have a large, complex operation that spans multiple countries. SAP is terrible yes, but do you know any other way on how to get complex processes from multiple sectors together in a single system? SAP is basically admitting your logistics and operations became so complex and large that there is no other way to do this more efficiently. One example is a company which produces ship engines and various other parts. They source all resources from different sub-companies across the globe. From the raw material to final assembly. All this information needed to be tracked in an ERP system and to be honest, SAP works well in this regard because it has a standardized process (which is terrible i must admit) but atleast it's a standardized process.
- Certhas 6y ago
  Look at the evidence. Lidl (and ALDI) are exapnding all over the world. Meanwhile Walmart decided to pull out of Germany because the competition was to tough. ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices. It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL. I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.
  - realityking 6y ago
    > In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. It was quite seriously discussed and some were used during the 2005 election. You don't see any discussions about it today because the constitutional court put a stop to it. https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/germany-constitutional-court-decision-on-electronic-voting/ https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/germany-constit...
    - eru 6y ago
      Interesting! Yeah, voting machines are pretty unnecessary (for most voting systems). There's something to be said in favour of a method that any village idiot can understand and observe with their own eyes. Paper delivers that.
      - pgeorgi 6y ago
        > There's something to be said in favour of a method that any village idiot can understand and observe with their own eyes. For example that it's a precondition to fair and open elections? :-)
- moonduster 6y ago
  I don't want that though, and the majority of Europeans don't either. Delivery robots work in the US as a crutch for the bad infrastructure, whereas here in Europe, I can walk or cycle to the store. I don't need to do big, weekly shopping like Americans tend to do (I've lived in the US also!) because the stores are nowhere near as giant. We already have cashier-less systems in the form of self-checkout tills and handheld self-scanning. We don't need Instacart because the chains themselves handle the delivery.
  - Certhas 6y ago
    Remember Monoprix trolling the Amazon Go ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNoa-9TBH30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNoa-9TBH30
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  This is true of most food retailers in the US, as well. Most forays into automated ordering have ended poorly due to cascading issues with the electronic inventory getting out of sync with reality. Whole contracting companies exist to reconcile physical and electronic inventories, and this is mostly done for accounting purposes rather than to aid automation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.

dna_polymerase 6y ago

In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.

verst 6y ago
Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon? I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).
- neuronic 6y ago
  Because the person doesn't know what they are talking about. Germans will never prefer Amazon over known local stores - it's already enough to be an American company these days. People know what that means and they don't want it. Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fake customer relations smiles, Germans find that creepy and annoying. I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster. And then comes workers rights. Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US (good luck, Tesla in Berlin). Running a business profitable in Germany is way different from doing the same in the United States. That's both for legal/bureaucratic reasons and also customer expectations. People in Germany also bring their own bags and actively don't want some slave to bag their items. It's a real skill not to piss off other Germans in a supermarket when you scramble to bag your stuff and take longer than a few seconds. In my experience, Aldi cashiers (well-paid btw) are better than any robot you could put there. Their speed is insane (remember to keep up with the bagging or you will get evil stares or comments for being a moron). The market is completely different.
  - didsomeonesay 6y ago
    > I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster. You are on to something. This is almost the classic Aldi check-out experience in Germany. Also, for not putting your cart in the correct location.
  - klarws 6y ago
    > Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US. In some areas yes, I hear that VW workers are paid well. In other areas, you have 400 Euro jobs and forced labor below minimum wage if the "job center" (formerly social security) decides that you need to be a slave. I don't understand why people here defend Europe as if it were the 1980s. Those times are long gone, perhaps folks here have a sheltered life and only listen to state propaganda.
    - neuronic 6y ago
      Yes, you are absolutely correct here but this is a very complex topic following the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s. All of this is currently on the political line and there is enormous political will in the population to "fix" Hartz IV. It helped Germany out of its labor misery when Schröder became chancellor in 1998 (5m jobless down to ~1m) but it brought new problems such as 1€/h jobs (tax-free, on top of unemployment payments), weird sanctions and brain-dead mechanisms to put people back into work. If it weren't for Corona it would likely be one of the major topics in the societal discussion right now as Hartz IV is widely recognized to be insufficient. Federal minimum wage is also fairly new and already way too little. But Corona is shaking everything up, so who knows what will happen now.
    - eru 6y ago
      Labour below the minimum wage is a fairly new thing. That's because minimum wages are a fairly new thing in Germany.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    It's true, as an American here in Munich, buying too many groceries at once is anxiety-inducing. I have to limit how much I buy at once, because otherwise it's too much to fit on the conveyor belt, such that I have to wait for items to be scanned so that I can put more things on. Which leads to not being fast though putting things back in the cart (so that I can bag separately later), which pisses everyone off. I appreciate the low prices, but it also makes buying groceries kind of stressful in a way that was never true in the US.
wolfgke 6y ago
> If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble. I doubt that since I think that Amazon's vision is very different from what many German customers want. Here is a (German) text of a German blogger who went to Amazon Books in the Empire State Building. His experience was not positive: > https://www.danisch.de/blog/2019/06/18/ein-seltsamer-einkauf/ https://www.danisch.de/blog/2019/06/18/ein-seltsamer-einkauf...
- lstamour 6y ago
  That’s not how prices work at Whole Foods, and that wasn’t my personal experience at the same store in January this year. Most items had e-ink price displays next to them so they could update but they were slow to update and so price updates were generally limited to once a day. In Whole Foods, they still use the usual printed price tags everywhere, though maybe locations vary. In Ontario, where I am, there’s a Retailer Code of Conduct that most grocery stores have signed up for which says if the price in the aisle is cheaper than the price at the register, you get the item for free if it’s under $10, or thereabouts. Also as a clarification, the in store demo Amazon Echo devices are set to a variety of names including Alexa and Amazon, which one to say where is printed on the product description tag I saw. They’re not spaced far enough apart though, occasionally “the wrong one” would answer me. I had a much nicer time shopping at an Amazon Go Store, though selection was limited and I had to edit my receipt later as it thought I’d bought a pop when I had only browsed for flavours.
- yorwba 6y ago
  To sum up: intransparent pricing that depends on your Prime customer status and may change after looking at an item, so you may end up paying more than expected.
- bildung 6y ago
  That wouldn't even be legal in Germany (and I guess the EU), pricing has to be clearly labelled, and additionally has to have a price per common unit if the package has a different size (e.g. a 3.5l bottle of detergent would show €/litre). I wonder why they don't just use e-ink price labels? These are common around here for a decade or so.
londons_explore 6y ago
In the UK, discounted or damaged items have a special sticker meaning "discounted to £0.70". That sticker has a barcode on, and is what is scanned at the checkout. That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to. Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went out the door, you don't know what needs to be restocked.
- tobylane 6y ago
  They scan the item before putting the new sticker on, then usually put the item in a known, high traffic area so it’s gone by the end of the day. Maybe they just consider it out the door at that scan then bin whatever reduced items didn’t sell.
- Wildgoose 6y ago
  Shrinkage in the form of shop-lifting also has an effect. Having said that, if the items being reduced were scanned as part of the process of being assigned a discount sticker, then the stock-taking process should be able to capture this. (Reduced items are usually sold, or failing that, discarded or returned).
- jon-wood 6y ago
  I don't have any insider information, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that those discount stickers aren't in fact the same. At the very least they have the actual discounted price encoded them, it wouldn't be a big leap for the label printer to register a new SKU for "Semi-skimmed Milk, discounted to £0.30" so they can still track that item's stock.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    I have just checked the barcodes, and all stickers are identical. Same barcode. Same text. Same everything. They are preprinted, not printed by a machine in the shop too.
    - 6y ago
bflesch 6y ago
That's the thing I tried to point out in my original comment: They don't embrace automation because it will 100% lower prices in the whole industry. In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating? Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation needed for main-stream adaption, they can get way higher margins in other categories (e.g. non-food). IMHO the perfect supermarket of the future is not food delivery, but a drive-in/pick-up model where you can go 24/7 and where your order is packed 100% by robots. Until we reach this point in terms of technology, the traditional supermarkets will not change due to the above-mentioned oligopoly.
- turnipla 6y ago
  How does this make sense? Automation lowers prices, not margins. The prices go down because you don’t have to pay people. If it costs the same, you don’t lower prices just because you’re using automation.
  - bflesch 6y ago
    Of course automation lowers prices, but only for the customers, for LIDL it will first of all decrease revenues. Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate. It took me a long time to understand this relationship, but while discussing this with a machine learning expert hired by LIDL it suddenly clicked: this is basically why they don't innovate further in terms of offline retail experience.
    - turnipla 6y ago
      You’re talking about ecommerce, not automation. Automation is unrelated to where products are sold. Automation might just mean one fewer cashier at a regular store.
  - 6y ago
twic 6y ago
> In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually Do other stores not do this? I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records. As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  Grocery is a high-volume business with multiple supply chains of various levels of integration. Keeping actual inventories rectified with sales data depends on accurate billing/receiving through the back door of any specific outlet. Expected inventory vs actual inventory can easily get out of sync due to uncapturable or hard-to-capture behavior at the store level (theft and damaged products aka shrink) or product being left at the warehouse but present on an invoice (which is transmitted electronically) or even product misplaced somewhere in the backroom that cannot effectively be sold. There is constant drift between what should be at a store versus what is actually at a store and augmented ordering is usually used in lieu of automated ordering, where managers have shelf-level visibility on what is on its way, what is currently present, and what is projected to sell based on historical data using something like a Motorola Symbol Barcode Scanner running Windows CE.
StreamBright 6y ago
Ironically SAP is also a German company. I have no idea why anybody thinks that using SAP will help any company. One size fits all approach with hilarious failure stories. Still, some managers think it is great. Amazon could not enter the German market that easily, people really like to shop in Aldi / Lidl and the online retail business is not as strong as in the US.
- bflesch 6y ago
  When thinking about SAP, it helps to imagine how bad it has been at many companies before they introduced SAP. It has many flaws, but at least people are finally using a database to store their information :o) On a side note, Amazon is unable to penetrate ALDI & LIDL's market share because they offer better prices. It's as easy as that, and it is not about whether German people love waiting in queues or driving to some shop. The savings by shopping at discounters are very real. Once you factor delivery costs into the equation, many German food retailers only offer the more expensive brand foods for delivery, and not the cheap stuff - exactly as Amazon does.
- kazen44 6y ago
  SAP makes a ton of sense if you have a large, complex operation that spans multiple countries. SAP is terrible yes, but do you know any other way on how to get complex processes from multiple sectors together in a single system? SAP is basically admitting your logistics and operations became so complex and large that there is no other way to do this more efficiently. One example is a company which produces ship engines and various other parts. They source all resources from different sub-companies across the globe. From the raw material to final assembly. All this information needed to be tracked in an ERP system and to be honest, SAP works well in this regard because it has a standardized process (which is terrible i must admit) but atleast it's a standardized process.
Certhas 6y ago
Look at the evidence. Lidl (and ALDI) are exapnding all over the world. Meanwhile Walmart decided to pull out of Germany because the competition was to tough. ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices. It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL. I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.
- realityking 6y ago
  > In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. It was quite seriously discussed and some were used during the 2005 election. You don't see any discussions about it today because the constitutional court put a stop to it. https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/germany-constitutional-court-decision-on-electronic-voting/ https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/germany-constit...
  - eru 6y ago
    Interesting! Yeah, voting machines are pretty unnecessary (for most voting systems). There's something to be said in favour of a method that any village idiot can understand and observe with their own eyes. Paper delivers that.
    - pgeorgi 6y ago
      > There's something to be said in favour of a method that any village idiot can understand and observe with their own eyes. For example that it's a precondition to fair and open elections? :-)
moonduster 6y ago
I don't want that though, and the majority of Europeans don't either. Delivery robots work in the US as a crutch for the bad infrastructure, whereas here in Europe, I can walk or cycle to the store. I don't need to do big, weekly shopping like Americans tend to do (I've lived in the US also!) because the stores are nowhere near as giant. We already have cashier-less systems in the form of self-checkout tills and handheld self-scanning. We don't need Instacart because the chains themselves handle the delivery.
- Certhas 6y ago
  Remember Monoprix trolling the Amazon Go ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNoa-9TBH30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNoa-9TBH30
barbecue_sauce 6y ago
This is true of most food retailers in the US, as well. Most forays into automated ordering have ended poorly due to cascading issues with the electronic inventory getting out of sync with reality. Whole contracting companies exist to reconcile physical and electronic inventories, and this is mostly done for accounting purposes rather than to aid automation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]