6 ms·

Karl Albrecht, Billionaire Co-Founder of Aldi, Dies at 94

46 points by valevk 12y ago

SixSigma 12y ago
We Al-Di in the end. But, to contribute positively, what brands managed to build was trust in their name - you go to the supermarket and faced with 40,000 products, (10 new grocery items are introduced every day) buying a brand name means less gambling on whatever processed food you're faced with. Aldi reduced the choice between the same item from brands and just had the choice between foodstuffs.
- valevk 12y ago
  They also sell brand items and no name items of a product made by the same producer. So, people who are brand conscious buy from the same supplier like the people who buy the no name of a product. Very subtle.
junto 12y ago
Does Bloomberg have a problem with umlauts? - Aldi Sued => Aldi Süd (i.e. south)
- valevk 12y ago
  Maybe the author didn't knew how to change the keyboard layout.
  - odiroot 12y ago
    Or you can just use Compose Key. It's more practical than switching layouts all the time. Also AFAIR on Mac OS X you can just long-press for alternative letters.
    - bellerocky 12y ago
      On Mac OS X I type Option-u and then the vowel for umlauts. Long press will just spam the letter you pressed.
      - eropple 12y ago
        In the majority of text boxes, it won't spam; OS X doesn't do key press repeats in most text modes. Long-pressing a vowel (or a number of other keys) brings up a popup that lets you select a variant with the number keys.
        bellerocky 12y ago
        What inputs does this work in? I've tried a bunch.
        jasomill 12y ago
        Accented character menus on long-press are on by default in 10.7 and later, at least for the default U.S. English settings. Two caveats: (1) Long-press menus appear in most places, but not everywhere. For example, they don't appear in Terminal windows. (2) While enabled by default, long-press menus can be disabled by setting the "ApplePressAndHoldEnabled" default to false. To make sure they're not disabled globally, enter defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true at a shell prompt (they could still potentially be disabled at the individual application defaults level, via mandatory managed defaults, etc.).
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Spelling a German umlaut with the letter e is etymologically correct, and it is a convention well known to Germans and to German-speakers in the non-German-speaking world. Most of the news reporting about the German national team to the World Cup reported the names of the players with that kind of alternative spelling, for example "Götze" as "Goetze" and "Özil" as "Oezil."
  - junto 12y ago
    I'm aware of this. As an English speaker in Germany this is my GOTO preference for my US keyboard when writing in German. I was just puzzled as to why such a large internet property chooses not to use them, or more likely, can't.
- asuidyasiud 12y ago
  It's the correct substitute for umlauts if the latter are not available (as opposed to "Sud").
ccozan 12y ago
One thing that I found very interesting: upto maybe 6-7 years ago in the Aldi shops there were no barcode readers at the cashier. Instead, the cashiers knew the price of _all_ products by heart and they had an incredible speed in typing at the numpads. I was truly amazed, it was hard to keep up puting the goods back into the shopping cart. There were literally no queues forming, since they took only cash. Now the shops are a little more modern, accept cards and the cashiers are rather mindless drones instead of numbers prodigies from before.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Highly skilled, or talented labor often has difficulty scaling.
  - cowsandmilk 12y ago
    yet, this man depended on what you view as highly skilled labor, scaled it, and was worth $20.9 billion when he died.
  - emidln 12y ago
    IIRC, Aldi's cashiers in the US were (are?) paid extremely well for a cashier. My mom mentioned to me (around 10 years ago) that the positions were infrequently open and competitive because they were paying close to $15 an hour. Of course, two skills the cashiers were required to have were the ability to memorize lots of numbers and trustworthiness to handle large amounts of cash. It was likely worth it to pay employees enough to make getting fired enough of a deterrence to theft.
    - doorhammer 12y ago
      I made over $14 as a night clerk in Oklahoma 7-11s. It was an entirely separate corp from the southland 7-11s. Most of the workers I knew there were pretty hard workers, and the 7-11's there were more similar to Quiktrips than 7-11s elsewhere. They usually didn't have a problem keeping people on point because it wasn't hard to replace you with someone good at the $13 or so even a normal day shift was making.
venus 12y ago
I don't understand these old bilionaires. It seems there's so much work to be done, and possibly a great deal of low-hanging fruit, in anti-aging research. Who's to say what Aubrey de Grey et al would have been able to deliver by now if given a few billion ten years ago? You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.
- orcdork 12y ago
  Why?
- terhechte 12y ago
  It may be that people are so accustomed to ageing and death, that even smart ones, especially if they were raised in the Western / Christian belief system, tend to accept death on such a fundamental level, that the idea of battling death simply doesn't compute for them. Or, is discarded as science fiction comic book hokum.
  - fred_durst 12y ago
    I accept death because I consider it the morally right thing to do. Others died to make room for me, and someday it will be my turn to make room for others.
    - arrrg 12y ago
      See, that’s exactly the kind of fucked up thinking that’s so creepy about this. This acceptance of death is something I just cannot understand. The nonchalance with which the complete destruction of conscious minds is accepted is mind-boggling.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    Dude, I really don't understand the downvotes. The most insightful reply... I'm speechless!
- tokenadult 12y ago
  From the text of the article kindly submitted here: "Karl Albrecht established the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research." Any working scientist who is actively involved in anti-aging research can tell you that Aubrey de Grey is not going to deliver with his approach. The current Wikipedia article on de Grey is largely written by de Grey and his close friends, and the article there about his approach to anti-aging research is written mostly by fans of his research. Wikipedia is currently a biased source. But I have been going to the complete journal subscriptions of a large research university with a medical school, with updating Wikipedia in mind. The general approach advocated by de Grey (and pursued by other researchers) is interesting, and was worth looking at when it was first mentioned, but it is not panning out as a general approach to reduce risk of aging-related health problems. I think the billionaire mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, who lived into his nineties, knew more on a practical level about how not to age too soon than de Grey does. (Aubrey de Grey has no medical training, after all.)
127001brewer 12y ago
I think it's interesting to note that Trader Joe's "has been owned since 1979 by a German family trust established by Aldi Nord's owner Theo Albrecht." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Zigurd 12y ago
There's an Aldi near where I live so I thought I'd check it out. I've lived in Europe and spent extended periods in Asia so I've seen all kinds of shopping experiences. For a place with an reputation for being innovative, Aldi seemed very downscale and out of step with tastes, even compared to the neighboring Wal Mart, never mind a Carrefour or a Japanese supermarket. Heavy on canned food. It seemed like something out of East Germany before the Wall came down. I'm surprised they thrive anywhere. Did I have an uncharacteristic experience? What's good about an Aldi shop? It's weird that the same outfit operates Trader Joes.

46 points by valevk 12y ago

We Al-Di in the end. But, to contribute positively, what brands managed to build was trust in their name - you go to the supermarket and faced with 40,000 products, (10 new grocery items are introduced every day) buying a brand name means less gambling on whatever processed food you're faced with. Aldi reduced the choice between the same item from brands and just had the choice between foodstuffs.

valevk 12y ago
They also sell brand items and no name items of a product made by the same producer. So, people who are brand conscious buy from the same supplier like the people who buy the no name of a product. Very subtle.

junto 12y ago

Does Bloomberg have a problem with umlauts? - Aldi Sued => Aldi Süd (i.e. south)

valevk 12y ago
Maybe the author didn't knew how to change the keyboard layout.
- odiroot 12y ago
  Or you can just use Compose Key. It's more practical than switching layouts all the time. Also AFAIR on Mac OS X you can just long-press for alternative letters.
  - bellerocky 12y ago
    On Mac OS X I type Option-u and then the vowel for umlauts. Long press will just spam the letter you pressed.
    - eropple 12y ago
      In the majority of text boxes, it won't spam; OS X doesn't do key press repeats in most text modes. Long-pressing a vowel (or a number of other keys) brings up a popup that lets you select a variant with the number keys.
      - bellerocky 12y ago
        What inputs does this work in? I've tried a bunch.
        jasomill 12y ago
        Accented character menus on long-press are on by default in 10.7 and later, at least for the default U.S. English settings. Two caveats: (1) Long-press menus appear in most places, but not everywhere. For example, they don't appear in Terminal windows. (2) While enabled by default, long-press menus can be disabled by setting the "ApplePressAndHoldEnabled" default to false. To make sure they're not disabled globally, enter defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true at a shell prompt (they could still potentially be disabled at the individual application defaults level, via mandatory managed defaults, etc.).
tokenadult 12y ago
Spelling a German umlaut with the letter e is etymologically correct, and it is a convention well known to Germans and to German-speakers in the non-German-speaking world. Most of the news reporting about the German national team to the World Cup reported the names of the players with that kind of alternative spelling, for example "Götze" as "Goetze" and "Özil" as "Oezil."
- junto 12y ago
  I'm aware of this. As an English speaker in Germany this is my GOTO preference for my US keyboard when writing in German. I was just puzzled as to why such a large internet property chooses not to use them, or more likely, can't.
asuidyasiud 12y ago
It's the correct substitute for umlauts if the latter are not available (as opposed to "Sud").

ccozan 12y ago

One thing that I found very interesting: upto maybe 6-7 years ago in the Aldi shops there were no barcode readers at the cashier. Instead, the cashiers knew the price of _all_ products by heart and they had an incredible speed in typing at the numpads. I was truly amazed, it was hard to keep up puting the goods back into the shopping cart. There were literally no queues forming, since they took only cash. Now the shops are a little more modern, accept cards and the cashiers are rather mindless drones instead of numbers prodigies from before.

valarauca1 12y ago
Highly skilled, or talented labor often has difficulty scaling.
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  yet, this man depended on what you view as highly skilled labor, scaled it, and was worth $20.9 billion when he died.
- emidln 12y ago
  IIRC, Aldi's cashiers in the US were (are?) paid extremely well for a cashier. My mom mentioned to me (around 10 years ago) that the positions were infrequently open and competitive because they were paying close to $15 an hour. Of course, two skills the cashiers were required to have were the ability to memorize lots of numbers and trustworthiness to handle large amounts of cash. It was likely worth it to pay employees enough to make getting fired enough of a deterrence to theft.
  - doorhammer 12y ago
    I made over $14 as a night clerk in Oklahoma 7-11s. It was an entirely separate corp from the southland 7-11s. Most of the workers I knew there were pretty hard workers, and the 7-11's there were more similar to Quiktrips than 7-11s elsewhere. They usually didn't have a problem keeping people on point because it wasn't hard to replace you with someone good at the $13 or so even a normal day shift was making.

venus 12y ago

I don't understand these old bilionaires. It seems there's so much work to be done, and possibly a great deal of low-hanging fruit, in anti-aging research. Who's to say what Aubrey de Grey et al would have been able to deliver by now if given a few billion ten years ago? You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.

orcdork 12y ago
Why?
terhechte 12y ago
It may be that people are so accustomed to ageing and death, that even smart ones, especially if they were raised in the Western / Christian belief system, tend to accept death on such a fundamental level, that the idea of battling death simply doesn't compute for them. Or, is discarded as science fiction comic book hokum.
- fred_durst 12y ago
  I accept death because I consider it the morally right thing to do. Others died to make room for me, and someday it will be my turn to make room for others.
  - arrrg 12y ago
    See, that’s exactly the kind of fucked up thinking that’s so creepy about this. This acceptance of death is something I just cannot understand. The nonchalance with which the complete destruction of conscious minds is accepted is mind-boggling.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  Dude, I really don't understand the downvotes. The most insightful reply... I'm speechless!
tokenadult 12y ago
From the text of the article kindly submitted here: "Karl Albrecht established the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research." Any working scientist who is actively involved in anti-aging research can tell you that Aubrey de Grey is not going to deliver with his approach. The current Wikipedia article on de Grey is largely written by de Grey and his close friends, and the article there about his approach to anti-aging research is written mostly by fans of his research. Wikipedia is currently a biased source. But I have been going to the complete journal subscriptions of a large research university with a medical school, with updating Wikipedia in mind. The general approach advocated by de Grey (and pursued by other researchers) is interesting, and was worth looking at when it was first mentioned, but it is not panning out as a general approach to reduce risk of aging-related health problems. I think the billionaire mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, who lived into his nineties, knew more on a practical level about how not to age too soon than de Grey does. (Aubrey de Grey has no medical training, after all.)

127001brewer 12y ago

I think it's interesting to note that Trader Joe's "has been owned since 1979 by a German family trust established by Aldi Nord's owner Theo Albrecht." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Zigurd 12y ago

There's an Aldi near where I live so I thought I'd check it out. I've lived in Europe and spent extended periods in Asia so I've seen all kinds of shopping experiences. For a place with an reputation for being innovative, Aldi seemed very downscale and out of step with tastes, even compared to the neighboring Wal Mart, never mind a Carrefour or a Japanese supermarket. Heavy on canned food. It seemed like something out of East Germany before the Wall came down. I'm surprised they thrive anywhere. Did I have an uncharacteristic experience? What's good about an Aldi shop? It's weird that the same outfit operates Trader Joes.