Cheating at Aldi?? Scheming the system?? This checkout monkey business has apparently
been going on for some time, and Aldi employees have had enough.
Odds are, if you try pulling something over on a grocery store cashier,
they're going to notice. In an interview with Insider, an Aldi employee who goes by JK shared
his thoughts on a tactic he especially hates. It's not uncommon for Aldi to place purchasing
limits on certain items, but people will often try to get around that in some underhanded ways.
The scheme is this: Customers know they can only take a certain number of a
limited item through the checkout. So they get other people, like family or friends,
to also bring the maximum number of that item through the checkout line
separately. Once they're out the door, they combine their respective spoils and voila:
they've gotten more than they were allowed to, like suburban grocery pirates.
But as Aldi employee JK shared with Inside,
employees can usually spot this scheme, and they hate it. He said:
"We know that a 3-year-old didn't come in on
their own to buy three dozen eggs with a $50 bill. In these cases,
we're forced to ask the responsible customer to put back the excess, and that's annoying."
Hyperbolic, but on the mark. The point is, you're probably not as sneaky as you think.
In 2023, cashiers likely faced these troubles when major grocery outlets set purchasing limits on
eggs. These limits were the result of a nationwide egg shortage, which caused prices to soar.
"And consumers and businesses have scrambled to keep up. What's behind the so called egg-flation?"
The news of the rations quickly spread across social media, with shoppers sharing their
first-hand accounts. One Twitter user shared a photo from inside the grocery store and wrote:
"Limit 2 per customer for 9-dollar eggs. Things are fine. Things are totally fine."
Difficult times like these make it even more challenging for grocery
store employees to keep things in check. And self-checkouts
have the potential to make this problem even more widespread.
Aldi has long been known for cutting costs by passing some of the work on to the customer.
That's why you bag your own groceries and return your own cart. It stands to reason,
then, that this retailer would eventually get on board with the self-checkout trend. Not all Aldis
have rolled out this new format as of yet, but the change is definitely underway and self-checkout
stations have been popping up in Aldi stores from Nebraska to Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
When it comes to circumventing item limits via self-checkout, it seems that you could probably
also try that same trick of having your kids go through the line to make their own purchases. In
this case, though, you won't be dealing with a cashier whose job may depend on them remaining
as polite as possible under the circumstances, but rather on the goodwill of other Aldi patrons
who have no such constraints…and who are probably interested in the same limited items you're trying
to get more of. We'll leave the specifics of how that might play out to your imagination.
Sometimes, instead of trying to bypass sales' restrictions, customers attempt
to ignore them altogether. Whether items are limited as part of a discount or because of
nationwide shortages in eggs, trying to ring up more than the posted amount is a waste of
time for both you and the cashier. The same Aldi employee told Insider:
"If customers take more than they're allowed,
we have to ask them to leave the excess at the register. This makes the employee look
like the bad guy when they're only enforcing a clearly posted rule."
Where some customers try to weasel their way out of purchasing limits,
others wish they'd be enforced on a larger scale. On the Aldi subreddit, one user called for limits
on Aldi's special "Finds" items. Though the shopper shows up each Sunday at 9 a.m.,
taking advantage of these deals isn't always possible due to greedier customers. The post read:
"Some of them bring 2-3 shopping carts each, and load up their carts with everything [...] One
woman bought every planter and pergola that my neighboring Aldi had in stock."
Why would one person need so many pergolas? Maybe shady people just hate the sun. On the
other hand, one commenter explained that shoppers buy bulk amounts for resale.
"I switch everything into another store's bag."
Either way, it's fair to say that there is a certain level of
etiquette expected when shopping in a grocery store. And it's a basic courtesy to not buy
over your limit when products are rationed due to a lack of supply.