Jessica

Dec 22, 2020

Deplorable Ethos & Poorly Designed

The robotic, cheap, dehumanising, profit-hungry mentality of Aldi manifested a spectacle of racist depravity in Aldi Keilor East today, in this instance due to their poorly designed checkout system. As a witness, this opened my eyes and I will never shop at Aldi again. Aldi - when you dehumanise your customers by forcing them to take massive detours around other peoples' trolleys EVEN if they have mobility issues and/or are only buying ONE single item, you frustrate them and put your employees at risk of personal attack, racist or not. When you train your staff to dogmatically and robotically abide by this checkout system rather than using their own, human discernment to keep things moving, you also dehumanise your own staff. I feel very sorry for them - they are generally dissociated and rude but it's clearly a company-wide ethos, not the fault of any individual. Aldi Keilor East, when you blame an incident like this on random racism (egregious though that may be) when the root cause was so clearly an issue with your dehumanising system, you let the whole community down. Take responsibility please, for the sake of your employees if not for your customers. If you want to behave decently, please start thinking clearly and address the root cause of your obviously rampant low morale. Either: a) stop short-staffing, so that customers don't have to wait forever and then suffer such ridiculous demands at the checkouts; and also encourage your employees to use their discernment, train them in basic customer service as this will not only boost their own morale and sense of autonomy but also improve the customers' experience. OR b) invest in a self-checkout system, since you're obviously so damn cheap. If you do neither, I personally hope the community collectively wakes up to your scummy attitude and boycotts you until you close down, and that your poor employees find companies that don't dehumanise them. We all deserve better.