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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
When they finally did get barcodes they wrapped around most of the product so they could just whizz them past the scanners. They're still fast, but it's a more frustrating to keep up, whereas before, you were kind of in awe.
If not wrapped, they know where the barcode in the product IS. Everytime I'm not at Aldi/Lidl in Germany, the cashiers seem to see the product for the first time and take close to forever to find the bar code. Especially frustrating in Poland, where they are so slow you start playing tetris with your products, because it takes so long. Whereas in Grmany the challenge is to outpace the cashiers.
This is one thing that I really, really like at Aldi: well trained cashiers.
'Never underestimate the person behind the register.' was one of the lessons we took away from a Point-Of-Sale system installation in a fast food restaurant. When the first customers came through the drive-through, we were surprised that the teenagers taking the orders had calculated the tax and order total, to the penny, in their heads. By the end of the day, we'd developed our rule, confirmed by further experience in other stores and other states.
Were they calculating it or had they "just" memorized the vast majority of common product combinations?
I ask that, because I worked at 7-11 in Oklahoma for awhile, years ago. The Ok 7-11's are their own separate corporation. We didn't have scanners for anything except cigarettes, and it didn't take long before you knew total price, including tax, someone would have to pay for various combinations of standards prices (.99 + .99 + 1.05 + .59 or what have you).
Mostly just a pedantic difference, but I thought I'd throw my experience into the mix.
Still pretty crazy when you get someone that's been there awhile and knows basically all of them.
I think my closest experience to this was when I was an order picker at a warehouse with no computers. We had guys on forklifts that seemed to know where every single item was in a warehouse with thousands of bays, and could tell you not just where something was, but what the number of the bay was. Pretty crazy.
I wouldn't be surprised in this case if they were just memorizing the final price of different combinations of orders. I imagine this has a lot to do with the intense time pressure. Often the time to check the computer loses you 5-10 seconds, which in a fast food order environment would make the difference between slow and fast.
We saw order pickers that just memorized their pick sheet when it was printed out for them and never looked at it again until they dropped off their pallet. They would also reorganize the pick order in their head for the most efficient route so trying to keep looking at what was an out of order pick sheet was a big time sink for them. So while we were thinking of trying to print the items out in the most efficient order, we realized they were already doing it themselves and wouldn't look at it anyway.
In Austria they're still quick. I remember seeing the old cahsier as a child - but it is still my favourite shop in terms of effectiveness.
Now they've started something like a bakery in stores with many people just buying one or two items, which slows down the process.
The process in the shops is optimized for people to buy in bulk.
I wonder if they have any data on what the accuracy/mistake rate was of the average Aldi cashier doing it by memory as compared to with barcodes. Be interesting to know
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Mea culpa. I didn't read the article. Glad to hear he was supporting medical research.
And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.
I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.
And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.
Well, because it's 1am, and as you say, assumptions. My bad.
But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.
I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?
Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some big ideas to make a dent in the universe.
I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so very, very rare.
> Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire,
I've always thought the rich man who doesn't want to die and is desperate to beat it with wealth as a cliché actually, a sign of the ultimate hubris of being wealthy. Desperate to forestall death while others are having a hard time living. Death is the great equalizer, rich and and poor die alike, but in the future I guess the rich will even escape death while some of us cheer them on.
Are you talking about yourself? Living in a first world country, access to first rate medical care, not dying of malaria in sub saharan africa?
Because you could be.
If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?
You are overly dismissive of de Grey's approach, and if you're going to Wikipedia for the details of SENS then you are in the wrong place. It is documented in far more detail elsewhere.
The standard response to your viewpoint is to point to the SENS Research Foundation advisory board, which includes George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, Maria Blasco, and so on and so forth for a list of luminaries in subfields of medical research relevant to aging:
It is also worth looking at the ongoing research collaborations, which involve noted labs at institutions such as Wake Forest, the Buck Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cambridge University, and so on and so forth.
I'm not sure why you think this research work is not panning out when it has barely even started. This is early stage work, creating the building blocks and foundations. The most advanced of the necessary lines of research is ablation of senescent cells, which has been shown to work in accelerated aging mice and is current in studies in normal mice. That is a few years away from technical possibility in humans, further once you add in the regulatory issues, and everything else is further into the future.
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.
It's quite possible that he did exactly what you suggest.
Sure, blame the victim. How is old age not literally every single person's problem who hasn't committed to suicide by a certain age?
It would be completely justified to spend 1% of world GDP on aging research - that is something like $700 billion per year, $7 trillion by 2025.
It's free money, too, as if you increase life expency from 70 to 90 I'm sure the people choosing to keep working from 65 or 70 up from 56 or 60 would more than account for a 1% increase in GDP. It's just free cash for the economy.
Until we can get more people's retirement plans solvent enough that they can live until 120 and be reliably not poor, I disagree with your assertion that it's free money.
we're not doing the analysis similarly, I don't mean research to make someone old and decrepit for an extra 30 years, I mean to keep people younger, longer. Just as a 60 year old rich venture capitalist might still be at the prime of their career today, maybe after 20 years of research the same will be true at 70. Those ten years, maybe 20% of their career after education, are free money. They would otherwise be unfit for or not interested in work.
> Even if I'm fit and healthy age the age of 90, I can't imagine wanting to, y'know, do things beyond care for my grandkids and such.
So let me get this straight. If you had the exact same physical and mental ability as you do now when you are 90, you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids? Nothing else at all? You wouldn't want to travel, work on interesting things, maybe try a new career? Why on earth not?
Well sure, maybe I would want to travel, and/or try new things, and/or work on interesting things. Those things don't require employment, or profit-seeking as a way of life.
> you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids?
And such. Y'know, the 'and such' part being the things that old people tend to do. Golfing, fishing, travel, vacation, that sort of thing.
Would I want to try a new career? Likely not. The career I have is a means to an end, and while I enjoy my work, and the company I work for, I don't want to be doing this when I'm 60. As a result, I cram every dollar I can into my 401k, and save aggressively, along with working on personally fulfilling side projects that maybe will one day become an alternative income stream.
In short, I'm preparing for retirement, and doing what I can to expedite its arrival, so that I can focus on more fulfilling things that aren't necessitated by rather unfulfilling things like "earning money for the mortgage".
If I have grandchildren, yeah, I'd like to spend a lot of time with them. No, that's not the only thing I'd like to do, exclusively, and I believe you misinterpreted my post to infer that I did.
but if you're fit and healthy at age of 90, will you still choose to work for a few years at 70? Especially the most productive members of society. I didn't look into it, you can investigate, but there was a factoid floating around that the top 1% support 40% of all taxes. So if the top 1% - who might spend a lot of their time in education - work an extra 10 years at their option, this might create 25% extra value, or increase the take in terms of taxes by 10% (40 percent of 25%). So if you increase everyone's lifespan enough to increase the tax take by 10%, spending 1% of GDP to do so might be well worth it.
Also, as the richest spend a lot of their early lives in education, and afterward can experience certain network effects of experience, knowledge, networking, etc, perhaps those are ten of their most productive years. Think of Warren Buffett at 35 and 65.
This is a rather hasty, and incomplete analysis, and I haven't had the time to look at all the facts, but yes my line of reasoning is that as a practical matter that money can be "free".
Pretty sure there's better causes to donate to than anti-aging if you're a billionaire. Funding disease research and whatnot will also increase the average lifespan, for example. Plus 94 is a very respectable age, I for one don't think I'd want to live for that long.
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]
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.
50 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadBut, 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.
- Aldi Sued => Aldi Süd (i.e. south)
Also AFAIR on Mac OS X you can just long-press for alternative letters.
(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
at a shell prompt (they could still potentially be disabled at the individual application defaults level, via mandatory managed defaults, etc.).Now the shops are a little more modern, accept cards and the cashiers are rather mindless drones instead of numbers prodigies from before.
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.
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.
This is one thing that I really, really like at Aldi: well trained cashiers.
I ask that, because I worked at 7-11 in Oklahoma for awhile, years ago. The Ok 7-11's are their own separate corporation. We didn't have scanners for anything except cigarettes, and it didn't take long before you knew total price, including tax, someone would have to pay for various combinations of standards prices (.99 + .99 + 1.05 + .59 or what have you).
Mostly just a pedantic difference, but I thought I'd throw my experience into the mix.
Still pretty crazy when you get someone that's been there awhile and knows basically all of them.
I think my closest experience to this was when I was an order picker at a warehouse with no computers. We had guys on forklifts that seemed to know where every single item was in a warehouse with thousands of bays, and could tell you not just where something was, but what the number of the bay was. Pretty crazy.
We saw order pickers that just memorized their pick sheet when it was printed out for them and never looked at it again until they dropped off their pallet. They would also reorganize the pick order in their head for the most efficient route so trying to keep looking at what was an out of order pick sheet was a big time sink for them. So while we were thinking of trying to print the items out in the most efficient order, we realized they were already doing it themselves and wouldn't look at it anyway.
Now they've started something like a bakery in stores with many people just buying one or two items, which slows down the process. The process in the shops is optimized for people to buy in bulk.
You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.
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.
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.)
And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.
I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.
And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.
But then you commented anyway, with a lot of conviction and assumptions and no mention of you not having read the article. Why?
But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.
I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?
Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some big ideas to make a dent in the universe.
I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so very, very rare.
I've always thought the rich man who doesn't want to die and is desperate to beat it with wealth as a cliché actually, a sign of the ultimate hubris of being wealthy. Desperate to forestall death while others are having a hard time living. Death is the great equalizer, rich and and poor die alike, but in the future I guess the rich will even escape death while some of us cheer them on.
Because you could be.
If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?
The standard response to your viewpoint is to point to the SENS Research Foundation advisory board, which includes George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, Maria Blasco, and so on and so forth for a list of luminaries in subfields of medical research relevant to aging:
http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board
It is also worth looking at the ongoing research collaborations, which involve noted labs at institutions such as Wake Forest, the Buck Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cambridge University, and so on and so forth.
http://www.sens.org/research/extramural
I'm not sure why you think this research work is not panning out when it has barely even started. This is early stage work, creating the building blocks and foundations. The most advanced of the necessary lines of research is ablation of senescent cells, which has been shown to work in accelerated aging mice and is current in studies in normal mice. That is a few years away from technical possibility in humans, further once you add in the regulatory issues, and everything else is further into the future.
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.
It's quite possible that he did exactly what you suggest.
It would be completely justified to spend 1% of world GDP on aging research - that is something like $700 billion per year, $7 trillion by 2025.
It's free money, too, as if you increase life expency from 70 to 90 I'm sure the people choosing to keep working from 65 or 70 up from 56 or 60 would more than account for a 1% increase in GDP. It's just free cash for the economy.
Even if I'm fit and healthy age the age of 90, I can't imagine wanting to, y'know, do things beyond care for my grandkids and such.
So let me get this straight. If you had the exact same physical and mental ability as you do now when you are 90, you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids? Nothing else at all? You wouldn't want to travel, work on interesting things, maybe try a new career? Why on earth not?
> you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids?
And such. Y'know, the 'and such' part being the things that old people tend to do. Golfing, fishing, travel, vacation, that sort of thing.
Would I want to try a new career? Likely not. The career I have is a means to an end, and while I enjoy my work, and the company I work for, I don't want to be doing this when I'm 60. As a result, I cram every dollar I can into my 401k, and save aggressively, along with working on personally fulfilling side projects that maybe will one day become an alternative income stream.
In short, I'm preparing for retirement, and doing what I can to expedite its arrival, so that I can focus on more fulfilling things that aren't necessitated by rather unfulfilling things like "earning money for the mortgage".
If I have grandchildren, yeah, I'd like to spend a lot of time with them. No, that's not the only thing I'd like to do, exclusively, and I believe you misinterpreted my post to infer that I did.
Also, as the richest spend a lot of their early lives in education, and afterward can experience certain network effects of experience, knowledge, networking, etc, perhaps those are ten of their most productive years. Think of Warren Buffett at 35 and 65.
This is a rather hasty, and incomplete analysis, and I haven't had the time to look at all the facts, but yes my line of reasoning is that as a practical matter that money can be "free".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Joe's
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.