Aldi: Where You Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent!

Sometimes you see things that make you stop and wonder if the world is going to hell in a handcart. This happened to me in my local Aldi in Godorf not 30 minutes ago.

I was waiting patiently in a long queue to pay for my water and cat food. I watched a young man, let's call him 'the customer', come into the shop with an item in his hand and make his way to the other checkout. Once at the front of the queue he said that he would like to return the item but that he didn't have a receipt for it. I know the staff in the Aldi in Godorf and normally that wouldn't have been a problem. Normally. But not today. Oh no. The officious young man who was cashier in my queue, not the cashier in the other man's queue note, turned round and said that the customer should have come to him first on the exit side of the checkout (through exit doors that only opened outwards!) and that the man could have just taken the item from the shelves and gone straight to the checkout! He basically accused the man of stealing the item in front of the whole supermarket, with not a shred of evidence to support his accusation!

The customer was allowed to come through the checkout and had to wait for the officious cashier at my checkout to finish the other customers in the queue before dealing with him. As I was driving away in my car, I could see that the customer was still waiting to be served.

If tackled, I can just hear the excuses trotted out by the officious cashier or Aldi, for this sort of inexcusable behaviour. They get a lot of pilferage, these are hard times, you can’t trust customers any more, etc. I am sure Aldi does have some of these problems, it being a cheap and not so cheerful (sic) retailer. But that doesn't mean that every customer is automatically guilty, until proven innocent.

Maybe the world is going to hell in a handcart, but if it is, it is officious cashiers that are pushing the cart there.

What do you think? Was the officious cashier right to assume the customer was guilty? Or should he have treated the customer as someone who needed help?

Post a comment and get the conversation going.

Graham Hill
Customer-driven Innovator
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