Woman, Spread Thinly

The interior of the store looks like this so they save money on the annoying shelf restocking. Products remain in their boxes until being removed by customers.  No unboxing and putting stuff on shelves, and constantly having to rearrange it. Also, the boxes make inventory a breeze as a sealed box has a defined number of items in it. 

Typical American grocery stores have shelves like this

Every item has to be unboxed and neatly stacked on the shelves. If they get messed up by the customers, everything has to be rearranged back to specific rigid order. When you have to verify the inventory, every item has to be removed from the shelves to be counted and put back. Aldi’s also do not have plastic bags. You can buy reusable bags or simply use the empty cardboard boxes that are available.

Last is the carts. Most grocery stores have their carts strewn across the parking lots, rolling around and hitting cars until a store employee is sent out to collect them, after being yelled at by the manager when they were told to do other tasks in the meantime. Aldi’s chains those carts together and you have to put a Quarter in to release it. When you are done, you plug the chain back in and get your Quarter back. If others are lazy, you can collect and return the loose carts and collect the Quarters. 

It stops this…

Then the employees have to do this

No. Cashiers here have to stand. When I worked retail, the only time I got to sit down all shift was for my 30 minute break. 

And the locking the carts thing is ONLY Aldi here. Most stores send employees out to collect carts every so often, even when the weather is awful and they have other shit to do. 

The interior of the store looks like this so they save money on the annoying shelf restocking. Products remain in their boxes until being removed by customers.  No unboxing and putting stuff on shelves, and constantly having to rearrange it. Also, the boxes make inventory a breeze as a sealed box has a defined number of items in it. 

Typical American grocery stores have shelves like this

Every item has to be unboxed and neatly stacked on the shelves. If they get messed up by the customers, everything has to be rearranged back to specific rigid order. When you have to verify the inventory, every item has to be removed from the shelves to be counted and put back. Aldi’s also do not have plastic bags. You can buy reusable bags or simply use the empty cardboard boxes that are available.

Last is the carts. Most grocery stores have their carts strewn across the parking lots, rolling around and hitting cars until a store employee is sent out to collect them, after being yelled at by the manager when they were told to do other tasks in the meantime. Aldi’s chains those carts together and you have to put a Quarter in to release it. When you are done, you plug the chain back in and get your Quarter back. If others are lazy, you can collect and return the loose carts and collect the Quarters. 

It stops this…

Then the employees have to do this

No. Cashiers here have to stand. When I worked retail, the only time I got to sit down all shift was for my 30 minute break. 

And the locking the carts thing is ONLY Aldi here. Most stores send employees out to collect carts every so often, even when the weather is awful and they have other shit to do. 

So, one evening, all us adults bring all the kids to a special one-night camping trip. All the kids are put to sleep, which frees up the adults to get into a circle and have some fun to ourselves for a while. People start talking, except they were forgetting to sign.  So I reminded them to please sign so I could understand them.  One of them told me that, no, they weren’t going to sign because this was our night to have fun and not have to think about communication.

So no one signed all night. They talked, they laughed, they had fun. I sat, feeling lost and cut off and betrayed. I remember wishing I had had the nerve to say, “No, what you mean is, you want a night in which everyone EXCEPT ME gets to not think about communication.”

I think sometimes when non-disabled people insist that we are too obsessed with our disability, what they REALLY mean is, “I wish you would stop reminding me that I have a shared responsibility as a fellow member of society to proactively ensure that we all have an opportunity to be engaged in society.  I wish you would just pretend to not have a disability so I can pretend that I don’t have to do anything to enable you to do the same things the rest of us are doing.”