“Daddy, can I have my quarter back?”
“Just a second,” I say, reaching into my pocket as I come to the stoplight. To find my pocket is empty. The irony brings a smile: “Honey, I think I left it in the buggy.”
Aldi saves money in many ways, but one method is based on the simple principle that we like physical things, that the slightest bit of actual money has more value than the minute or two we might save in leaving a shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. The theory was, I’m assuming, that if people have to put down a monetary deposit, they’ll want it back, no matter how insignificant. And so we all dutifully roll our carts back to the long outdoor line of carts, snap the metal tab back into place, and retrieve our quarter. (Actually, since we leave our cart at the checkout for the next customer, it’s the quarter belonging to the guy who beat us to the checkout lane.) In doing so, we save work for the employees, because no one has to go out and round up all the carts, thus reducing overhead, which leads, in part, to Aldi’s famously low prices.
Why do we return the shopping carts? After all, it’s just a quarter, and we could easily just tack that on as a shopping expense like gas. But we don’t. Not a single one of us: I’ve never seen a single buggy left in the parking lot at Aldi. Not one. Yet in the parking lots of grocery stores that have buggy corrals and regularly send out young employees to rustle them up, we see shopping carts left here, there, everywhere. Customers must feel that, since someone is already coming out to release the carts from their little prisons that they could just as easily walk a few more steps and pick up the buggy left a few yards away. It’s rare that you see a good Samaritan pushing back someone else’s cart, but therein lies the beauty of the Aldi system: it relies not on motivating customers to return their own carts but in motivating other customers to round up abandoned carts, because, hey, free quarter. So the rest of us must internalize that thought and tack on a little sense of competition: “Someone’s going to get that quarter — it might as well be me.”
At least that’s my idea. Any others?
