This Is Why Aldi Barcodes Are So Big

It seems like there’s always more to discover about Aldi, America’s fastest-growing budget grocery store. For one thing, the chain employs endless tactics to keep grocery prices low, from foregoing in-store music to selling non-name-brand items. It also has some clever strategies to streamline operations, including stocking items on the shelves in their original shipping boxes and skipping cart-wrangling with a shopping cart rental system. Efficiency is a top priority at Aldi, and customers take notice.

While Aldi has endeared itself to consumers with such innovations and money-saving tactics like savers tags, the store does something else objectively good for the employees, too: oversized barcodes.

Why are Aldi barcodes so big?

Sarah Tramonte For Taste Of Home

Anyone who has operated a self-checkout kiosk knows that it can sometimes be a bit of a scavenger hunt to find the barcode on a packaged grocery item; you have to turn and flip the box every which way until you find it. Aldi understands that this problem can eat up precious seconds at the cash register, so it adds barcodes to virtually every surface of each item and exaggerates their size so it can be scanned faster. Sometimes the codes are comically stretched out, like down the entire length of a cereal box—but it works.

“While a small detail, we’ve designed our barcodes to ensure products can be scanned quickly from almost any angle, whether by employees or customers using self-checkout,” an Aldi spokesperson told Nexstar Media Group via email. “By making our barcodes larger, and including several on our packaging, we help reduce the amount of time shoppers need to search for barcodes, which means they can get in, check out and [get] back to life outside the grocery store.”

Though media interest might currently be swirling around the big barcodes, Reddit has been curious about the packaging for years, and Mother Jones noted the phenomenon back in 2016:

“The store I was at had a grand total of one (1) checker, which I gather is standard, but holy cow was she fast,” Kevin Drum wrote about his first visit to an Aldi. “The key, apparently, is to put large UPC codes on literally every surface of the packaging, so that checkers can just slide stuff over the scanner at light speed. This works fine since the packaging is all controlled by Aldi and doesn’t have to be used to attract customers.”

The next time you visit a non-Aldi grocery store, you might take note of all the marketing-driven filler on food packaging: taglines, bland platitudes about “wholeness” and “goodness,” maybe a picture of a leaf to signify freshness. Now imagine if that space were used to streamline your actual shopping experience instead. Aldi has made the calculation that saving time is more valuable than the marketing potential of a pretty box. Will any other supermarket chain ever draw the same conclusion?