After repeated poor experiences, I had avoided the grocery-store chain Netto for almost three years. A week or two ago, I gave it another chance, in case things had improved in the interim. My impression was mostly positive: prices were competitive, the available products were a little different from my usual stores, and the problem with intrusive and annoying announcements was considerably lessened. There were still the occasional intrusion in the “Buy this! Super prices!” family, but far fewer than in the past, the loud-speaker volume of the announcements was considerably lower, and there was not one word about COVID (unsurprisingly, as we are now in 2024).
For more on the earlier poor experiences, see [1]. Note an excursion towards the end with more general issues than the bags of the main text.
As a caveat, most of my experiences since I moved to Wuppertal are with a single store, near my apartment, and experiences can vary from individual store to individual store. Formulations that speak of “Netto” will then hold true for this particular store and might or might not hold for Netto more generally. (However, I have a worse average impression of Netto than of its main competitors, even this one store aside. This especially when it comes to contempt for the customers.)
Today, 2024-03-01, I went for a second visit—and was so turned off that this will remain my last visit for the foreseeable future. (Call it another three years, if I find myself in a forgiving mood.)
It began in the parking lot, where I tried to check out a shopping cart by entering a coin in the appropriate slot on the cart. This turned out to be impossible, as the “slider” that needed to be pushed in just popped out again and again, and failed to release the cart. The presence of duct tape next to (but not covering) the slot/slider pointed to a damage to the mechanism that had been perfunctorily patched together, and in a manner that was either insufficient and untested or had simply not lasted. Amateurish: the cart should have been taken out of service until a sufficient repair had been made.
Shopping carts in Germany are usually chained together in such a manner that a coin has to be inserted to detach a cart from the chain. The coin is returned when the cart is put back in the chain.
Note that the one defective cart blocked an entire chain of carts. The attempt to save a quick buck on repairs backfired by making a third, give or take, of all the carts unavailable for the time being.
Theoretically, of course, some other explanation might exist, e.g. that someone had deliberately sabotaged the cart and applied the duct tape to delay discovery. Such explanations, however, seem far-fetched and, if true, would still point to a recurring problem and one by no means limited to Netto: grocery stores pay too little attention to their carts. Just having someone on staff give each cart a, e.g., monthly check, to see whether it can remain in use or should be serviced/scrapped, could work miracles for the average state, but this simply does not appear to be done. The result is blocked wheels, unbalanced wheels, malfunctioning coin slots, damaged handles, whatnot, that are only fixed with great delays. (This while it is rarely worth the customer’s time to point an issue out to the staff. Reactions, both on my very few own attempts and some few attempts by others that I have observed, have ranged from (variations of) “What do you expect me to do about it!” to “Wait here for five minutes while I get the manager!”.
I had better luck with a second chain of carts and proceeded into the store—where I immediately heard an overly loud commercial announcement. (Contrast this to the much more moderate announcements during my prior visit.) To boot, the announcement used the presumptuous, rude, and generally unconscionable-in-advertising “Du”, instead of the proper “Sie”. Further announcements took place; one of them, absurdly, demanded that I make Netto, a grocery store, my electricity provider (or some such—I did my best to ignore what was said). Such announcements have no place in a customer-friendly store, and even a customer-unfriendly one should have the common decency to keep intrusiveness down and to be polite to the customers. (However, as a silver-lining, the number of announcements remained similarly low to the prior visit and, correspondingly, much lower than at the time of [1].)
See an older text for further explanations around “Du” and “Sie” and the difference between general politeness and general rudeness.
As is often the case with commercial/advertising language, other issues with poor communication, lack of logic, presumptuousness, whatnot, abounded during today’s visit, e.g. things in the “Your partner for X!!!” family.
Apart from the occasional commercial announcement, the actual “shopping phase” went reasonably well. However, this ended when I reached the queue for the single cash register.
Firstly, the queue was unnecessarily long, without a second register being opened. This reflects a very common problem with my prior visits to Netto (cf. [1]), that there are no attempts by the staff to adapt to the number of customers in the store or in a given queue. Instead, the store stubbornly sticks to exactly one register until the customers explicitly complain.
This is the more idiotic, as the saved time/cost/whatnot for the store is minimal relative a more proactive approach: the amount of work done by the staff remains almost the same. There might be a minute or two lost to open or close the cash register, but this is dwarfed by the time lost by the customers, and, very often, this opening/closing has to take place anyway, even when the store is not proactive. It might be five or ten minutes later, but it still takes place and the overall time lost remains the same. (While the time lost by the customers is considerably changed.)
Also note [2] for some other issues with queueing. Note how similar calculations to those made there show massive gains when a second register is opened “now” over “in five minutes”. (Let alone over not opening a second register at all.)
When a second register was announced, I made the mistake of remaining in the original queue, believing that I was sufficiently far ahead that it would be faster to remain: A common issue is that the time from announcement to actual opening can be anything from ten seconds to several minutes. Netto tends to be comparatively slow. Another is whether one lands sufficiently far ahead in the new queue. (Depending on reaction times, how easy navigation is, who originally stood where, etc., the new position might or might not be better than the old one.)
However, as things played out, I might finally have been done some five minutes (!) after the new register had already closed (!) again. (Going by subjective time. I did not make measurements. However, it was certainly in the minutes.)
There were two considerable problems on Netto’s end, made worse by a customer issue (cf. side-note).
To look at the Netto issues:
Firstly, the very young cashier did not seem up to the task. He was slow, had repeated instances of hesitation of the “What do I do know?” kind, and had problems handling some equipment (cf. below). My speculation would be that it was one of his very first days doing the job. If so, a particularly close eye on the development of the queue should have been kept by others and someone should have been at hand to intervene; if not, he was clearly not cashier material and should not have had the job at all.
Looking at the former scenario, I would go as far as to recommend that a beginner should never be the sole cashier or, on the outside, “never when a non-trivial number of customers are in the store”. Get him up to speed first and then let him handle things alone. Unfortunately, however, many stores appear to do it in the exact opposite way: put the kid in the deep end of the pool and to hell with the customers. (And, to re-iterate, Netto seems to follow a strict only-one-register-open-until-the-customers-complain policy.)
Secondly, with the very last customer before it was my turn, something went wrong when he tried to make a manual input for a non-scannable item (also see side-note below). Everything seemed done, when the customer complained that “You did something wrong! It says ‘potatoes’ and I had no potatoes!” (paraphrased from memory). The cashier now spent quite some time pushing buttons, with increasing agitation, while achieving nothing. Eventually, he had to call for a senior colleague to achieve the correction—who took half an eternity to get there. This despite there now being a hold-up of possibly a dozen customers in a queue again of considerable size. (The second register had already closed.)
The senior colleague arrived, punched some buttons, left, and was called back, because she had not completed the transaction, which caused a further delay upon the delay upon the delay. (I lack knowledge of the details, but the need to enter a password was mentioned.)
According to the cashier, there was a recurring (!) issue that he entered some numerical code and something else was registered, e.g. that the last digit was cut off. Here we have three main alternatives: (a) He was doing something wrong and should have been supervised/instructed until he did it right. This did not happen. (b) The particular device at this register was flawed and the queue should have been shifted to another register. (E.g. by opening that register in parallel, moving most customers there, and only keeping the original register open until the few closest to the register had been handled.) This did not happen. (c) A larger problem was present, in which case Netto is all the more deserving of losing its customers. As far as I am concerned, this actually did happen—I am, for the second time, a lost customer.
The customer issue was not necessarily “anyone’s fault” and certainly not Netto’s fault. It did make matters worse, however:
I was preceded by a group of women, who appeared to truly be in a group, as in a single family keeping each other company, but with a single checkout. This including arrangements on the conveyor belt (or whatever the correct English term might be). As it turned out, they were actually making three separate checkouts, with a corresponding almost threefold increase in time needed. Apart from the increase in time, as such, it also made it hard for me to gain a realistic estimate of the remaining time. Had I known that there were two “hidden” checkouts, I likely would have switched queues when the second register opened (cf. above).
The situation was made the worse by all three having bought some breads, donuts, or similar on a pick-them-yourself-and-put-them-in-a-bag basis. The already slow cashier now had to go through each bag and enter a separate numerical code, as opposed to just scanning a bar code, for each individual item, which made the time needed to enter all the products explode. It was with the last of these three bags that the above problem occurred.
(A third Netto-specific issue could be argued, in that some better system should have been found to handle the breads, but it is, I suspect, rare that so many instances in a row occur. When it is, say, one-every-ten-minutes instead of three-in-a-row, the overhead might be acceptable. How such a solution would look, I cannot say for certain without much more knowledge of the situation, but a possibility might be more unified pricing and the use of a single entry code or a combination of unified pricing, a bar code on the bags, and the mere entry of how many items were in the bag.)
With hindsight, as I run events through my head during writing, I do suspect a wrongdoing by one of the women: Two of them were originally standing in line ahead of me. The third joined them shortly after I had entered the queue and I did not object on the basis that I, again, assumed that they were a single group with a single checkout. Looking back, chances are that she inconsiderately presumed to barge ahead on a “My friends are already in the queue!!! I have the right to join them!!! To hell with queue-etiquette and civilized manners!!!” basis. (Also note some remarks on similar issues in [2]. Women, in particular, seem to have no understanding of how fair queuing works.) Worse, while I did not keep an eye on the who-is-who, chances are that this third woman also was the third to reach the check out, which implies that her purchase was the one that added entirely unnecessary minutes to my queueing.
There is often a trade-off between price and service, price and quality of product, whatnot, and it can be hard to provide a reasonable service (quality, whatnot) level below a certain price level. This can, then, lead to deliberate choices that have negative effects on the customers, in the hope that they will be sufficiently price sensitive to still remain customers, say, in that there might be a corporate dictate that only one cashier should be active at any given time or until the customers complain (cf. above). In cases with few repeat customers, we might also have a hope that sufficiently many will be fooled into being one-time customers based on the price and in ignorance of the negatives that come with the favorable-seeming price.
Chances are strong that such factors play in above. However, I note that:
Aldi does a much better job at approximately the same price level. The price level is, then, at best a contributing explanation.
For instance, Aldi also tries to get by with one cashier when it can—but it is much more ready to supply more when the need arises and often does so without customer prompting.
Also note that how much money is spent on X is, within reasonable limits, often less important than how well it is spent. For instance, I have already noted how small the savings through a reluctance to provide a second cashier in a timely manner is.
A true comparison of prices between two stores would require a great amount of research. My subjective impression from the two Netto visits mentioned above compared to the more frequent visits to Aldi, however, is that Netto has a very slight edge in average price. (While both compare very favorably to e.g. Rewe.) That this very slight edge would, from a business perspective, justify such a drop in service level, etc., does not seem plausible to me. Likewise, I do not see this very slight edge as sufficient justification for me, as a customer, to visit Netto when I have an Aldi across the street.
Such pressure on costs often involves hiring by cheapness instead of ability (ditto, e.g., industriousness), something which tends to backfire in terms of low productivity and is usually a poor strategy. Note how some of the above problems could be explained by a low competence level.
The same applies to inadequate training, which might or might not have been the case with the cashier above.
A particular complication is that low competence often goes hand in hand with low I.Q., which, contrary to Leftist propaganda, has a pervasive effect and can lead to, e.g., an inability to make good decisions, an inability to see the big picture, and an inability to see the point of view of someone else. Such inabilities can provide an explanation for poor queue handling, even absent, or well beyond, a corporate dictate. (And need, of course, not be limited to the workers in the store—a comparative I.Q. deficit could also, and often does, exist at the corporate level.)
Much of the problems could have a background either in corporate policy (or store-manager policy, or similar) or incompetence at the level of individual workers, or some combination thereof. Below, I will usually silently assume policy, as an additional discussion of incompetence among individual workers would bring little beyond what follows from the current item.
A focus on costs might explain malfunctioning hard- or software in a cash register (cf. above), but not a poor handling of this malfunction. Incompetence, in contrast, can provide such an explanation.
Should a malfunction be behind some of the problems above, it can also be a sign that, again, costs have been cut too far, pushing the damage through poor quality up high enough to outweigh the cost savings. Likewise, the handling of the shopping carts is likely to do more harm even to the store than if a more costly, but actually working, solution had been found.
Such malfunctions are largely a game of statistics: every non-trivial system contains at least one bug. (To slightly paraphrase a software maxim.) Worse quality in purchases, development, integration, testing, whatnot, can increase the corresponding risk considerably.
A particularly good example of what not to do was provided by some skiing world championship or other in the very early 2000s: The system that was used to provide onscreen data displays for the TV broadcast (e.g. who reached what point of the course at what time) had been replaced for the championship. Anyone who understands software would have made sure to premier it during a regular world-cup, or whatnot, broadcast to ensure that problems were found and eliminated before the more important championship. Instead, the big premier was saved for the championship—and a number of unnecessary problems appeared, leaving the viewers worse off than had the old system been used for the championship too.
(Writing in 2024, my memory of the details are very vague. I would speculate that it was a biathlon championship, as biathlon has a more complicated flow of information than e.g. regular cross-country skiing, but cannot say even that for certain.)
Even in a business that prioritizes low costs, there are limits that should not be exceeded. There simply comes a point where the natural and justified expectations of the customers are failed in an unconscionable manner, and the prioritization no longer can be justified.
As a partial example and partial analogy, I might expect a cheaper restaurant to have fewer waiters per customer than a more expensive one, with a natural effect on the service level, but I would still expect mistakes in orders, bills, and similar to be a very rare occurrence. If they become common, then the restaurant is understaffed, staffed by those too incompetent, or has some other severe problem (maybe, even, outright attempts to cheat...). The restaurant, then, fails to meet a conscionable standard.
In a next step, as with me and Netto, we might see customers disappear, a reduction in revenue, and less profit than if cuts in quality had been less drastic.
Depending on the exact circumstances, we might also have cases of outright breach of contract, fraud, or a failure to meet reasonable “fitness for purpose” expectations.
A common, usually highly misguided, cliché in similar discussions is “You get what you pay for!”—often used by those wanting to justify high prices. This is a half truth in that, yes, someone paying less can regularly expect a lower quality of this-and-that, but, at the same time, a conscionable quality level, fitness for purpose, etc., must still be present.
An attitude like “If you buy something cheap, then you should expect it to break in short order!”, “[...], then you cannot expect it to be usable!”, or similar, is not conscionable. (And, yes, I have seen statements to a similar effect on several occasions—fortunately, never directed at me.) The point is simply that if someone cuts quality so far that a product is not in a conscionable state, then this is fraud, even should the price be low. If a seller/producer/whatnot cannot provide a conscionable state at a given price, then he simply has to increase the price until that conscionable state can be provided—anything else is fraud.
Various deficiencies can make the nominal price highly misleading, with the true price being considerably higher—even to the point of exceeding that of a nominally more expensive product. Consider the potential costs for repairs and replacement, loss of service/use, time lost on a hotline, and similar. (Costs are, of course, not always in the form of money.)
A particularly perfidious example is the package delivery industry in combination with online sales: the costs to actually receive the delivery can exceed the value of the purchased goods, let alone the small nominal delivery fee, because the delivery company does an unprofessional or outright fraudulent job. As, moreover, the seller of the goods has contracted the delivery company, the means for action by the purchaser are close to nil, beyond boycotting the seller for the future. Here, it would be far better to perform an adequate service and actually charge openly for that service, instead of pretending to be able to deliver adequately at a price that is, in some sense, too low.
(Problems like intrusive and annoying announcements can, of course, not be explained by mere cost cutting. However, excessive cost-cutting and such announcements could both go back to contempt for the customer or some similar issue.)
On 2025-08-13, I had a somewhat similar experience with Penny (another low-price chain of grocery stores), if not as negative:
I had long avoided Penny, because of the intrusive in-store commercials in combination with the distance to the nearest store known to me. (While the store is not outrageously far away, there must be more than a dozen other grocery stores closer to my apartment—including at least two Netto stores and several commercial-free stores from other chains.)
About some two weeks earlier, I found myself next to this Penny store, on an errand, and decided to give it a chance. The experience was mostly positive. The commercials were definitely much lower in loudness than in the past and they gave me the subjective impression of lower quantity; and there was a variation in products relative my usual stores. As with Netto in the same situation, I decided to give Penny the occasional chance in the future.
(To boot, an unfortunate store-layout had been altered, but the new layout was more “different” than “better”. Still, it might be a sign of trying.)
Came the day, I was again running errands, again close to the store, and again went for a visit. The result was highly disappointing, as the commercials were back at full loudness and (again, in my subjective impression) in the full quantity. I found fewer products of interest this time around; was confronted with discounts that varied greatly depending on whether one used the store’s app; and got stuck in a long line with a much delayed opening of a second register. There will be a good long while before I consider another visit.
The price–app issue is particularly problematic, as I have long feared that we will reach a situation where no discounts are given to non-app users, where even regular prices differ, or where it becomes outright impossible to buy products without using an app (and/or a smartphone). This risk alone might be cause to boycott such stores. If in doubt, what is one supposed to do? Install an app for every fucking store one visits?!? (Resulting not only in overhead and security risks, but also exposing the customer to various abuses of phone resources/data/whatnot by the store. Even the issue of unethical customer profiling and tracking aside, such factors make the required or quasi-required installation of apps unconscionable and the voluntary installation a foolish act.)
The “second register” issue is yet another example of an ongoing irrationality: Currently, it seems that virtually all low-price grocery stores (e.g. Netto, Penny, Aldi) work with one-register-only per default, regardless of time of day and number of customers in the store/queue—waiting for someone to explicitly complain. This is very weak, as a proactive opening of additional registers as need arises would cost next to nothing to implement, increase customer satisfaction considerably, and, as a bonus, be beneficial to society as a whole through less time wasted in queues. (In contrast, some higher priced chains, including Akzenta, might err in the other direction, which sometimes results in cashiers rolling their thumbs between customers—that is not what I am suggesting.)
In contrast, the difference in “products of interest” might be coincidental, as my interest, beyond some few standards, is often contingent on a discount and it just might have been that the selection of discounted products was more favorable to me at the first visit.
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