I've honestly never noticed things like that when at supermarkets, while living in Australia or Singapore. I'm gonna watch out now see if I notice any of these sort of things. Thanks.
In Germany, there is still a divide between regular "supermarkets" and "discounters". The latter focus on price at the expense of selection and customer service.
Aldi defined the discount grocery segment in the 60s with their focus on vertical integration and cost savings. In the 90s, all Aldi stores notably used the same sort of ugly tiles for their floors and walls, probably because they got a bulk price on them and they're easy to clean etc. When Aldi stocks new items, the process consists of placing a pallet onto the shop floor and removing the foil around it. For smaller items, they just open up the box and put the entire box in the shelf instead of shelfing items one-by-one. At the checkout, there is no bagger; you're supposed to pack your bags while the cashier is scanning the items.
Aldi also waited much longer than anyone else before introducing barcode scanners at their checkouts. Since they stocked only one of every type of item (e.g. only one type of sugar, one type of flour, etc.), there were so few items that cashiers could just memorize the codes for each product. It was quite impressive to see a cashier punching codes into the register at a rapid pace while the flood of items scrolls past them. I may misremember it, but it may have been faster than scanning barcodes.
When Aldi introduced barcodes in the early 2000s, they modified the packaging of items so that barcodes were not only placed at one corner, but instead stretched across the whole side, so that the items could be scanned more reliably.
The divide between supermarkets and discounters is blurring, though. The Aldi store next door just got a redesign and now looks confusingly welcoming. Kind of un-German. I always think of Aldi as a place where shopping is done efficiently first and foremost, and the new design does not really reflect that. It makes it look like a regular supermarket (although still at the size of a discounter).
I live near the border between the Netherlands and Germany and since German supermarkets are cheaper by a lot I go to Germany to buy groceries every now and then. The ALDI there has incredibly fast cashiers. And I mean REALLY fast: The only way to keep up with the cashier is almost to swipe everything in your cart with both hands, you have to as well, because there is only about 50-80cm of 'runway' after the scanning. There is some sort of docking bay for your cart right after that. So everything is designed for a speedy check-out. We once commented to the cashier that they are so incredibly fast and she said that it is due to the scanners they use, they can scan a product in almost any orientation so that she doesn't have to be very accurate or remember where the barcode is for every product.
Due to this incredible speed at check-out, the same number of employees can process a far larger number of customers than the super market in the Netherlands that I go to. Very smart.
> The Aldi store next door just got a redesign and now looks confusingly welcoming
In the UK they seem to have taken store design up a notch, to the point that there's a discernible difference with the Lidl experience (along with now being a tad more expensive on equivalent products). I suspect it's an incremental differentiator in retaining the more affluent customers they captured over the past decade. Lidl, on the other hand, offers a more mixed experience: for the most part, they're still quite dowdy and utilitarian, although they have what seem like experimental stores that appear to be competing in affluent areas with an Aldi presence (larger, open layouts; brighter lighting; polished, natural floor tiles etc.). The kinds of customers I usually find at Lidl are notably absent.
