Aldi's extra-long barcodes are oversized for one very important reason
Here’s Why Aldi’s Barcodes Are So Long
Published on Dec. 02, 2024
If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, then you already know it’s unlike any other grocery store. It requires shoppers to pay to use a shopping cart, doesn’t play music and serves up some of the best bargains of any supermarket. There’s one other quirky trait that makes Aldi truly unique: All of its in-house grocery items have extremely long barcodes.
The affordable grocer‘s surprisingly long barcodes serve a thoughtful purpose. Keep reading to find out everything we know about Aldi’s long barcodes and why the store won’t be doing away with them anytime soon.
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How long are Aldi’s barcodes?
After Aldi’s impressively low prices, the peculiar barcodes on its packaging might be the next thing you notice. These codes are long—almost cartoonishly long. In fact, they are so long that they span the entire length of an Aldi cereal box.
To the inexperienced eye, the long barcodes might look like a mistake or a misprint at first glance. But take a stroll down Aldi’s aisles, and you’ll see tons of seemingly stretched barcodes. Not sure whether an item came from Aldi? The extra-long barcode is a telltale sign.
Why are Aldi’s barcodes so long?
Aldi’s oversized barcodes use up the empty space on the store’s packaging for one very clever reason: efficiency. They make for significantly faster scanning during checkout.
That’s right: Not only does Aldi do everything it can to help you save money, but the German-born grocery chain also prioritizes saving you time at checkout. It’s why you’ll sometimes come across Aldi products with not one, not two, but up to four or five barcodes.
“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. “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.”
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