ALDI Culture: How do you build something nobody can copy?

Twenty years ago today, on 1 July 2006, I started at ALDI SÜD as a part-timer. The store was five minutes from my parents' house. Three days a week, from six in the morning, I put stock out. My section was frozen, and I had almost exactly one hour forty-five to do it. I had to be finished before the first customer walked in. That doesn't sound hard. At least that's what I thought, and I was so wrong.

The walk-in freezers in an ALDI store are sized to the sales potential of the range they hold. Store "RHE-19" took twelve euro pallets. That was it. There was no second storage location. Stock not fitting was simply not an option. When the driver unloaded at night, there had to be room for the new delivery. He couldn't take it back with him, and leaving it standing in the aisle would have meant serious stock loss, so that ruled itself out.

The routine went like this. Clear the leftovers first, which hopefully didn't have to be dug out of the back corner from behind nine euro pallets of new stock. In Germany we called them the Reste. In Australia, years later, the same stock was the uglies. Every market invents its own word for it. The job underneath is identical. Then put the new delivery away while checking it against the picking list and flagging anything that didn't match. Whether there was too much or too little wasn't the point. It wasn't about whether the store came out ahead or behind at inventory. It was simply about the stock on hand being correct.

Flush to the edge

Every frozen item had a correct orientation. There was a narrow side and a long side. The product had to face the customer, and the text couldn't sit upside down, because it had to be readable. Cases had to sit flush to the edge, and that applied inside a freezer chest just as it did on a shelf. Anything meant to be sold loose got tipped in as it came. The customer should find what they came for. Because discount, at the market leader, never meant cheap tat. It meant the best quality at the best possible price, put out by the most efficient and capable people in the entire grocery trade. The customer should feel comfortable: presentation, cleanliness, friendliness, availability. That was what everyone stood behind and stood for, and it wasn't negotiable. It simply wasn't up for discussion.

Price cards above the freezers had to be checked and swapped. Price supplement strips had to go exactly where the instruction from the "bulletin" said they went. Price-drop arrows, organic seals, "new" flashes, MSC certification markers. Every one of them had to hang in the right place and be changed wherever something had changed.

After my second shift, the deputy manager (German "Vertretungskraft") put the ordering device in my hand and told me that from now on, in the middle of the 2006 World Cup summer, I was responsible for supply across the store's entire frozen range. Deputy manager was the actual job title back then, plainly descriptive in the ALDI way. Nineteen years old, no experience worth mentioning, full consequences. More on that at the end.

Six in the morning at −21°C

I still know exactly how it feels to pull open the heavy sliding door of the walk-in freezer early in the morning and push the milky, translucent strip curtain aside. After the vacuum gives way with a dull thud and enough force behind it, and the cold air streams into your face, and you are suddenly awake and full of energy. I remember the smell of frozen pizza and the crackling prickle in your nostrils from the crystallised water particles in the dry cell air. And I remember how hopelessly I spun at the start, panicking because time was running out through my fingers. And how I was simply fascinated watching my colleagues put away three times as much while joking and laughing, and still finding time at the end to have a coffee together, unhurried, before the first till drawers were handed out.

What I'm describing sounds like a grounded, almost Netflix-documentary opening to a successful career. And yet it isn't really anything unusual. Nearly everyone who walked alongside me over two decades had their own version of it. One had his first day in the middle of the Christmas trade. Another had hers on the Thursday before Easter at 30°C, with queues stretching back to the toilet paper, all four tills open and running flat out. Or a Monday when sun lounger cushions were in the catalogue, customers were fighting over the right pattern, and the store team could barely keep up.

The anchor Area Managers

And yes, maybe someone's first day, shadowing an anchor Area Manager, one of those people who had done the job for almost thirty years with total passion and dedication, turned into a sixteen-hour day, because inventory, month-end close and covering a colleague's leave all landed on the same date.

Today isn't an official anniversary. By the handbook those are the tenth, twenty-fifth and fortieth, clearly defined and tied to bonus rules. But on a day like this I like to look back. These memories show me something far more valuable: the answer to how an incomparable company culture actually comes about. Because I share that school with hundreds of current and former ALDI leaders. Some are part of top management today, in senior positions across every ALDI continent, or on the executive floors of companies of every size and sector. All of them learned the product codes for fruit that wouldn't scan. All of them fought their way through replenishment, stood in overflowing stockrooms, fought back tears of desperation because they had to get through a Saturday afternoon alone with the one other member of store staff on shift. And grew beyond themselves anyway. Because that was the precondition, and it mattered. Everyone learned the business from the ground up and got through it, and was respected and recognised for it by their colleagues in the store teams.

And here's what's even more fascinating: no matter where each person's career took them, everyone stays connected. Regardless of how they eventually left the business. Not everyone goes voluntarily. Sometimes the end came with a bang, sometimes slowly and predictably. This is where you'd expect resentment, anger, boycott. And you find the exact opposite.

"Those years are too formative to deny. They're part of you, and they make each person who they are today."

Not everything was good. A lot has clearly improved and loosened up. But there were also aspects that gave security and structure, and that made you do your job with enthusiasm and pride. And much of it was breathtakingly good: the solidarity, the moments of success, the sense of community, the shared uniform. For many decades none of that required first names, or a relaxed dress code, or white sneakers. Germany was a formal, conservative country to work in, and the shift to a first-name culture came less than ten years ago.

And when that change did come, it was a good one, a more modern way of working and communicating. It just never changed the core. In the end this is, and remains, a performance business, one that demands a great deal and gives a great deal back.

Part of that was the willingness to hand over responsibility, to demand it, and to trust people with it, at every level. Every leader had to complete several store times of their own. With their own inventory, kept separate. Full responsibility for the result. That only worked if you genuinely worked with the store team. Anyone fresh out of university who thought he could explain the world to the old hands fell on his face faster than he could imagine. Anyone who asked, who was seriously interested, who worked himself into the ground, was supported, and found out what team spirit under hard conditions actually means. That was no empty phrase. That was daily store life.

Clear responsibility, clear consequences, and trust

Someone once said to me: "You're not going to break this company." And that is exactly how we then acted: in the best interest of the business, but bold and decisive with it.

That, I believe, is why other companies have spent decades trying to copy this spirit and failing. Because it isn't written in a handbook. It sits in people who once sat at a till and know what that means.

Today begins my twenty-first year at ALDI, and it will also be my last ALDI year. I'll say it openly: the weeks after that realisation were shaped by disappointment, anger, resentment, hope, confidence, and an incredible drive to act. Am I sad? Yes. Will I try to make the best of it? Absolutely. But whatever stage of grief you happen to be in: this time shaped me, and so many before and after me. I wouldn't want to miss any of it, and I'm taking with me what formed me. Some of it I'm also taking as a reminder of what I want differently in future. Because a company culture doesn't come from vision boards, employer branding campaigns, hoodies, or the fifteenth benefit you're convinced will finally fix everything if you just add it.

One realisation stays unshakeable: a real company culture is created by every single person who was part of it, and by people who defend that culture. Against trends. There are core values that have to outlast, and it takes courage and backbone to stand behind them. And flexibility to move with the times. Finding a good mix between what stays and what has to change. And maybe that's exactly why it matters that people come and go. To stay open, and to pass things on.

One pallet of frozen mince

Back to my first posting twenty years ago. For my first order, instead of one box of frozen mince, I ordered a full pallet of it. It arrived, and it stood in the back corner of the walk-in freezer. Which left eleven spaces for ice cream and pizza. One of the weakest-selling items in the range, with a short best-before date, blocking strictly limited space.

I made a lot of mistakes. I knew I had to check the delivery against the picking list and pass on any discrepancies, so a claim could be filed to correct the stock on hand. I was so busy that I sometimes let it slip. What I hadn't factored in: that someone would actually follow up and give me feedback on it.

And that was nothing next to the first inventory result I owned myself, out of many store times during my traineeship I was fully accountable for.

"Nobody tore my head off, and I was never shouted at. But it was always made clear what was going well and where I had to improve. That is what I grew and matured on."

The last pack of frozen mince, by the way, sold in the final week of September, the week I ended that part-time job to start my dual study programme, which I also began at ALDI. Nothing had to be thrown away. And I learned an enormous amount from it. In the end there was even a wink and a feeling of gratitude, even for me, who from my own point of view back then was the smallest of small fry, even though not one of my new colleagues or store managers ever gave me the feeling that I didn't belong from day one.

And so ALDI will always be a part of me. I share those years with a lot of people who walked a very similar road in their own way.

To my (ex-)ALDI colleagues all over the world: what was your highlight? Write to me by email.