A whistleblower claims the chain’s workers face the sack if they fail to scan at least 1,000 items an hour.
Former deputy manager Andrei Ignatescu said those who miss the target, which equates to an item every 3.5 seconds, are hauled into performance reviews with managers and can be ‘let go’ if it happens three times.
It’s not just Aldi. I spent a miserable year working night shifts stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s and they were obsessed with impossible targets as well. If you didn’t meet them, you were questioned about it. Pointing out that a computer derived target failed to take into account real world difficulties such as stock rotation and putting stuff back in its right place after customers had left them wherever they felt like it, didn’t wash. The computer says, so…
My time there was fractious to say the least and I had several confrontations with the supervisor over it. I got to the point of telling him to sack me if it was such an issue, but he couldn’t as he didn’t have that authority, so we lapsed into a sullen truce. I hated every minute of it. Nice to see the others are much the same….
Few things are quite as vile as the target culture.
“Few things are quite as vile as the target culture.”
Amen to that. Back in the ‘nineties I was encouraged to set an annual target for a ‘front counter’ department under my control, and initially I thought making 100K profit was a decent target. In the end, I went with 50K and no one objected to the size of the target. It just had to be a target.
In the end the department made a 90K profit and thus in having exceeded the target by so much i was praised (though not rewarded) Had I set the 100K target I would have been seen as a failure. Big lesson, that: best to overachieve on a small target than narrowly miss a big one.
About the same time I knew some advertising reps, and they were smart. They had monthly targets, of course, but the worse thing for them was overstepping it by a lot because the next month’s target would be raised accordingly. So, they actually persuaded customers to postpone advertising so they could just come in with the target for that period and had something in reserve for next month.
As you say, vile things targets.
I’ve also had similar. I had to ‘forecast’ expected take from clients for a year. I just deducted 10% of what I expected to get and went with that. Others in my department we struggling with missed targets, but I never did.
To cheat a system that is bollocks, you first have to recognise that it’s bollocks
As a man once responsible for delivering engineering projects I learned the hard way about targets. Set reasonable targets and use the reporting of progress as a tool to identify problems and solve them, no fear, no blame and you have a happy team and usually good results. On the other hand set stretch (impossible) targets and you invite continual failure and intense pressure, pass those targets down to your team and you will have a stressed team who will eventually stop trying, morale will plummet and the client will get disappointed and aggressive. Once bitten, I stuck to my guns, estimates were not trimmed, contingency was reserved, schedules were flexible with reasonable scope for slippage to be recovered.