LIDL occasionally discounts products. This may be because a product is nearing the best-before date, to clear slow moving goods or maybe because the item’s packaging has been damaged. The sticker below is from LIDL's mixed salad The sticker tells the consumer the original price, the percentage discount and the discounted price. The consumer also gets to know how much he or she is saving per kilo of that product. The shortcoming of LIDL’s system is that the barcode of the discounted product is the same as that of its undiscounted equivalent. On many occasions the undiscounted product is concurrently on sale. This means that when the cashier scans the barcode, LIDL’s system has no way of differentiating between the differently priced products and the cashier has to manually intervene to mark down the product. LIDL operate a high efficiency system. Cash points are opened or closed depending on the number of customer waiting at the checkout. When not at the till ...