By doing so, I saw something —- having nothing to do with how many shoppers were waiting to check out —- that made me want to become a loyal Aldi shopper then and there.

I saw check-out lanes and a minimalist basket-reloading system that had clearly been designed with specific intent to allow the cashiers to do their work efficiently while seated on padded, back-supported, office-type chairs throughout the entire process.

After that revelation, the rest of that trial experience became a hopeful search for evidence that prices, value, and selection were sufficient to justify my a priori decision to become an Aldi loyalist. I found it….easily.

Aldi Testimonials in Print and from Friends

Ever since the Corona-Virus pandemic, a surprising number of friends had been offering enthusiastic testimony about the great prices at Aldi. My awareness and interest were further piqued by my reading.

I have long devoted a portion of my reading time to developments in the food and wine industries and their related retail and service networks. Recently, my friends’ advice had been receiving corroboration in a growing frequency of articles citing the chain's excellent pricing and product development policies.

More importantly, at least to me, many of these also took note of Aldi’s efforts to improve food quality, their excellent returns policy, and --- above all --- their wage and benefits policies for store-level employees. These, while not at Costco’s stratospheric heights, ranked well above industry standards and in surveys of their present and former employees.

One Experience, Long Ago….

But I kept putting off an Aldi trial shopping trip. I had already been to an Aldi store in the late 1990s on a visit back to my home town in Pennsylvania. I had driven my father a few miles to the local store. He liked the very low prices for fresh vegetables, basic staples, and dairy products.

In retrospect, I can now only imagine how incredibly low those prices must have been nearly thirty years ago, though I cannot remember them now. At the time, I’d paid them little attention because I had already made a snap judgement.

I conceded that Aldi did indeed have lower prices than the area supermarkets; but its selections of produce, meat, and seafood were too limited to make it anything but a satellite option that I might use occasionally to stock up on staples.

The price differential was a less compelling consideration back then because I was working and because --- in contrast to recent times --- even the supermarket prices weren't that much higher.

For years now, my wife has been joining me on a fortnightly drive to Ann Arbor to see my chiropractor. By chance, about four years ago we noticed a recently opened Aldi just up the street from her office. Given the rampant pandemic- and subsequent policy-fueled inflation, we decided to stop and check out the prices and selection to find out if they now merited a convenient, every-two-week stop.

My Day of Conversion

This was the conversion experience trip described above. We found the selection and layout much improved from my first distant experience, and we found the prices had become often stunningly better than those at supermarkets. We’ve shopped there regularly every two weeks, and sometimes at an Aldi closer to our home, ever since.

I have briefly listed some of the many reasons for shopping at Aldi. But, for me, what might have been a mere rational price/value-based choice has been elevated to a higher-level, proselytizing loyalty.

My loyalty’s meta-rational dimension is due almost entirely to that seated-cashier policy --- and the underlying design effort undertaken to make it possible. It is, in our area at least, unique to Aldi [though it is common in much of Europe and other areas in the world].

As our every-two-weekly visits to my god-sent chiropractor might indicate, my attachment of so much importance to this issue is heavily colored by my own reality of living with chronic lower back pain, with the constant risk of being debilitated by it for weeks by a random, commonplace, ill-executed, or forgetfully lock-kneed, ironing-board-posture bend.

Epidemic Levels of Lower Back Pain

But the problem of lower back pain is widespread [by some estimates a massive 74% of adults --- especially concentrated among those over-fifty] It ought to be of concern to anyone who seeks to make or advocate for real, positive, inexpensive, non-politically-entangled change that affects working people.

Human cashiers, especially the kind that are effectively tethered to their posts for hours of long lines of loaded shopping carts, may soon go the way of trolley conductors; but until that day comes, there are millions of them still standing on their feet and constantly bending, in confined rectangles, for hours on end.

To my eyes, the prior decades-long trend of hiring young, part-time, transitory retail cashiers and baggers has been waning, and the number of adults, often older, and mainly women, now filling those positions has been on the rise, especially in recent years. There also seem to be more older men doing this work than ever before. This is understandable in recent years as inflation has most disastrously affected those on small, fixed incomes.

Unfortunately, over-fifty adults constitute the huge bulk of people with chronic back pain and bending limitations. Not to mention problems and pain in their knees, ankles, hips, and feet --- all exacerbated by the standing-cashier requirement.

That this correctible workplace health hazard remains so prevalent in the U.S., while becoming ever less common in so much of the rest of the world tells us much about our society --- most specifically and especially about its workplace sociology and its class- and education-rooted fault lines.

Our Society’s Fault-Lines Are Showing

Today, these selectively-tolerated cruelties [‘barbarities’ would not be far amiss] go largely unnoticed, undiscussed, unreported on, and unstudied and researched in and by the cognitive circles most known for their aggressive, gaudy professions of virtue, compassion, and dedication to rectifying injustice.

I have found no indication that Aldi’s seated—cashier initiative has become the model for the development of any similar industry-wide trend in the US. Aldi, it seems, remains a visionary outlier.

This disinterest in doing the right thing on behalf of low-wage retail employees also shines an unflattering light on the industry and on shoppers as well, who are often quick to complain about ‘service’ if they see cashiers somehow managing to find some surface or box to sit on in their work area.

A Glaring Contrast

It is particulatory unflattering and revelatory of the glaringly contrasting treatment of employees in the more ‘important’, ‘non-menial’ tier of our society’s educational/occupational/class divide.

The Silicon Valley-born trend among more ‘advanced’ corporate or public-sector workplaces has been to act quickly and extravagantly to protect their employees from the ‘hazards’ of sitting in cubicles looking and typing at screens all day.

These victims of eye strain, posture-related problems, insufficient physical activity, and “This is the business we have chosen” hemmerhoids may be provided with highly adjustable chairs, expensive, adjustable sit-or-stand desk platforms, optimal lighting, exercise rooms, vegan lunch providers, stress relief-counseling, and creativity-inspiring, kindergarten-type, idea-play spaces, and more —- if they are even required to show up more than occasionally.

But that is the subject of another post. This one will have fulfilled its purpose if it brings some small attention to the issue and extends a bit of well-deserved praise and gratitude to the Aldi chain for doing the right thing for its employees and for doing so long in advance of a class-blindered industry that has yet to begin to be bothered enough to take notice of the problem.

[This is a eulogy in honor of my friend, David Aroner. I hope that in our politically tribalized times, it might, for some readers, also serve as a portrait of the exemplary strength of character and openness of heart and mind —- of the indissoluble mutual respect for motives and life efforts, no matter how seemingly opposed —- that we so urgently need and have lost in the present moment and have so ruinously and suicidally abandoned over the last half-century.

David died in Berkeley on March 18. We had remained friends since our student days at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the early 1960s. He had spent most of his working life as the strong and effective Director of SEIU Local 535 in the Bay Area and as a member of SEIU's International Executive Board, though he ultimately retired due to disagreements about the union’s direction during its Andy Stern era. Anyone who knows me knows my unfavorable opinion of much of SEIU’s political activities and initiatives over the years.

I sent the following eulogy to his widow, Dion. It was read at his recent October Memorial service in Berkeley by his grandson. This version contains some clarificatory expansions to better convey to unfamiliar readers the details and contexts as well as the mindsets of both the times and ourselves. I have also added two italicized paragraphs to flesh out the reasons and nature of my ‘divergence’.]

A Eulogy and an Appreciation of a Cherished Friend

I have lost the only remaining member of my small circle of friends from the early 1960s in Ann Arbor. David was the best and the most persistently communicative of that group, and I was by far the most withdrawn and reclusive. I am, by nature, neither withdrawn nor reclusive; indeed, in many contexts, I am quite the opposite. But I do not handle separation well at all, be it geographic or, as it is now, terminal and terrible. That is the only, woefully feeble reason I can adduce for taking so much time to send this statement to be read today.

David was a friend, a mentor, and in important ways, a kindred spirit. In our undergrad years, we shared similar political values. I was a New Deal Democrat, committed to the common man and reflecting my upbringing in a heavily ethnically enclaved small Pennsylvania working-class city. David was a more broadly aware and already strategically sophisticated progressive from Chicago. We shared, too, an appreciation and gratitude for the life enrichment provided by the fruits of America's cultural difference, as we then understood it.

An Accidentally Foretelling Analogy

I shall always remember a conversation, at what we then called an 'ethnic' restaurant, in Detroit, in which I made a crude analogy between how the food of other cultures opened our mental eyes to the brilliance of simple foods from simple ingredients achieved by common people working within different traditions and constraints and struggles for sustenance; and how, in much the same way, the very politically engaged ‘Weavers' [whom we both venerated] frequent use of simple, traditional folk melodies opened our hearts to the often unforgettable expressions of common people of their hopes, fears, joys, amid their broader struggles.

We both played around with that analogy and David returned to it frequently thereafter. Unbeknownst to us at the time, it both described the core of our shared commitments and foretold the basis, nature, and direction of the eventual diverging paths which we chose to pursue them. Those commitments —- and our even stronger commitment to each other’s integrity and sincerity —- held us together, despite diverging political visions, for more than six decades.

David was a kindred spirit, too, in a big, important way. We both held a deep sense, even then, that we should live our lives in deep dedication, as callings or vocations. He already knew the specific occupational role through which he would express his dedication. I had no idea of how I would go about mine. To this day I have no definitive answer. After leaving academia, I just imposed it, as best I could, into whatever role life thrust me into.

But the targets of our dedication remained similar. David's were the unfairly and unjustly treated working people, life’s victims [though the term is now profoundly fraught] and those who deserved better from it. Mine were the 'little and ordinary people', overlooked, discounted, and taken for granted in life today and forgotten by traditional history. Those who, over millennia --- most of them working in unimaginably laborious conditions --- had nonetheless created, small idea by small idea, the world of luxury we were born into.

Civil Rights, SDS, and Viet Nam

I first met David as a mentor when, in my junior year at Michigan, he would spend hours in the Michigan Daily building, where I was at first a staff writer and later a tangential member of a group of SDS and like-minded friends who discussed and argued about how best to address the main issues of the day: Civil Rights, the 'multiversity', the growing Viet Nam involvement, and the like.

David --- always calm, patient, contextualizing, avoiding the spotlight, and focused on the importance of coalition building --- took the time to localize for me the more abstract and campus/class-based discourses of the SDS group, particularly with references to his work with Ann Arbor CORE.

Gradually, he convinced me to attend CORE meetings, where I met a group of good, racially and economically diverse people dedicated to the (now quaint --- if not actionable) goals of racial integration and equality. CORE also gave me my first opportunity to contribute whatever knowledge of media and messaging I had acquired at the Daily.

Shifting Foci, Locations, and Commitments

In time, David began working in Detroit', and I remained in Ann Arbor. With the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, I shifted focus to the early stages of opposition to the Vietnam War escalation and the early faculty-student meetings that conceived and planned the first Vietnam Teach-In. From there, I became active in UM/Ann Arbor SDS and eventually its chairman during the tides of opposition that dominated 1965 and early 1966.

I believe David moved to Berkeley in 1966 where, Alinsky-trained, he began his rise to prominence in SEIU, becoming the Executive Director of its Bay Area Local and then a member of its International Executive Board. We remained in contact throughout as co-activists on what we continued to understand broadly as the same side.

Within a year, however, I began to withdraw from SDS and slowly from the Ann Arbor left and its factional conflicts and began questioning what my deepest commitments were and where they should lead me.

Ultimately, they led me to grad school in social history (of the ignored common people who held no offices and left any written memoirs, letters, official papers, etc.) and then out of academia, out of the battles within leftist politics, and out of the nascent outbreak of the multiplicity of now dominant, but even then insupportable identitarian, grievance, and ‘critical’ ‘studies’ ‘disciplines’ --- that I had foreseen and tried to oppose --- that the campus left was splitting and lurching towards at the time. I continued my involvement, but more now as a kind of picky, free-lance mobilization and educational event consultant.

[A Clarificatory Summary of My Political Evolution]

[Over time, I accepted with more clarity that I had been moving steadily to the adoption of what had become a foundational, defining wariness and critical assessment of the class implications revolutionary intellectuals; and of the unhappy realities involved in efforts to impose their abstractions on real individuals and social systems.

I have reached and sustained this adversarial mindset by lifelong reading of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and scholarship about him and about the ideas, questions, and prescient fears that obsessed him. In a similar but less thorough manner I had moved to a Burkean-Tocquevillian [and many others] gradualist reformism and an attendant respectful embrace of civil society, custom, and tradition.

Thus, I came to recognize the need for change —- but change undertaken within a rigorous consideration of all its likely consequences —- conducted with profound gratitude and appreciation for the innumerable gifts and achievements bequeathed to us, unearned, by the innumerable great and small efforts of our antecedents: most of them insignificant and un-noted 'common people'. At the national political level, I developed a deepened gratitude for the wisely configured edifice of balanced powers in our Constitutional Republic.]

Divergence and a Quest for Understanding

This kind of thinking led far from the comfort of the then-termed, ‘liberal’, sanctuary we had shared since we met. It began the process by which our broadly unified beliefs at the political —- though not then or ever at deeper —- levels began clearly to diverge. For me, SEIU, in its political activities, had become an enemy.

Throughout that period, David was the one who persistently made unceasing, if frequently mystified, efforts —- across the widening political gap that has rent our society but did not rend us —- to call; to inquire; to probe; all to understand better why and how I had arrived at what my other former Ann Arbor leftist friends understood as outright and intolerable apostasy.

I doubt that for most of those years, I explained or fully understood the process myself well enough to make him understand it all clearly. We would discuss a few timely issues; he would probe; I would explain my thoughts and positions; and then we would both affirm that commitment to each other and to history’s 'little people'. That never wavered.

Real Changes Collide

For me, what had greatly, truly, and irreparably wavered was my old, New Deal faith in the beneficial impact of the now massively expanded state. Indeed, that state had grown beyond New Dal imaginations. It now funded, controlled, and sought to replace ever-greater segments of public and private life and eradicated all but harassed pockets of what was once a defining, vibrant, and diverse civil society. It had shifted to policies and goals directly opposite those I had been born into and supported.

Living through this expansion only strengthened my corollary, working-class-based fear of the inevitability of a society divided between a modern Hegelian one-party ‘universal class’ of those conformed enough to be allowed within the affluent ranks of formal controllers and those with connections to them; and the mass of those whom they would, probably inevitably and destructively, control.

All of this collided with David's consistent lifelong faith that the wisely conducted and untiring pragmatic hard work of organizing society's underdogs --- and strongly supporting throughout his life those whom he was not in a position to organize --- would result in progress and a better nation and world. I believe he held that vision strongly to the end, though he had expressed to me at least a degree of perplexity at some of the directions taken in recent years.

Communication and the Effort to Understand

In our phone conversations of the last decade or so, though, David remained my loyal friend, who placed and kept loyalty above political difference, as I hope I succeeded in doing with him. He always made efforts to communicate while I was frequently too wrapped up in my head to do so. He tried his best to understand --- in his elegant, vanishing, pre-cancel-culture sense of friendship -- through the decades when I was not yet able to explain it all with the clarity worthy of his interest and concern.

At many times, one of us felt the other’s ways of understanding and promoting our beliefs to be misguided; he likely more frequently than I. It is a tribute, due more to the depth and open-mindedness of his commitment than it is to mine, that an old understanding from our youth that we had developed in a different world was able to survive, thrive, expand, and uplift our minds, hearts, and souls through a half-century of societal fragmentation and turmoil, until my final call to him on his last birthday in March.

He was, for me, a solid, unwavering rock --- as I'm sure he was to Dion, his family, and his many, many friends --- standing tall and broad in a landscape of relative pumice pebbles blown about by shifting winds. I often had a strong premonitory sense of when he might be likely to call. I counted on hearing him, sharing updates on our various ailments [his far more trying than mine], discussing politics with no intent to change each other’s minds, and reasserting the friendship that endured through our dissimilar life journeys.

I shall miss those calls; I shall miss even more the ability to be secure in his loyalty, even when being open and honest; and above all, I shall miss the opportunity to convey to him --- this time, for eternity --- better and more directly than ever before, the depth of my gratitude for his lifelong friendship and loyalty. R.I.P., my friend.

Peter di Lorenzi