Aldi did not announce where the 70 new stores would be, but it will enter Arizona, its 37th state, later this year, with four new stores in the Phoenix area. Aldi will also open a new regional headquarters and distribution center in Loxley, Alabama, to distribute to stores in Alabama, Florida and Louisiana.
Aldi has a low-cost business model and boasts that its prices are up to 50% cheaper than traditional supermarkets. Stores, at around 12,000 square feet, are much smaller than a typical US supermarket of 40,000 square feet. More than 90% of the brands Aldi sells are its own private labels.
There are other quirks to the store, too. Shoppers need a quarter to rent a shopping cart. At checkout, cashiers hurry shoppers away, expecting them to bag their own groceries in a separate location away from the cash register. Aldi opened its first US store in 1976, but in recent years it has invested more than $5 billion to remodel existing stores and to open hundreds of new stores.
Aldi is expanding at a moment when much of the retail industry is in turmoil. The pandemic has forced retailers such as JCPenney into bankruptcy, led to job losses and caused thousands of permanent store closures. A record 25,000 US stores may close this year.
SOURCE: Aldi Newsroom