When 79-year-old Mary Porter walked into Manhattan's newest Aldi store hunting for bargains, she found what she called a “retail miracle”: a $4 jar of almond butter that costs $22 in her own neighbourhood. “Aldi has the reputation for being inexpensive, so I thought I would come and check it out, and by golly, it is amazing,” Porter told the BBC, marvelling at the savings alongside the fresh spinach and organic raspberries filling her basket.
The storefront is hidden in plain sight – tucked away in an underground car park beneath The Ellery, a luxury apartment complex where the cheapest rent starts at nearly $5,000 (£3,725) a month. The building’s own website omits the grocer from its curated neighbourhood guide, choosing instead to highlight pricier nearby options like Whole Foods and Brooklyn Fare. But step past the luxury façade into the basement, and the quiet disappears. Even on an early Tuesday afternoon in July, the brightly lit, bustling space hums with high energy as a lunchtime crowd of New Yorkers navigates the narrow aisles with oversized canvas bags.
“Aldi's $4 almond butter in Manhattan reveals its $9bn US expansion strategy against premium rivals.”
Porter’s discovery is part of Aldi’s $9bn US expansion plan to add 800 new stores over five years, specifically targeting dense urban hubs like Manhattan. It marks a massive scale-up for the German supermarket, which first entered the US in 1976 and now has nearly 2,800 storefronts. The aggressive real estate blitz signals a bold shift for a brand traditionally associated with suburban strip malls and lower-end consumers.
Incumbent US grocers may look with some concern at the insurgency Aldi pulled off since it entered the UK market in the 1990s. Alongside fellow German supermarket Lidl, Aldi picked up huge swathes of the market by offering cheaper prices for high-quality goods. The traditional “big four” grocers – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons – were slow to respond, leaving the challengers to gradually pick off their shoppers. Today, Aldi is the UK’s fourth biggest grocer, commanding 10.8% of the market. Its rapid growth is mirrored across Europe, aided by easing perceptions of it as a strictly lower-cost grocer. The cost of living crisis of the 2020s further fuelled its ascent.
However, while Aldi is rapidly ascending in American grocery consciousness, it is not, and may never aim to be, Walmart. Aldi currently holds just 2.9% of the US grocery pie, while Walmart controls about 20%. Yet analysts say that staying smaller…