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, her basket filling with fresh spinach and organic raspberries.
“Aldi’s $9bn US expansion targets Manhattan with a $4 almond butter that costs $22 elsewhere.”
The store itself is hidden in plain sight – tucked into 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 Aldi from its curated neighbourhood guide, highlighting pricier options like Whole Foods and Brooklyn Fare instead.
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.
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 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” – 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 as shoppers became impressed by product quality. The cost of living crisis of the 2020s further fuelled its ascent.
However, while Aldi is rapidly ascending the ranks of 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%.
The question for Aldi now: can its discount model truly take on America’s hyper-efficient retail titan, or will it remain a niche player in a market dominated by giants?