ALDI And Lidl: A Storied History, Now In Lacey

LACEY, NJ — Lacey as we know it may never be the same. Two heavyweights among German discount grocery chains will hold their grand openings Tuesday morning.

The competition between Lidl and ALDI is new to Lacey, but it's been brewing abroad for generations. And like many stories rivalries, the lore gets tangled in fact and fiction.

Lacey has already seen the effects of competition between both businesses. Lidl announced Aug. 9 that it would open its Lacey location Sept. 12. Later last month, ALDI announced a Sept. 10 grand opening.

Lidl rescheduled its grand opening to Sept. 10 shortly after and doubled its opening-day giveaways. A manager told Patch last weekend that ALDI would hold a soft opening Monday.

You can already sense the competition in Lacey. Here's more on the history of both stores.

Founding ALDI

Let's go back to 1913. The mother of Karl and Theo Albrecht opens a small store in a suburb of Essen, Germany, according to MSN. Karl was born in 1920, while Theo was born in 1922. Karl completed an apprenticeship in his mother's store, while Karl worked at a deli.

Karl took over a shop which already advertised that they were the "cheapest food source." In 1946, the Albrecht brothers took over their mother's business and soon opened another retail outlet nearby. They owned 13 stores by 1950.

There's a misconception among some that the founders of ALDI and Lidl were brothers who split. In fact, the brothers behind ALDI split in 1960 over a dispute about whether they should sell cigarettes, according to The Telegraph. Karl thought they would attract shoplifters, while Theo disagreed.

In 1962, they jointly owned 300 shops. They introduced the name Aldi — short for Albrecht-Diskont. Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd have been financially and legally separate since 1966.

They shared all information except profits and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, according to The Guardian. But they were seperately run, with stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently colored floors — one yellow and one gray.

The Underpinnings of Lidl

In 1930, Josef Schwarz became a partner in Südfrüchte Großhandel Lidl & Co., a fruit wholesaler. He developed the company into a general food wholesaler, according to LoveMoney.

The first Lidl store opened in Ludwigshafen in 1973. It employed three people and offered about 500 products.

Here's how the name came about, according to German publication Manager Magazin. The Schwarz-Gruppe, run by Josef's son Dieter Schwarz, began to focus on discount markets and supermarkets in the 1970s. Dieter did not want to use the name Schwarz-Markt (Schwarzmarkt means "black market" in German).

Josef Schwarz's former business parnter was named A. Lidl. But legal reasons prevented Dieter Schwarz from using his name. Instead he found a newspaper article about Ludwig Lidl, a painter and retired schoolteacher. He bought the rights to the name from him for 1,000 German marks.

Expansion

By the 1980s, Lidl had 300 stores across Germany. Then they expanded to France and opened their first United Kingdom store in 1994. In 2015, Lidl opened its first American location in Arlington County, Virginia.

ALDI reached the states far earlier, opening their first American store in 1976 in Iowa.

The stores hold several similarities, according to NJ Advance Media. Both utilize cost-cutting measures to keep prices down. Both don't regularly provide bags. Neither carries many brand names. The individual stores don't usually have local phone numbers, which saves each location from having an additional bill.

ALDI operates more than 1,900 American stores in 36 states. They plan to increase that total to 2,500 by 2022. Lidl, meanwhile, operates more than 65 stores in nine east-coast states.

The chains' American expansion hits Lacey this week.

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