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Aldi plans to open 800 new stores around the U.S.
Aldi plans to substantially expand its U.S. footprint, with the discount grocery chain announcing Thursday that it will open hundreds of new stores across the U.S. over the next five years.
The company said it will add 800 new stores by the end of 2028, including newly built outlets as well as converted locations currently operating under different names that Aldi has acquired. Aldi operates 2,300 stores nationwide.
Aldi said the expansion will bring low-priced groceries to more communities across the U.S. as consumers increasingly look for ways to save money at the register. Although inflation has cooled, grocery prices remain stubbornly high. The cost of food eaten at home typically rises 2.5% per year, but in 2022 those prices shot up 11.4% and increased another 5% last year, according to government data.
Two-thirds of voters polled by Yahoo Finance/Ipsos late last year said the greatest toll from inflation had been in surging food prices, far outpacing the 1 in 10 who said they feel the impact through gas prices or higher rents.
Driving Aldi’s expansion is organic growth, combined with its acquisition of Southeastern Grocers, which operates and its Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket stores.
“Our growth is fueled by our customers, and they are asking for more Aldi stores in their neighborhoods nationwide,” Aldi CEO Jason Hart said in a statement Thursday.
The expansion will cost Aldi a total of $9 billion over five years, according to the company. Aldi said it will add nearly 330 stores across Northeastern and Midwestern states, as well as open new stores in Southern California, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
—With reporting from the Associated Press
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Writer Delia Ephron, famous for rom-coms like “You’ve Got Mail,” knows how to dream up a fairy-tale storyline. But Ephron’s Broadway debut later this month comes directly from the pages of her life.
Ephron has written about intimate things before, but now it is her own life that is on the stage for everyone to see. She said it was not easy, “because I am basically introverted.”
But she sure makes it look easy. When “Sunday Morning” first interviewed Ephron two-and-a-half years ago, she’d just finished a best-selling memoir, “Left on Tenth.” Now she’s turned that book into a play, telling her remarkable story of beating the odds. She said, “It’s the story of a woman who loses her beloved husband of 38 years, and a man from her past drops into her life and she falls madly in love. And then shortly afterwards I got diagnosed with a terrible disease, a fatal leukemia. And I survived.”
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That’s right: seven years ago, because of her blood cancer, Delia Ephron was given four months to live. She’d already lost her sister, Nora, and her husband, Jerry, to cancer. But she somehow found love again, and got married in the hospital while undergoing chemo (a wedding that Dr. LaPook, a friend of Ephron’s, recorded).
Five-time Tony Award-winner Susan Stroman is directing the play. “It’s about second chances, and love, and life, and being brave enough to take those second chances, ’cause most people aren’t,” she said.
Stroman and Ephron share something in common they wish they didn’t. “I sadly lost my husband to AML, to leukemia,” Stroman said. “So, when I started to read the play, I knew everything about what was going on. I didn’t have to research anything, ’cause I had lived it, too.”
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She said it is “tricky” to direct the play’s turns from humor, to tragedy, and back again. But it’s a trick Stroman mastered – as “Sunday Morning” watched, tagging along every step of the way, from the first meet-and-greet, to an early rehearsal, to the stage of the James Earl Jones Theatre.
Emmy Award-winner Julianna Margulies plays Ephron. “They’re saying it’s a rom-com, and it is,” Margulies said. “It’s romantic, and it’s funny, and it’s wonderful, but bring tissues, in case you need them.”
LaPook asked stage legend Peter Gallagher (who plays Peter Rutter, Ephron’s newfound love), “The play is about two people falling in love who are not in their 20s or 30s; they’re older than that. What’s the significance of that?”
“Well, you know, you’re closer to death!” Gallagher replied. “Everything is precious. And I think that’s another thing that the audience is going to recognize and feel.”
Asked about the play’s life lessons for the audience, Ephron said, “We plan our lives out as a young person: ‘Oh, I wanna get married. I wanna have children. I wanna have a career.’ You know, you make all these things. But then you don’t think, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen to me after I’m 50? What life do I want then?’ It’s a much more open book. And this is about seizing those years and really creating something.”
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Story produced by Amiel Weisfogel. Editor: Remington Korper.
