A look inside Aldi’s new Midtown Manhattan location

As the US commemorates its 250th year, Aldi is celebrating its 50th in the US by opening nearly 200 new stores across the country.

In January, Aldi announced plans to open 180 new stores this year, bringing its store count to 2,800 and surpassing Kroger to become the second-largest grocery chain in the US.

One of its latest openings is in Midtown Manhattan—a notoriously expensive neighborhood that lacks many discount chains like Walmart, Costco, or Dollar General that’ve been thriving as consumers increasingly seek out low-price grocers. With the store blocks from New York City’s bustling Times Square and Theater District and across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Aldi is banking on business from tourists and locals alike at the store, Dan Gavin, VP of national real estate at Aldi USA, told Retail Brew.

During a tour of the new location, Gavin and Scott Patton, chief commercial officer at Aldi USA, walked us through a few of the store’s unique features and the many ways Aldi has found to cut costs—and therefore, prices—in its stores.

On the town: Aldi uses “complex statistical analysis” to inform its location strategy, analyzing factors like housetops per square mile and nearby competition, Gavin said. Some locations, like Los Angeles, can often be too costly to deliver on its low-priced retail model. The high volume and sales expectations in Midtown offsets pricy real estate, and it also anticipates e-commerce sales, with third-party partnerships through Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, will be sizable at this location.

The new Aldi Midtown store is part of a pilot program of 12 stores that feature updated aesthetics and in-store experience, Gavin said. The updates include video screens highlighting its product assortment and promotions, with content rotating on a weekly basis, which Gavin noted saves the company the cost of weekly flyers. It’s also introduced wayfinding at the end of aisles, and is emphasizing Aldi’s color scheme throughout the store.

At 13,000 square feet, the new store is 10% larger than a typical Aldi, which along with additional employees (five to seven at a given time), checkout aisles (nine, where the average is five or six), and optimized display space that combines upright and lid chest freezers, will help accommodate the high volume of shoppers, Gavin noted.

Stock options: The new location is also practicing many of the tried-and-true strategies that have kept Aldi’s operations efficient and its prices low.

Some of these are well known, like stocking only 2,000 largely private label SKUs, as well as the nostalgia-inducing quarter-cart system, which pushes consumers to return their own carts and Patton said saves the company millions in labor costs annually (carts in Midtown are kept inside because there’s no parking lot).

Many details across the store are optimized to save labor costs and time. Products are stocked in custom-made cardboard boxes that are quick to stock and replace on shelves all at once, rather than one by one. At a high-volume store like NYC, they’ll be replaced four times a day, Patton said. For some popular fresh foods like eggs and milk, Aldi combines its storage and retail spaces by stacking products on carts that can easily be rolled in and out for restock, with 240 units of eggs able to be restocked in 10–15 seconds. It also prints extra large, and often multiple barcodes on its private label items to allow for speedier checkout.

Discount me in: Aldi’s expansion comes as the grocer has seen its fastest-ever growth over the past five years, Patton said. Its store visits jumped 8% YoY in 2025, per Placer.ai, with several of Aldi’s private labels seeing more than 90% unit volume growth YoY as of March 31, per Numerator.

“Every time we go to a new market or put a new store in an existing market, we continue to see new customers come back, so that really gives us the confidence that we can continue to grow,” Patton said.

While Aldi has shared plans to open 3,200 stores by 2028, “that’s not the end,” Patton said.

“We’re not stopping in 2028,” he said. “We continue to have our success because the business model resonates—low prices, great quality, easy to shop—and that’s what people are looking for, and there’s really nothing else like it.”