After 100 years, the Aldi parent company in Essen has become too small for the food retailer's growing assortment. Aldi Nord plans to start building a branch more than twice as large this year in the immediate vicinity of the building in which Aldi founders Karl and Theo Albrecht were born and raised.
According to company information, the new market with almost 1300 square meters of sales area will be ready by the end of 2020. The development plan has entered into force at the end of August 2019, according to the city.
obs / ALDI purchasing
The branch in the Huestraße 89 in Essen-Schonnebeck in the year 1930
The sales rooms in the Aldi headquarters are to be used in the future after a century of food trade. "For this, numerous options are currently being examined with interested parties," said the Essen-based company. Aldi Nord makes it clear that it could also result in an external user for the traditional commercial space.
However, due to the emotional connection to Huestraße 89, the founding family said that the building would remain in the ownership of the group of companies. Aldi had been looking for an alternative location for some time.
Germ cell of the group
The first shop of the Albrecht family of entrepreneurs was initially a bakery trade opened by the later parents of Karl and Theo in 1913 in what is today the Essen district of Schonnebeck. He was in today's Huestraße 87, in Anna Albrecht's parents' house. In the spring of 1919, the Albrecht moved their business in the neighboring residential and commercial building number 89, which had bought the couple. The new much larger store they called "department store for food Karl Albrecht", as emerges from a corporate presentation. The building, built in 1909, is called "Stammhaus" by Aldi himself.
obs / ALDI purchasing
The discounter pallets are still missing: The "Aunt Emma" store of Albrecht in the Huestraße 89 (1930)
Trade analyst Matthias Queck sees in the planned move of Aldi from the parent company much more than just a branch relocation. This step illustrates the new freedoms of today's management as opposed to the purist concepts of the deceased Aldi founders. "This is already a cut-off from the sometimes overpowering over-fathers of the discounts, Karl and Theo Albrecht." In some points it is a "conceptual liberation". However, the expansion of the product range also poses a cost problem from logistics to personnel to the store network itself. Special new locations cost much more money.
According to the EHI Retail Institute, all discounters are following the trend towards larger branches. According to this data, the average sales area per store at Aldi Nord climbed ten percent from 2010 to 2018 to 848 square meters. At the independent sister company Aldi Süd, it is almost five percent more at 889 square meters per market on average. Archrival Lidl has the branch network with the largest average area, according to the EHI ranking, with a plus of 5.6 percent to 898 square meters. Also at Norma, Penny and Netto Marken-Discoun sees the EHI growing branches.
