This Thursday, German retailer Lidl opened 10 new stores on the East Coast, in their attempt to become an important player on the U.S. market, becoming a competitor with a huge potential for companies like Walmart, Trader Joes’s or Whole Foods.
Currently, the retailer has over 10,000 stores in 27 countries, according to The Washington Post, and it’s trying to attract American clients with serious discounts, modern-looking stores and a fine selection of wines.
More locations to come soon!
The stores opened this week are located in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. However, Lidl is also planning to open 90 more locations by the end of the year, on the East Coast.
However, these aren’t the first Lidl stores in the United States, as the company, which has the headquarters in Arlington, has been testing the market for the past year, through a prototype store in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in Spotsylvania County. After this entire period, it looked like Americans are looking forward to finding free bakery samples in the stores, as well as chilled beer.
As for the aspects Lidl is planning to rely on, in order to differentiate itself from the competition, we’re talking about very low prices and discounts. Besides this, they will offer a lot of in-house brands and maintain the size of a store at around 21,000 square feet.
The latter will definitely be well received by the U.S. buyers, who often complain about needing to look through 24 aisles in order to find what they need. A Lidl store, on the other side, has just six aisles and 90 percent of the merchandise consists of in-house brands.
No more waste!
Finally, another important aspect which could help the retailer a lot is the ability to keep prices low in part by cutting waste in pretty much every step of the process.
“We look at waste differently,” said spokesman William Harwood. “It’s not just what ends up in the garbage can at the end of the day, but also about any inefficiency along the way that ends up costing the customer more.”
