The Quarter in the Cart
The most radical idea in modern retail costs twenty-five cents. Not to buy — to borrow. At every Aldi store in America, the shopping carts are chained together in a corral, and to unlock one you slide a quarter into a slot at the handle. When you return the cart, the quarter comes back. It is, in the grand scheme of a grocery trip, an absurdly small amount of money. But that quarter is a thesis statement disguised as a coin deposit. It eliminates the need for cart attendants. It keeps the parking lot clean without a cleaning crew. It signals, before you have touched a single product, that this store operates on principles different from anything you have encountered — that every hidden cost has been hunted, cornered, and eliminated so that the savings can be passed, relentlessly, to you. The quarter-in-the-cart mechanism is a microcosm of a company that has, over eight decades, turned the systematic removal of expense into something approaching an art form — and, in doing so, built one of the largest and most profitable grocery empires on earth without ever issuing a share of public stock, without a marketing department for most of its existence, and without offering more than a fraction of the products its competitors consider essential. Aldi is the world's most successful grocery discounter, an operation so ruthlessly efficient that when the CEO of Procter & Gamble visited the company's European headquarters several years ago, his regional president did not take him to see Danone, Nestlé, or Unilever. He took him to an Aldi store. The four-letter name — short for Albrecht Discount — strikes, as Harvard Business Review put it, "fear in the hearts of brand managers across Europe." And increasingly, across America.
By the Numbers
The Aldi Empire
~12,000+Stores worldwide across 20+ countries
$80B+Estimated combined annual revenue (Aldi Nord & Aldi Süd)
~2,800U.S. stores by end of 2025
$9BCommitted U.S. investment through 2028
~1,400–2,000SKUs per store (vs. 30,000–40,000 at a typical supermarket)
90%+Products sold under Aldi-exclusive private-label brands
45,000+U.S. employees
#1Price ranking per Dunnhumby Retailer Preference Index, five consecutive years
The numbers tell only part of it. What the numbers cannot capture is the degree to which Aldi's operating philosophy — a philosophy forged in the rubble of postwar Germany, refined across six decades of obsessive cost discipline, and now being deployed at unprecedented scale across the American Sunbelt — represents a fundamentally different answer to the question of what a grocery store should be. Every conventional supermarket in the world is organized around the principle of abundance: more brands, more choices, more services, more square footage. Aldi is organized around the principle of subtraction. And subtraction, it turns out, compounds.
The Ruins of Essen
The origin story begins not with entrepreneurial ambition but with survival. In 1913, Anna Albrecht opened a small grocery store in Schönebeck, a working-class suburb of Essen, Germany. Her husband, Karl Albrecht Sr., had been a coal miner before emphysema forced him out of the pits. The store was what Germans call an "Tante-Emma-Laden" — an Auntie Emma shop — the kind of modest neighborhood provision store that existed in every German town, selling flour, sugar, soap, and whatever else the mining families of the Ruhr Valley needed to get through the week.
Anna's sons, Karl Jr. and Theo, both served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Karl fought on the Eastern Front and was wounded; Theo served in Rommel's Afrika Korps and was captured by the Allies in Italy. Both were quickly repatriated after the war ended. They returned to Essen to find much of the city in ruins — the Ruhr had been among the most heavily bombed industrial regions in Europe — but their mother's small store, improbably, still stood.
The two brothers took over the shop in 1946, and the conditions of postwar Germany gave them their operating philosophy by necessity. There was no money for advertising. There was no money for decoration. There was barely money for inventory. So Karl and Theo Albrecht did the only thing available to them: they sold the bare necessities — non-perishable goods at the lowest possible prices — from the small, nondescript shop, and they stripped out every cost that did not directly serve the customer's need for affordable food. They refused to stock perishables, which carried waste. They refused to spend on store fixtures. They displayed merchandise in the same cardboard boxes it arrived in, eliminating the labor of restocking shelves. They did not install telephones in their stores; branch managers were instructed to use nearby pay phones.
This was not a retail concept. It was austerity, made operational. But the Albrechts discovered something that would define the next eight decades: the German consumer, even as the Wirtschaftswunder economic miracle took hold in the 1950s, did not abandon thrift. The cultural memory of deprivation ran deep. And the brothers' prices — often 20% below competitors — attracted customers from every social class.
By 1950, they had 15 stores in the Ruhr Valley. By 1955, more than 100. By 1960, more than 300 across West Germany, still displaying stock in torn-open cardboard boxes, still refusing to invest in anything that did not lower the price at the register.
Quantitative data can form only a limited basis for comparing companies and is not very helpful. It should be much more important for competitors to think about the purpose and goals of their own businesses.
The Cigarette Schism
The split that defined Aldi's global structure arose from one of the most prosaic disagreements imaginable: whether to sell cigarettes. In the early 1960s, Theo Albrecht wanted to stock tobacco products, which carried high margins and reliable demand. Karl Albrecht opposed the idea, reportedly because he believed cigarettes would attract shoplifters. The dispute was irresolvable. So in 1961, the brothers did something that should have destroyed the enterprise — they divided it in two.
Karl took the southern half of Germany and called his company Aldi Süd. Theo took the north — Aldi Nord. An "Aldi equator" was drawn across the country, and the two entities became legally and financially independent, operating under contractual agreements that prevented them from competing in the same markets. They later carved up much of the world on similar lines. Aldi Süd operates in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, China, and — crucially — the United States. Aldi Nord controls Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain, Poland, and — through its 1979 acquisition of the chain from
Joe Coulombe — Trader Joe's in America.
The oddity of Trader Joe's deserves a beat of attention. Coulombe, a Stanford MBA who had built a quirky, Hawaiian-shirt-themed grocery concept in Southern California, reluctantly sold to Theo Albrecht's Aldi Nord in 1979 and stayed on as CEO for another decade. Trader Joe's and Aldi occupy opposite ends of the discount grocery aesthetic spectrum — one whimsical and curated, the other austere and utilitarian — but they share a common DNA: private-label dominance, limited SKU counts, and a fanatical focus on cost per unit of quality delivered.
The cigarette schism, far from weakening the Albrecht enterprise, may have strengthened it. Two independent organizations experimenting with variations of the same model, in different geographies, without the bureaucratic overhead of a unified corporate structure. No management consultants. No shareholder meetings. No quarterly earnings guidance. Just two families, operating in parallel, with a 30-year time horizon and the patience that private ownership permits.
How a disagreement over cigarettes created two global grocery empires
1913Anna Albrecht opens a small grocery store in Essen-Schönebeck, Germany.
1946Sons Karl and Theo take over the store after returning from WWII.
195015 stores in the Ruhr Valley.
1955More than 100 stores across Germany.
1960300+ stores; cigarette dispute emerges.
1961Formal split: Aldi Süd (Karl) and Aldi Nord (Theo). The name "Aldi" — Albrecht Discount — is officially adopted.
1976Aldi Süd opens its first U.S. store in Iowa.
1979
The Architecture of Absence
Walk into an Aldi and the first thing you notice is everything that is not there.
No pharmacy. No bank branch. No floral department. No deli counter with someone slicing prosciutto to order. No bakery with a glass case of artisanal croissants. No loyalty card program. No self-checkout kiosks (in most locations). No music. The lighting is functional — strip fluorescents, not the warm halogen glow that Whole Foods uses to make organic kale look like it was hand-picked by angels. The aisles are narrow. The store itself is small — roughly 12,000 square feet in the U.S., versus 40,000 to 60,000 for a conventional supermarket, and 90,000 or more for a Walmart Supercenter.
Products sit in their original shipping cartons, placed on pallets or simple metal shelves. Each carton is designed with a perforated front panel that can be torn open to create an instant display — eliminating the labor and time required to individually shelve items. When a carton is empty, it gets pulled. When a new one arrives, it goes in the same spot. The system means that a typical Aldi store can be restocked by a skeleton crew in a fraction of the time required at a traditional grocery store.
The store carries approximately 1,400 to 2,000 SKUs. A typical supermarket carries 30,000 to 40,000. This is not a limitation — it is the strategy. For any given product category, Aldi offers one or two options, almost always under its own private-label brands: Simply Nature for organic products, liveGfree for gluten-free, Earth Grown for plant-based. More than 90% of what Aldi sells is exclusive to Aldi. This means no shelf-space bidding wars with CPG companies, no slotting fees to negotiate, no promotional calendars to manage, and — most importantly — no brand-name markup to pass along.
The radical SKU constraint has a cascading effect on the entire supply chain. Fewer products means higher volume per product, which means more purchasing leverage with suppliers. Fewer products means simpler logistics, fewer stockouts, faster restocking. Fewer products means less spoilage, less markdowns, less waste. Fewer products means smaller stores, which means lower rent, lower energy costs, lower capital expenditure per location. The math is almost unfairly elegant.
Aldi's checkout process is designed with the same subtractive logic. Cashiers are trained to memorize the price of every item in the store — or, more recently, to scan barcodes that are printed on multiple sides of the packaging so that any face scanned registers correctly. The speed is legendary. Customers pack their own groceries at a separate counter behind the registers, because mixing scanning and bagging at the same station is an inefficiency Aldi will not tolerate. Bring your own bags, or buy Aldi's reusable ones at cost. And that quarter deposit for the cart? It is a system that eliminates the need for cart corrals, cart retrieval teams, and the entire parking-lot management infrastructure that every other grocery chain takes for granted.
Every one of these choices — the boxes, the bags, the quarter, the small store, the private labels, the limited range — removes a cost that conventional grocers pass to consumers in the form of higher prices. Aldi's prices are typically 20% to 30% below traditional supermarkets, and the Dunnhumby Retailer Preference Index has ranked Aldi as the #1 grocery chain for price in the United States for five consecutive years.
We avoid non-essential services like banking, pharmacies and check cashing to bring more savings to you.
The Private-Label Fortress
The private-label strategy is the load-bearing wall of the entire Aldi structure, and it is worth lingering on why.
When a conventional supermarket sells a box of Cheerios, the gross margin is thin — typically 25% to 30% — because General Mills has the brand power to dictate terms, and the retailer is essentially renting shelf space to the manufacturer. The economics of this arrangement mean that the supermarket must sell enormous volumes across tens of thousands of SKUs to generate adequate profit, which requires large stores, which requires large staff, which requires large marketing budgets, which requires higher prices. It is a system that subsidizes brand-name manufacturers at the expense of the grocer and, ultimately, the consumer.
Aldi inverts this entirely. By selling more than 90% private-label products, Aldi captures the manufacturer's margin. It controls the specifications, the sourcing, the packaging, and the pricing. It negotiates directly with contract manufacturers — often the same factories that produce the name-brand equivalents — and buys in massive volumes per SKU. The result is a product that, according to Aldi's own testing, meets or exceeds national brand quality at a price 30% to 50% lower. One in three Aldi-exclusive branded products has won an industry award.
The risk is obvious: without the emotional pull of recognizable brands, Aldi must earn customer trust through consistent quality. The Twice as Nice Guarantee addresses this head-on — if a customer is dissatisfied with any Aldi-exclusive product, the store will replace the product and refund the purchase price. It is a double guarantee, and it functions as a trust accelerator: try it once risk-free, and the quality does the rest.
Since 2018, Aldi has increased its overall product selection by 20%, including a 40% increase in fresh food offerings — organic meats, USDA Choice beef, sustainable seafood, gourmet cheeses, seasonal produce sourced from local farmers. This expansion of fresh was a calculated concession: early Aldi stores, echoing the postwar model, had been weak in perishables. The shift required investment in cold chain logistics and more frequent deliveries, but it closed the one gap that had prevented Aldi from being a primary grocery destination for middle-income households. Aldi has also added a limited selection of national brands in response to customer feedback — a pragmatic acknowledgment that some brand loyalties are too deep to overcome with private-label substitutes. But these remain a tiny fraction of the assortment.
The Albrecht Method: Decentralization as Doctrine
Karl and Theo Albrecht were, by every account, obsessively private. Karl was described as Germany's wealthiest man at his death in 2014 — his fortune estimated at more than £12 billion — yet he almost never gave interviews, never appeared at industry events, never cultivated a public persona. Theo's only moment of public visibility was involuntary: he was kidnapped in 1971 and held for 17 days before a ransom was paid. The experience deepened the family's already extreme reclusiveness.
The management philosophy they embedded in Aldi reflects this temperament. The company is radically decentralized. Both Aldi Süd and Aldi Nord are further divided into dozens of independent regional companies — 32 regional entities for Aldi Süd in Germany alone, 35 for Aldi Nord. Each regional company operates with significant autonomy, responsible for its own stores, its own logistics, its own hiring. There is no bloated corporate headquarters. No annual budgets in the traditional sense. No management consultants. No strategy retreats at Swiss conference centers. Promotion comes exclusively from within — store managers are drawn from the cashier ranks, district managers from the store managers, regional executives from the district managers.
Dieter Brandes, a 14-year Aldi veteran and member of the company's administrative board, documented these practices in
Bare Essentials: The Aldi Way to Retail Success, one of the only insider accounts of the company's operating culture. What Brandes describes sounds less like a modern multinational and more like a federation of extremely efficient small businesses, unified by a shared philosophy and a few non-negotiable principles: the simplest solution is always preferred, every decision must lower the price for the customer, and complexity is the enemy.
The parallels to Berkshire Hathaway are striking and not accidental. Both are decentralized conglomerates that abhor corporate overhead. Both give operating units autonomy and judge them on results. Both have a philosophical commitment to treating partners — suppliers, in Aldi's case — as long-term allies rather than adversaries to be squeezed. Aldi's supplier relationships are famously stable; contracts are long-term, volumes are predictable, payment terms are reasonable. In exchange, Aldi demands the lowest possible cost and uncompromising quality standards. The result is a supply chain built on trust and mutual self-interest rather than zero-sum negotiation.
The family ownership structure is the enabler. Because Aldi is never required to report quarterly earnings or justify strategy to public shareholders, it can pursue the 30-year plays that its listed competitors cannot. As one industry observer noted: "The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies." Aldi does not have this problem. The Albrecht heirs — Karl Albrecht Jr. and family control Aldi Süd, while the descendants of Theo control Aldi Nord — are the only shareholders who matter, and they have shown no inclination to change the formula.
The Invasion of Iowa
Aldi Süd entered the United States in 1976 with a single store in southeastern Iowa. The choice was deliberate — the Midwest's working-class, value-conscious consumer base was the closest American analogue to Aldi's German customer. The expansion was slow, methodical, almost invisible. No national advertising campaigns. No splashy grand openings. Just one small store at a time, each replicating the model: limited SKUs, private labels, no frills, devastating prices.
For decades, Aldi was a regional curiosity. East Coast and West Coast consumers barely knew it existed. The stores were concentrated in the Midwest and parts of the South — Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania — serving precisely the demographic most likely to prioritize price above all else. The company opened 300 new U.S. stores during the 1990s and another 220 in the early 2000s, expanding into Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and eventually Florida, Connecticut, Texas, and California.
Then came the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Then came the slow-burning inflation of the 2020s. And Aldi's moment arrived.
The dynamics are straightforward: when food prices rise, consumers trade down. They switch from brand names to store brands. They switch from Whole Foods to Aldi. They switch from "I'll grab whatever looks good" to "I need to feed my family for less." The U.S. Labor Department reported that grocery prices jumped 0.7% in December 2024 alone from the previous month, with beef and veal up 16.4% year-over-year and coffee up nearly 20%. The vast majority of U.S. adults reported noticing higher-than-usual grocery prices in recent months, according to AP-NORC polling. Aldi's entire value proposition — the same quality for dramatically less — became less a preference and more a necessity for millions of American households.
The company responded with the most aggressive expansion in its U.S. history. In 2024, Aldi announced plans to open 800 new U.S. stores by 2028, backed by a $9 billion investment commitment. It opened a record 225 locations in 2024 and plans more than 180 additional stores in 2025, along with new distribution centers in Florida, Arizona, and Colorado. It is targeting more than 50 stores in Colorado within five years and plans to double its Las Vegas store count by 2030. By end of 2025, Aldi will operate approximately 2,800 U.S. stores, pushing toward a stated goal of 3,200 by 2028 — which would make it the third-largest U.S. grocery retailer by store count.
Our people absolutely are what differentiates us from our competitors. Team members across the company genuinely care about our customers and understand how each role contributes to achieving our Purpose.
The British [Beachhead](/mental-models/beachhead)
The United Kingdom offers a case study in Aldi's patience — and in the mortal danger that patience eventually poses to incumbents.
Aldi Süd opened its first UK store in April 1990, in Stechford, Birmingham. It was, by all accounts, an underwhelming debut. The store stocked 600 items. It placed no advertisements. It did not accept cheques or cards. Checkout assistants had been trained to memorize the price of every item and scanned so fast that British shoppers experienced what would come to be called "Aldi panic" — the terror that you cannot bag your goods quickly enough. A reporter from the Times visited a Birmingham Aldi in 1991 and called it "the anonymous, slightly alarming face of 1990s grocery shopping," noting the absence of avocados or kiwi fruit.
The British grocery establishment was dismissive. "We welcome the advent of Aldi and others to come," said Tesco's managing director David Malpas. "We can live quite happily in our part of the market and they can live in theirs." Sainsbury's remarked on the absence of service, which was "important to British customers." In 1999, the Financial Times noted that Aldi had made "little impact in Britain."
By 2009, after nearly two decades, Aldi's UK market share was just 2%. It seemed like the skeptics were right. Then the financial crisis hit. Then austerity. Then the slow, grinding realization among British consumers that the 7% profit margins enjoyed by the Big Four supermarkets — Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons — were being funded by their wallets.
Aldi began to modernize. It expanded fresh food and premium ranges. It launched marketing campaigns — including "Kevin the Carrot," a Christmas advertising character that became one of the most effective retail campaigns in UK history. It invested in store appearance without abandoning cost discipline. And customers came. Not just the working class, but the middle class, then the affluent. The social stigma of discount shopping evaporated.
Today, Aldi operates over 1,000 stores in the UK and topped £15 billion in annual sales. Together with Lidl, the German discounters hold more than 18% of the UK grocery market, up from less than 6% in 2010. Tesco and Sainsbury's have been forced into radical restructurings — launching their own discount lines, cutting costs, closing stores. The transformation took 30 years. Aldi had planned for that.
The [Flywheel](/mental-models/flywheel) of Frugality
Aldi's competitive advantage is not a single moat — it is a system of interlocking efficiencies that compound over time. Each element of the model reinforces the others, creating a flywheel that becomes harder to replicate the longer it runs.
Fewer SKUs mean higher volume per product, which means greater purchasing leverage and lower per-unit costs. Lower per-unit costs enable lower retail prices. Lower retail prices attract more customers. More customers mean even higher volume per product, which further increases purchasing leverage. Meanwhile, fewer SKUs mean smaller stores, which mean lower rent and operating costs, which further reduce the break-even point, which allows Aldi to sustain lower prices even in markets where competitors could not. The private-label strategy captures margin that would otherwise flow to brand-name manufacturers, and that margin is reinvested in lower prices rather than taken as profit.
The operational efficiencies extend to labor. Aldi stores are staffed by small teams — typically three to five employees per shift — who are cross-trained to perform every task: stocking, scanning, cleaning, cash handling. Aldi pays above-market wages, which reduces turnover, which reduces training costs, which improves productivity. The combination of small staff and high productivity per employee is one of Aldi's most underappreciated advantages. The company was named to Fortune's "Best Large Workplaces in Retail" list, with employees noting that "management here is excellent, and my managers make me feel like a person — not just a number."
The real genius of the system is that it makes competitive response almost impossible for conventional grocers. To match Aldi's prices, a traditional supermarket would need to cut its SKU count by 90%, exit its pharmacy and banking partnerships, tear up its supplier agreements with CPG companies, shrink its store footprint, retrain its workforce, and restructure its entire supply chain. No public company board would approve that transformation. The disruption to current revenue would be catastrophic. So incumbents are left with half-measures: launching discount store-brand lines that can never be as cheap as Aldi's, or launching small-format stores that can never be as efficient. The structural response is always inadequate because the structural change required is too radical.
ALDI Finds and the Treasure Hunt
One of Aldi's shrewdest innovations is its weekly "ALDI Finds" program — a rotating selection of approximately 100 limited-time products that arrive every Wednesday. These range from premium food items and specialty wines to small kitchen appliances, seasonal décor, outdoor furniture, gardening tools, and, famously, random items of startling eclecticism. A kayak one week. A fire pit the next. A leather messenger bag. A telescoping ladder.
ALDI Finds serves multiple strategic functions simultaneously. It drives weekly foot traffic — customers return not just for staples but for the thrill of discovering what's new, creating a "treasure hunt" dynamic similar to the one that drives Costco's rotating merchandise or T.J. Maxx's ever-changing inventory. It allows Aldi to test new product categories without permanently expanding its core assortment. It generates buzz and social media engagement — Aldi's cult following shares their Finds hauls with genuine enthusiasm online. And it provides a pressure-release valve for the limited selection: customers who might feel constrained by only two pasta sauce options are delighted by the unexpected appearance of a cast-iron Dutch oven at $24.99.
The program is also a masterclass in inventory management. ALDI Finds are purchased in limited quantities from opportunistic supply arrangements — closeouts, seasonal overruns, one-time production batches. When they're gone, they're gone. This creates urgency (buy it now or miss it forever) while also meaning that Aldi carries no lingering inventory risk on these items. The financial exposure is minimal, the customer engagement is maximal.
The Trade-Down Engine
The macroeconomic backdrop for Aldi's current expansion is almost comically favorable. Since the pandemic, cumulative food inflation in the United States has exceeded 25%. Beef, eggs, coffee, dairy — the staples of American households — have seen price increases that have forced consumers across every income bracket to reconsider where they shop. President Trump's trade war and tariff proposals have added a layer of anxiety about future price increases that, regardless of policy outcomes, has already altered consumer behavior.
The phenomenon is called "trading down," and it has accelerated relentlessly since 2021. Americans are dropping trusted name brands for cheaper store brands. They are switching from restaurants to home cooking. They are abandoning their traditional grocery stores for discount and thrift alternatives. Dollar General and Dollar Tree have benefited. Walmart's grocery business has surged. But no one has been better positioned to capture this shift than Aldi, whose entire operating model was designed — literally, from the rubble of postwar Germany — to serve the customer who needs quality food at the lowest possible price.
Aldi's sales reportedly increased by 10% in 2022, and the expansion pace since then suggests that growth has continued or accelerated. The company is adding distribution centers in Florida, Arizona, and Colorado to support its Sunbelt expansion, targeting the fastest-growing population centers in the country. It is not just growing — it is growing into the places where the new American middle class is most anxious about prices.
The competitor most threatened is not Walmart, which has scale and logistics advantages that provide its own form of price leadership, but the conventional supermarket sector — Kroger, Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize, regional chains — that operates on 2% to 3% net margins and lacks the structural capacity to match Aldi's prices without imploding their own business models. The attempted Kroger-Albertsons merger, which would have created the largest conventional grocery chain in America, was in part a defensive response to the Aldi and Lidl threat. That merger collapsed under regulatory opposition in late 2024, leaving two weakened competitors to face the discount onslaught separately.
The Kingdom of Simplicity
There is a philosophical dimension to Aldi that transcends strategy and enters something closer to conviction. The Albrechts were not simply frugal operators — they were ideologues of simplicity. Dieter Brandes' account in
Bare Essentials describes an organization where complexity is treated not as an inconvenience but as a moral failing. Every additional SKU, every additional layer of management, every additional service offering is presumed guilty until proven innocent. The burden of proof for adding anything is immense. The bias is always toward removal.
This philosophy extends to Aldi's information environment. The company does not disclose financial results. It does not participate in industry conferences. Its executives almost never speak publicly. There is no investor relations team, no annual report, no earnings call transcript to parse. The company's two operating entities are held through family foundations — the Siepmann Foundation (Aldi Süd) and the Markus Foundation (Aldi Nord) — structures that provide both tax advantages and an additional layer of privacy. For a company of Aldi's scale, the level of informational opacity is extraordinary, almost anachronistic, a refusal to participate in the performative transparency that modern capitalism demands.
This opacity is itself a competitive advantage. Competitors cannot benchmark against Aldi's margins. Analysts cannot identify strategic pivots before they're executed. Suppliers cannot use Aldi's internal data to negotiate more aggressively. The company's intentions are knowable only through its actions — a new store opening here, a new product line there, a distribution center being built in a state where Aldi has no current presence — and by the time the action is visible, the decision was made years ago.
Karl Albrecht, who died in July 2014 at 94, spent his later years at a vast private estate outside Munich. He collected rare orchids and old master paintings, two of the few extravagances he permitted himself. Theo, who died in 2010 at 88, had been even more reclusive after his kidnapping. Neither brother ever wrote a memoir, gave a keynote speech, or appeared on a magazine cover. The wealth they accumulated — the Albrecht family's combined fortune has been estimated at approximately $38 billion — was generated by a business built on the principle that every pfennig, every cent, every quarter saved was an act of service to the customer.
In the parking lot of an Aldi in suburban Phoenix, a woman returns her shopping cart to the corral and retrieves her quarter. It is 107 degrees. The cart slides into the chain with a click. The quarter is warm in her palm.
