Aldi's defining moves.

A normal supermarket carries 25,000+ items. Aldi carries about 2,000 - and nearly all of them wear Aldi's own name. The narrowness isn't a limitation. It's the engine that funds the price gap, and Mondelez just sued to prove the machine got too big to ignore.

Aldi stocks about 1,350 items where a supermarket stocks 30,000, and roughly 90% of them carry its own label. That isn't thrift — it's arithmetic. Every structural choice is engineered to force the price down, which is why full-assortment rivals can't copy it without breaking themselves.

The myth is that Aldi makes its own groceries in its own factories. It doesn't — Shearer's, Schreiber, and Storck do. Aldi owns the spec, the brand, and the demand signal, and lets others own the plants. On €112 billion in sales, that's integration without the capital.

The story is that Aldi and Lidl cracked US grocery together. They didn't. Aldi's first US store closed in 18 months in 1976; it took nearly 35 years to reach 1,000 stores. Lidl arrived 41 years later and, after eight years, holds about 1% share in its own trade areas.

Everyone thinks Aldi's edge is cheap groceries. Cheap is the output. The real moat is a store that carries roughly 2,000 products instead of 25,000 — a structural choice that lets ~90% of the shelf be its own brand and leaves rivals unable to match the price without bleeding their own margin.

A conventional US supermarket stocks more than 30,000 items; Aldi stocks roughly 1,400–1,800. That isn't austerity for its own sake — it's the single decision every other cost advantage cascades out of, and the one no incumbent can copy without tearing itself apart.