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Lidl in Bär will not open for another year and is several months behind the German grocer’s original schedule for opening the store.
Despite obvious construction progress, Lidl plans to open its almost 30,000 square meter store on Pulaski Highway and Salem Church Road in autumn 2022, according to a company spokesman.
The company announced last year that it would open the store before the end of 2021.
“Like thousands of companies, we have seen COVID-19 put pressure on the materials supply chain and that affects our planning,” Lidl’s communications director Will Harwood wrote in a statement. He added that the company was confident of the new schedule.
Lidl, pronounced LEE-dul, receives approval for the bear shop in May 2020. It is being built on the site that was previously used by the Countryside Nursery and Garden Center.
Lidl is a discounter – similar to the German Aldi – that sells its own retail brands and has fewer products in stock than traditional grocery stores. For cost reasons, the company presents the products in the boxes in which they were shipped.
The Bear Store will be the third Lidl store in Delaware, alongside the Dover and Middletown locations.
After retooling its original U.S. expansion plan, Lidl became the fastest growing retailer in the U.S. from 2018 to 2019. according to the National Retail Federation. It remained part of the grocery market’s biggest growth sector until early 2020 when the grocery store as a whole became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic.
“Now those gains have slowed,” said Venkatesh Shankar, director of research at the Center for Retail Studies at Texas A&M University.
However, Lidl is well positioned to expand in the region and opened a 700,000-square-foot distribution center in Cecil County, Maryland in March 2020. The company had previously announced that it would add 50 stores by the end of 2021, with half of the locations in the northeast. It is unclear how many will hit the year-end target.
Lidl has a smaller presence in Delaware than Aldi, which arrived in Delaware a year earlier than Lidl in 2016. Aldi has five locations in Delaware and plans at least two more on the coast road in Rehoboth Beach and on route 273 in Christiana city center.
In his statement, Harwood said the new store will feature “state-of-the-art equipment, furnishings and lighting, wide aisles and other eco-friendly design elements”.
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Contact Brandon Holveck at bholveck@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter @holveck_brandon.
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