The cheapest grocery store in America may be the one that decided not to sell you half the things you wanted. That's basically Aldi's trick.
Then H-E-B looked at the same problem and tried something completely different.
Instead of stripping the store down, it built a cheaper version of itself called Joe V's Smart Shop.
And Walmart? Walmart has spent decades doing the exact opposite. More stores. More scale. More products. More customers. More purchasing power.
Three retailers.
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Three very different ways to make a grocery bill smaller. And right now, they're all pushing harder.
In 2026, Aldi is opening more than 180 new U.S. stores and is aiming for roughly 2,800 locations by year-end, on the way to 3,200 by the end of 2028. H-E-B is continuing to expand Joe V's Smart Shop, including two new Houston-area stores planned for 2027.
Walmart is remodeling more than 650 U.S. stores in 2026 while continuing to expand its Neighborhood Market format and push deeper into private label and faster delivery.
This isn't just a price war.
It's a business-model war.
And the question I find much more interesting is this:
What does a grocery store actually have to remove to become dramatically cheaper?
A cashier? Maybe. A bigger building? Definitely helps. 15 brands of ketchup? Probably.
A pharmacy? A bakery? Thousands of products? Now we're getting somewhere.
Because Aldi, Joe V's and Walmart are basically answering that question in three different ways.
And once you understand what they're removing and what they're stubbornly keeping the grocery store starts to look less like a supermarket and more like an engineering problem.