What Might Aldi Look Like in 2050?

Most people know, at least at a basic level, what history is. As Merriam-Webster puts it, history is “a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events.” History is a vast field, so vast that most historians specialize in little slices of it. Not only is the information at our command overwhelming, but the explaining part — such as understanding how different historians have looked at a specific event over time — is equally intimidating.

A less known object of study is that of futurology. Futurology, or futures studies, is defined by Wikipedia as “the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social/technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future.”

Futurology is serious work. Predicting what will happen in the future is difficult, with plenty of examples of people who got it hilariously wrong. That hasn’t stopped people — experts and regular folks alike — from trying.

It also hasn’t stopped other people from grumbling about it. After all, humans don’t always like change.

Nevertheless, it seems all but certain that grocery stores in the future will look different. But how? Here we’d like speculate at what Aldi might look like 26 years from the year of this post, in 2050.

Here are five guesses.

1. Most Shoppers Will Buy Their Groceries Online

Online grocery shopping has increased by a lot in recent years. While the pandemic of 2020-2021 certainly accelerated that increase, the trend lines were already there. It’s hard to see how online grocery sales will do anything but go up in the years to come. The technology — the devices people use and the portals those devices access — will only get better, making it easier for shoppers to get what they need. We can think of all kinds of ways developing tech like artificial intelligence and virtual reality could transform the grocery shopping business.

Will Aldi still be using Instacart or its corporate descendant, a different vendor, or its own portal? We could see this going a few ways. It’s possible that some vendor — either one that exists already or one that doesn’t exist yet — will push grocery purchasing in ways that will transform the way people buy. It’s also possible that Aldi will develop its own platform down the road. Or you might see something a little like what you see today, with a mix of grocery store portals and third parties giving grocers more than one way to order online.

We wouldn’t be surprised if both curbside pickup and delivery are both still in the mix in 2050. The real question, in our minds, is whether or not the cars doing pickup and delivery are self-driving or not. If shoppers have their own self-driving cars, they could conceivably dispatch their car to the grocer, who could load it up and send it back.

2. Inside the Store, Checkout-Free Will Rule

We think there may still be a market, if a shrinking one, for in-store purchases. Unless virtual shopping gets so good you can examine the strawberries from home before you buy them (and with the advances in virtual reality, who knows?), we assume some people still go into the stores. It might even be one of those routines people do to get out of the house and be around other people.

For people who still shop in person, we expect Aldi to be all, or nearly all, checkout-free by 2050. In other words, we think you’ll be able to go into an Aldi, put what you need in a cart, and walk out the door without having to stop to scan anything. Store technology will detect what you put in your cart, automatically add it all up, and place the charges on your payment method as you walk out the door.

Anyone who has read the news the last few years knows: this isn’t science fiction. In fact, Aldi, who had been testing the technology for years in the United Kingdom, launched an American checkout-free store in 2024. We’ve seen it, and it’s promising. With so many companies, including Amazon, experimenting with checkout-free technology, it seems all but a given that it will eventually become the norm for people who still visit stores.

3. Automation Will Replace Most or Maybe Even All Workers

Aldi has a reputation for keeping prices low by keeping operations slim. We’ve seen that on display as the grocer has moved headlong into self-checkout, reducing the employees necessary to staff the checkout lanes. If that is any indication, the Aldi in 2050 — perhaps like most grocers outside of maybe Trader Joe’s — will have few workers on property.

You might need a worker or two to shelve things, load at curbside, and deal with hiccups, but not much beyond that. And if companies somehow figure out how to create effective robots that can do one or more of those jobs, you might not need workers at all. As lean as Aldi likes to run things, I wouldn’t be surprised if Aldi is one of the first American grocers to ditch workers entirely.

4. Carts Could Look Different

We’re still a little ways off from mass-produced articulating robots that can move with joints like a human. Wheels, though? Self-driving cars are already here. We’ve already speculated on how self-driving cars might be a part of curbside pickup and delivery, but we could also easily see self-driving carts in the mix for some grocers. Imagine, for example, a cart that follows shoppers around as they browse the aisles. The cart could even have a display that adds up prices.

Grocers are already thinking this direction. Walmart patented self-driving cart technology back in 2016, and a number of companies are developing and testing “smart cart” technology in grocery stores.

Would Aldi spring for those kinds of carts? Self-driving carts would make a lot of sense for grocers who send workers out to collect carts, but it would make less sense for Aldi, which has its shoppers do that work. Add in the fact that Aldi likes to keep its frills and costs low, and self-driving carts seem like a bigger question mark. We wouldn’t rule it out, though, especially if Aldi felt like it had to do so to keep up with other grocers … or if Aldi felt like the carts could make the grocer more money in the long run.

Regardless, one inevitable casualty of the future could be the almighty quarter. Cash use has slowly but steadily declined over the years, and if that trend continues, a close-to-cashless society could loom in the future. Aldi might need an alternative to quarters if it wants to keep customers bringing those carts back.

Or Aldi could just cave and deploy self-driving carts.

5. Aldi Will Continue to Change While Staying True to Certain Ideals

Aldi certainly looks different now than it did when it first opened in the United States in the 1950s: product quality and choice have improved, for example. Once a basic stock-up store, the grocer now appeals to everyone from low-income families on SNAP to affluent shoppers looking for artisanal cheeses. We expect the Aldi of the future to maintain its multi-class approach to the grocery wars.

What’s more, Aldi is also in a lot more places than it used to be, and we would expect that to continue. Will Aldi be in all 50 states by 2050? Will Canada finally get an Aldi to call its own? It could happen, especially if the grocer continues to succeed as it has to date.

Still, we expect Aldi to remain unchanged in certain fundamental ways. Aldi has, through the decades, kept to a core proposition of being a disciplined, aggressive, lean, small-footprint store that revels in having the lowest prices among grocers. We expect any changes Aldi makes in the future to keep in line with that philosophy.

The Aldi of 2050 will, we suspect, be home to inexpensive groceries, just as it has been at the time we wrote this.

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What do you think Aldi will look like in 2050? Let us know in the comments.