Discount grocery store chain Aldi will hold a grand opening on Thursday for its second Centre Region location, about five months after opening its first.
A ribbon-cutting will take place at 8:15 a.m. followed by the 8:30 a.m. opening of the store at 780 Benner Pike, next to the Nittany Mall.
It will be open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Sunday and 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday.
“We have served the Johnstown-Altoona area for more than 20 years and look forward to continuing to offer State College residents high-quality, fresh foods and low prices in every ALDI aisle, every day,” JR Perry, ALDI Saxonburg Division vice president, said in a statement.
Beginning Thursday, customers at the new store can enter for a chance to win a $500 ALDI gift card on-site by scanning a QR code using their mobile device.
The 19,221-square-foot store, located on the former Krentzman Supply property at the corner of Benner Pike and Shiloh Road, joins the 1798 N. Atherton St. store in Patton Township as State College area locations for the grocer, which previously had its nearest locations in Blair and Mifflin counties.
The 20,422-square-foot Atherton Street store opened in October 2021 as the first building at the Patton Crossing development, the 30-acre commercial and residential development on the site of the former Penn State Mobile Home Park site.
Like the Atherton Street store, the Benner Pike location will employ 15 to 20 people.
“At ALDI, we streamline our approach to staffing, creating cost-saving efficiencies that are passed onto our customers,” Perry wrote in an email last month.
Aldi specializes in offering mostly private-label brands and, in addition to store efficiency, keeps prices low through a variety of measures. Among them, customers deposit a quarter to use a shopping cart and have it returned when they return their cart. Shoppers are also asked to bring reusable bags and the store does not offer single-use plastic bags.
Access to the new store is right-in/right-out from Benner Pike as well as a full-movement intersection at the mall access road between the property and the former Sears Auto Center that connects to Shiloh Road.
The store has a “dual-tower” layout, raised at both the north and south ends. That’s not a typical design for Aldi stores, which often have one tower at the entrance. The second was included, based on comments from College Township on an initial concept plan presented in 2020, because of the building’s location as “gateway,” to the area.
“This building will be a little bit more expensive and a little nicer because of that,” Rory Garr, Aldi’s director of real estate for western Pennsylvania, said at a College Township Council meeting in February 2021.
Garr previously said that Aldi had long been looking to get into the State College market and was fortunate to find prime locations become available in quick succession.
“We’ve been trying in the area for a long time, and we were lucky enough to have the development on North Atherton then find this piece of property [on Benner Pike] and work out the parameters of the deal,” Garr said.
