Aldi an anchor! Who’s leg are you pulling?

With September being recorded as the worst trading month on the high street for 20yr we are served with the news by one of the Bedlington Tory coalition independents that his team at Northumberland County Council have secured an anchor store to save the high street in Bedlington and the long awaited ‘Pipers Place’ development will at last get off the ground two years and two months late.

But will it?

In July 2019 the Grocer and the Daily Express if you can ever believe anything the DE prints, told the public that ALDI were primed to become the third largest supermarket chain in both the US and the UK with a 21 store UK expansion prior to xmas 2019 being announced to bring their property stock up to 1200 stores.

Aldi’s planning team when checking where to site its new stores use ‘Location Analytics’ to determine their sites of choice and luckily for Bedlington, just like Lidl who are already on site, use were told, a three mile radius to develop their second string of data from known as  Psychographics.


 Whats that then?

According to Aldi themselves:
‘Psychographics broadens the scope from focusing on who a person is, to what that person believes in. Psychographics identifies lifestyle habits, values, attitudes, and other defining attributes.’

Our Laymen team have undertaken a bit of research to define how that wonderful statement links in with deciding on the location for a supermarket.

Its actually quite simple, they draw a radius line on a map and check the deprivation data within their radius. There is a sound basis in fact that in areas of deprivation the majority of residents do not shop online for their groceries and instead rely on low cost choice at their local supermarket.

Luckily for the Tories and their coalition Independent group from Bedlington, both Cowpen and Kitty Brewster wards the most deprived wards in the County of Northumberland sit within the correct radius and are connected by bus services to the site on offer in Bedlington.

Aldi can site their stores within three months of agreeing the price for their site and its been said they have taken 1.5 acre of land at Pipers Place.

The question now has to be asked will Advance Northumberland open up the site onto the High Street for a single discounter or will Aldi insist on opening up onto Schalksmuhle Road where the entrances to Morrisons and Lidl are well established. Those businesses are currently sharing trade and the now well developed competition has helped local people secure best value from their weekly shopping experiences in both stores.

The cost of opening up onto Bedlington Front Street is enormous due to its geography and topography and unless a quality housing provider has made advances to gain a foothold on this site we as laymen are not sure that it’s a viable proposition until a host of other and probably better anchor stores are found to sit on a site where business collapse over the years has been the accepted norm with both the Co-op and Tesco failing in this position.

So in conclusion or is that back to where we started this short article, September 2019 recorded the worst trading figures on the High Street for 20yrs.