Aldi Is Buying Winn-Dixie & Harveys
Aldi has
announced today that they’re buying ~400 Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores from Southeastern Grocers, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2024. Fresco y Mas stores – another brand owned by Southeastern Grocers – isn’t being bought by Aldi.
Based on the press release, it sounds like some Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores will remain branded in that way, while other stores will be converted to an Aldi format.
From a grocery perspective, a change from Winn-Dixie to Aldi would presumably result in fewer different items available but with the benefit of lower prices based on Aldi’s stack-’em-high-sell-’em-cheap approach and my own anecdotal experience of the high prices charged by Winn-Dixie when in Florida a few years ago.
From a gift card perspective, this isn’t good news though. From what I’m aware, Aldi doesn’t carry third party gift cards but if it does, they don’t seem to ever run gift card deals. Although gift card deals at Winn-Dixie and Harveys suck nowadays following the change that prevents you from earning Mystery Bonus points on gift card purchases, they do at least occasionally run gift card deals. For stores that get converted to an Aldi format, gift card deals would presumably go away. For Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores that remain as those brands rather than being converted to Aldi, they’ll hopefully retain the ability to buy third party gift cards as well as having occasional gift card deals.
It remains to be seen how all this will work out though. You never know though – perhaps Aldi will decide to start carrying third party gift cards themselves. Lidl – one of their low-price competitors – carries gift cards and occasionally runs gift card deals, particularly around the holidays. With Winn-Dixie and Harveys already having a partnership in place with a gift card provider (I can’t remember if they use GiftCardMall or Incomm), it presumably wouldn’t be hard to extend that distribution to Aldi if they wanted.
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