Aldi's co-founder was once kidnapped and held in a wardrobe for 17 days. His captors were so confused by the cheap, ill-fitting suit he was wearing that they made him show ID to prove it was really him.
His family paid a 7 million Deutsche Mark ransom, around $2 million at the time and the largest Germany had ever seen. Theo Albrecht later tried to write the whole thing off as a business expense on his taxes. After that he barely appeared in public again. Almost no photographs of him surfaced for the next 30 years, and he took a different route to work every single day.
The chain started in one corner store. Theo and his brother Karl grew up working in their mother's tiny grocery in a poor suburb of Essen. Their father had been a coal miner until his lungs gave out, so the shop became how the family ate. Both brothers were sent off to fight in the war. When they came home, most of Essen was rubble, but the little store was somehow still standing.
They rebuilt it on one rule: only stock what sells, and sell it for less than anyone else. They spent nothing on advertising or decorating the stores. The shops were barely the size of a dorm room, with products left sitting in their shipping boxes. By 1955 there were more than 100 of them across Germany.
Then one argument split the company down the middle. Karl was sure that selling cigarettes at the register would attract shoplifters, while Theo wanted them on the shelves. Neither brother backed down, so around 1961 they drew a line across the country, Theo keeping the stores in the north and Karl the south. People still call that border the Aldi Equator. The brothers shortened the company name, Albrecht Diskont, to Aldi.
Both brothers stayed cheap their whole lives. Theo used pencils down to the stub, and the two of them turned down the public honors and awards they were offered. When Karl died he was the richest man in Germany, worth around $25 billion, and Theo was worth close to $17 billion.
The bare-bones format they pioneered went on to take over their home country. Discount chains now take close to 40 cents of every euro Germans spend on groceries, and Aldi and its rival Lidl have grown into the two biggest sellers of store-brand groceries anywhere in the world.
Aldi opened its first US store in Iowa in 1976. It now runs more than 2,600 of them, the third-largest grocery chain in America by number of stores, each one about 10,000 square feet, a fraction of a Walmart Supercenter's 178,000. The crowd lined up on West 42nd Street was waiting for a business that began as one tiny shop in Essen, run by two brothers who counted every coin.
Sarah Shahi, The Sopranos’ta James Gandolfini ile çektiği sahneleri anlattı:
🔹 “Seks sahneleri çok yoğundu.”
🔹 “Öpüşme sahnelerini defalarca yeniden çektiler.”
🔹 “Kes denildikten sonra bile öpüşmeye devam ediyorduk.”
🔹 “Hayatımda yaşadığım en iyi öpüşmelerden biriydi.”
🔹 “James Gandolfini çok çekiciydi.”
🔹 “Başta kendime bunu nasıl hissedeceğim diye sordum.”
🔹 “47 yaşında, iri ve saçları dökülen bir adamdı.”
🔹 “Ama düşündüğümden çok daha fazla etkiledi.”
Notice how the alien looks very much like a demon.
I'll take the story where time traveling Valkyrie go back and arm Erik the Red & Co and give them a decent map of North America. Imagine a world where the heathen Norse hightail it to Vinland.
One time my dad took me to a check-up and the doctor told me happy birthday. My dad snapped "It's NOT her birthday." So the doctor silently handed him my chart while asking me how old I was. I said ten! 😁 and then I got in trouble. for not telling...my dad..about...my birthday
Today would be a good day to fire up Amazon Prime on your TV and watch Citizen Vigilante. It ends with a dedication: "to rape victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.”