Clayton will be part of German grocer Lidl’s wave of US stores

The Triangle’s grocery store wars are moving into Johnston County.

German grocer Lidl will build a store in Clayton along U.S. 70 Business, across the highway from Walmart just over the Wake-Johnston border. The company will cut the ribbon on its first Triangle store next month in Wake Forest and already has six other stores up and running across the state.

Pronounced “lee-dil,” the company is one of the biggest grocery store chains in the world and has used North Carolina to lead its foray into the U.S. market. The stores open in North Carolina are mostly outside the state’s largest cities, such as Kinston, Sanford and Rocky Mount.

Company spokesman William Harwood said that while Lidl has 10 stores right now in the United States, by next year the company expects to have 100. As for Clayton, he said it’s too early to speculate on the timeline of the site.

“We’re going through the approval process on sites across the state,” Harwood said. “For us it’s really about getting a great location that’s convenient for customers.”

Lidl is positioned in the busy supermarket industry as a discount grocer, with most of its products being under its own labels, similar to Aldi or Trader Joe’s. Harwood said about 90 percent of the products will be the store’s brand.

The store cleared its only governmental hurdle Monday night in Clayton, securing the blessing of the town’s planning board. The company plans to put a 36,000-square-foot store on a narrow 3.8-acre strip of land situated between a funeral home and a Hardee’s. The land was a Camptown RV store until two years ago, when the company moved to McGee’s Crossroads. Since then, the lot has been used as overflow RV parking for the Garner Camping World.

Clayton’s Lidl will have a large glass front and a sloped roof with red brick and white stucco walls on three sides. There will be room for 168 parking spaces on the highway side of the building.

The planning board took issue with the plainness of one of the store’s exterior stucco walls, instead suggesting a brick accent on the corner to match the rest of the building.

“Personally, I think some more brick would look nicer, some more architectural features,” planning board member Marty Bizzell said. “It does look a little plain on that side. It’s a long length down that building to not really have any kind of break or some additional brick.”

The company did not send a representative to the Clayton meeting, but lead engineer Wyatt Bone of Bohler Engineering spoke on behalf of the project and speculated the company would be willing to accommodate the town.

The tightness of the property also raised a question, with the land being so narrow and steep that trucks will only be able to get to the back of the building by taking a serpentine route through the parking lot used by customers.

“It’s obviously not an ideal situation; it is a tight site,” Bizzell said. “Obviously they did their (computer simulation). It’s probably about as good as it gets.”

Bone said that the route for delivery trucks through the parking lot was the only configuration that worked without losing parking spaces, which are already tight.

“We’ve got a minimum amount of parking our client likes to have right now,” Bone said.

The store’s site plan got the unanimous support of the planning board and won’t need to go before the town council.

The store first signaled its interest in the quickly growing Johnston County town last year when it commissioned a traffic study.

This story was originally published June 27, 2017 at 4:41 PM with the headline "Clayton will be part of German grocer Lidl’s wave of US stores."