Aldi to open Thursday in former Mars in Timonium

Discount grocer Aldi will open a store next Thursday at a former Mars Super Markets site in Timonium. The new store at Grand York Plaza on York Road is part of the fast-growing German chain’s $3.4 billion investment to expand from nearly 1,800 U.S. stores to 2,500 by the end of 2022. Aldi is known for selling exclusive discounted store brands and keeping its costs and overhead low. The no-frills stores typically have small footprints, open carton displays and a 25-cent cart-rental system that refunds shoppers’ quarters when the cart is returned. The supermarket will fill a vacancy left when Mars closed its doors two years ago, citing declining sales and intense competition. Mars, a family-owned fixture in Baltimore’s grocery landscape since the 1940s, shuttered 13 stores, a handful of which were bought by Weis Markets. The new Aldi will offer gift cards to the first 100 customers after a 7:50 a.m. opening, and shoppers can enter to win a year’s supply of produce. its 6,500 hotels and resorts worldwide by next year. The world’s largest hotel company said Wednesday that the move will eliminate approximately 1 billion straws and 250 million stirrers by July 2019. Marriott, based in Bethesda, says the year-long timeframe will let hotels deplete their existing supplies and identify alternatives to plastic straws. Customers will be given alternatives upon request. Marriott is the latest big company to ditch plastic straws. Starbucks and American Airlines announced plans to eliminate plastic straws last week. Hilton Hotels and Hyatt Hotels Corp. have also said they plan to stop using plastic straws by the end of this year. The push to ban the straws gained traction after a viral video in 2015 showed rescuers removing a straw from a sea turtle’s nose. Plastic straws are too small and lightweight to be easily recycled, and many wind up in the ocean. Some Marriott hotels have already begun eliminating plastic straws. In February, more than 60 Marriott hotels in the United Kingdom dropped them. Hotels in Costa Rica, Hawaii and Australia have made similar moves. The JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort in Florida was using 65,000 straws each month before it eliminated them in March, said Amanda Cox, the resort’s director of sales and marketing. Cox said the move was a natural one on the island, which is a nesting ground for loggerhead sea turtles.