Axios

Discount grocery chain Aldi unveiled a plan Monday to invest $5 billion in the U.S. and increase its American store count to 2,500 in a move that will make the firm the third-largest grocer in the United States, behind Walmart and Kroger.

A bare-bones strategy: Aldi's rapid growth has been driven by offering a small selection of private-label brands in a small-store format. The firm has bet that shoppers are ready to trade selection and customer service for prices even cheaper than Walmart's.

What it means for workers: A recent analysis by British trade publication RetailWeek found that Aldi ranks as the U.K's most efficient grocer in terms of revenue per employee, and the firm is replicating this low-head-count strategy in the United States. The rise of Aldi dovetails with a recent trend of job losses in retail, and suggests that the industry will continue to search for success while trimming employment.

We still like to do some of our own chores:

• Despite the boom in online shopping, Americans still love to pick over and buy their food at brick-and-mortar stores.
• Americans also like to buy stuff to fix up their homes, and do the work themselves.

These are clear messages from the chart below, researched and created by Axios Visuals Editor Lazaro Gamio. Online shopping's headline hiring is impressive on a percentage basis, soaring by 61% since 2003. But it's still only in the hundreds of thousands. Building materials stores employ 1.1 million workers, and have revitalized in recent years; grocery stores employ 2.7 million workers, a number that grew by almost 9% since 2003.

We seem to get outsized politicians just when we need them — such as during economic upheaval, when such figures gave Americans the 40-hour work week, weekends and Social Security.

But who is prepared to tackle this era's crises, brought on by globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence? These aren't ordinary difficulties. Speaking to Axios, Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, said we are talking a problem-solver of the scale of Germany's Otto von Bismarck, England's William Gladstone, or Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. But he said he doesn't yet see a figure of such size to tackle them.

This is not surprising: One of today's most polarizing issues among Americans is their contrary appraisals of their leaders. They worship and loathe President Donald Trump, and admire and hate Hillary Clinton. There's almost no overlap — except the broadly held yearning for an all-knowing personality to pull apart the partisans, and resolve the crises.