A new Aldi is opening in Durham on Wednesday with free samples for customers.

The store, located at 7906 N.C. Highway 751 South in Durham, will open at 11 a.m.

The Durham store is part of a recent expansion in the Triangle. Last November, Aldi opened a third Raleigh location. And a Wake Forest store is scheduled to open later this year. Cary and Fuquay-Varina also have Aldi stores.

The new Triangle stores are among 80 new Aldi stores to open in the past year in the United States. The chain has more than 1,100 stores in 31 states.

The discount German grocery with U.S. headquarters in Batavia, Ill., is one of my favorite places to buy produce and items that rarely have coupons.

Among the ways Aldi keeps its prices low:

The stores are smaller than most supermarkets and offer mostly Aldi-brand products. Customers bring their own bags and pay 25-cents for a cart, which is refunded when you return it. Customers bag their own groceries. Stores accept cash and debit cards but no credit cards.

A Silicon Valley technology company that makes software for analyzing customer buying patterns has picked Durham as its second U.S. office.

SugarCRM, based in Cupertino, opened the office on Emperor Boulevard about five weeks ago. It employs 12 in sales and engineering here, but it expects to double the staff in the coming months.

The company said in a statement it wanted to be closer to clients and resellers in the Eastern half of the United States, where it works with more than 60 "channel partners" to sell and support its products.

SugarCRM, founded in 2004, employs more than 200 people, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. Outside its two U.S. offices, the company has foreign offices in Munich, Paris, Cambridge, Sydney and Minsk.

The company's customers include Avis, Coca-Cola and General Motors. Its product, known as Customer Relationship Management, creates databases of customers, documenting their orders and preferences by location and other demographic categories.