In a Belgian hypermarket that was forced to decrease in size, French retail chain Carrefour has opened its first Carrefour Café. That concept merges a convenience store with features of a restaurant, and will also be introduced in other locations.
Restaurant meets store
The plan is to make a visit to the store more convenient for its customers, serving meals for every moment of the day – including salads, sandwiches, sushi and quiches. A large part of those will be prepared on the spot as well. Customers who want to eat in the 82 sqm Café can also choose something from Carrefour’s Lunch Time range. Another way to add a new attraction for customers is the fact that the retailer wants to organise workshops in the renewed store.
The first location to welcome a Carrefour Café is shopping centre Belle-Île in Liège, where the chain had to decrease its presence from a hypermarket to a smaller Market store (rather than completely closing the store as proposed in the chain’s transformation plan). There are plans to open several more Café corners in other stores too, but Carrefour has released no concrete information as to where these corners would be built. It is quite likely that in these other cases as well, the Cafés will be used to fill up superfluous floor space in locations that have had to reduce in size.
