First French “hypermarket” celebrates fiftieth anniversary

Over 50%
market shares in food

Fifty years
ago France called Marcel Fournier crazy. He had built the largest “grand
magasin” in France, together with the brothers Defforey: 2,500 m² (three times
the normal size in those days), with “all products under one roof” (5,000
products in non-food and food) and “up to 30% cheaper”.

The set-up
seemed megalomaniac, but it was an instant success. To this day more than half
of all food products in France are bought in the more than 2,000 hypermarkets
in the country.

“The death
of the hypermarket is being predicted for ten years now because of our changing
shopping habits. The consumer prefers shops close to him, in cities. Families
have also become smaller, making a weekly trip to the shop no longer necessary”,
says retail specialist Philippe Nobile of consultancy Javelin in Le Figaro. “But
the concept will keep on putting up a fight as long as the sales of food
products through the internet doesn’t pick up.”

New ones
still opening

In France, the
biggest country for hypermarkets, new ones are still opening up every year. Over the
last 12 months 23 new ones were opened and the number of hypermarkets has doubled
since 1996. According to trade magazine Linéaires 77 new hypermarkets have been
green lighted in 2012, racking up a total of 330,200 m² of extra shopping
space.

And all big
distributors are joining in. Casino, Leclerc, Système U, Intermarché: they all
stick with “medium sized” hypermarkets with a maximum size of 5,000 m². “We
want to double the share of this format in our sales by 2015 to 25-30%. We will
have 150 of big stores by then, compared to 83 today”, they say at Intermarché.

Competitor
Auchan, which is investing in the opening of six hypermarkets between 2010 and
2014, want to go even bigger: “Our dream size is 10,000 m².”

Carrefour
also back in the game

Even
Carrefour, the “inventor of the hypermarket”, has come back to the format. The
group has learned from the past though: “The past ten years we haven’t expanded
the number of hypermarkets; now it is time to start expanding again. There isstill room for slightly smaller hypermarkets, between 5,000 m² and 6,000 m²,
which should function as neighbourhood stores”, says current CEO Georges
Plassat.

To
underline his renewed belief in hypermarkets, the French CEO will be visiting
the Carrefour hypermarket in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (Essonne) on 17 June,
where it all started 50 years ago. To truly celebrate its birthday, that
hypermarket was renovated and expanded to 8,000 m².