Carrefour ends its Easy chain

Carrefour Belgium has decided to pull the plug on its proximity store chain Easy. Most stores will transfer to the Express concept, saving the French retailer the burden of one extra store profile to maintain.

Stores become Express

“We had already decided to stop Easy’s expansion, in order to focus on our brand with just three store concepts”, spokesman Baptiste Van Outryve explains. “A part of our January transformation plan was to stop spending money on other brand names.”

The twelve existing Easy stores are to have an orange Express logo on their store fronts, but they will keep the same focus: proximity stores for daily groceries, focused on fresh produce and a small range of ‘in case of emergency’ food products. They will adopt the name of the Carrefour Express concept, but not its colour (green) or its focus (convenience and on-the-go). Both the green and the orange Express stores will have a part to play in further expansion plans, says the retailer.

Carrefour Easy was rather short-lived: just five years ago, Carrefour opened a pilot store named ‘Easy Caddy’, in order to fill the gap between smaller Express stores and larger Market supermarkets. Easy’s official launch was just two years ago, adopting the motto “fast, fresh and simple”. Carrefour hoped to be able to open a hundred stores of the Easy concept, but that was not to be.