French supermarket chain Carrefour has opened its second ‘City Café’ store in Paris. Four months after opening the first trial store in Bordeaux, the “laboratory for innovations” has proved itself strong enough to earn a second store in the fifth department of France’s capital.
City Café is a brand new concept: a convenience store where customers can immediately consume their goods. The new store is 150m² big and is located near Jussieu, a neighbourhood filled with both students and tourists. One side of the store is a classical store with over 600 food products (sandwiches, snacks, drinks, bread, …) and in the other part, customers can eat whatever food they bought while enjoying the WiFi connection.
City Cafés are open every day of the week between 7.30 and 22h, a lot more than a normal small convenience store. Furthermore, while customers can buy bread in the morning, the store will focus on sandwiches and drinks in the afternoon breaks and in the evenings.
Carrefour aims at two goals with this new concept: building on its image as ‘local convenience store’ and offering an alternative for McDonald’s (fast food) or Starbucks (breakfast or snack with coffee).
Carrefour is not the first in France to open this kind of store-bistro: earlier Monoprix opened seven dailymonops (five in Paris) and Relay-Casino opened six “Chez Jean” stores (four in Paris).
