Hypermarches in France
 

Just a fun question; what do you think about the hypermarches in France?

For myself; living in the Netherlands (with mostly rather small supermarkets, although they are getting bigger), I just love the huge hypermaraches. Just fun to walk around and check out all the products. Bet hey, I also love to roam around foreign supermarkets!

One other thing; when I first visited the USA in 2000, I thought that all the supermarkets would be like french hypermarches. But unfortunately they weren't. I must say I was a little bit dissappointed about the American supermarket size, big but no hypermarche!

I love them! In fact Igo out of my way to "tour" one when I have a chance. Whenever I travel I hit the grocery markets, they tell me a lot about the local people and culture.

I would enjoy them a lot more except for the fact that I live and work in France and am often condemned to visit them on a Saturday afternoon, the worst possible time.
The Auchan at the Val d'Europe shopping mall is so huge, however, that even on a Saturday I find it totally bearable. It is also one of the rare places in France that offers self checkout.

We sampled a few Auchans and Carrefours over the past 2 weeks. There were awesome. The selection of food is unbelieveable. My wife pigged out on the patisserie sections which were almost as good as in the independent shops , but less than half the "steet" price for sweets. The same cannot be said for their bread- stick to boulangeries if you want the good stuff.

Rick

Hypermarkets have a nice selection of things in one place (especially food, as compared to American stores); that's their advantage (which is why they are called hyper instead of super—super is smaller).

Unfortunately, you usually have to go out into the suburbs to find a hypermarket, as they are too large to fit in Paris (or other city centers) itself.

For those who would like to visit a hypermarket without really leaving Paris (after all, Val d'Europe is a good 40 minutes by RER), there are still some possibilities:
Auchan at La Défense (metro line 1)
Carrefour at Porte de Montreuil (metro line 9)
Auchan at Galliéni (metro line 3)
Carrefour at Porte d'Auteuil (metro line 10)
Carrefour at Basilique de Saint Denis (metro line 13)

Unfortunately, except for Auchan La Défense, they are somewhat smaller than the hypermarkets in areas with cheaper real estate.

>Unfortunately, you usually have to go out into the suburbs to find a hypermarket, as they are too large to fit in Paris (or other city centers) itself.<

That's true! But most of the time when I am in france I'll be with my car. So when getting of the Autoroute there is bound to be a hypermarche!

Although there are some hypermarches near or in city-centers (a Auchan in Lille for example, with two floors).

Also in Paris there is a very large Auchan in the www.les4temps.fr mall. It is in La defense, just a fwe stops by metro/rer from for example the metro-stations on the Champs Elyssees.

I do my weekly shopping at Carrefour in Dijon every Tuesday and I can tell you it is hard to stick to one's budget with all those discounts, special offers in every display! I'd rather go to a supermarket and stick to my usual list of food and spend less...
Poor Kerouac, Saturdays are really awful! :-(.
Use the self checkout ONLY when you have a little caddie or it will take much longer!

Self-check-out is so convenient! In the Netherlands I have seen two systems (at least at the supermarkets I visit).

The first systeem is only convenient when you have only a few things: You do your shopping and at the end you scan your products.You then put them on a small conveyer-belt (correct word?) which then (Ithink) weighs your product to see if it is a match with the product you just scanned. After that the conveyer-belt takes the product through a small 'tunnel' and at the end of the belt you can collect your things.

The other system is very convenient for your staurday shopping; at the beginning of the store you take a mobile-scanner. While shopping, you scna the products you want to buy. At the end you put back your scanner and pay. And then right to your car!

Super Walmarts weren't around in 2000?

They remind me of the hypermarches I've visited...

I won't shop there, but they remind me of them.

I agree, Suzie. I have personally not found Wal-Mart Supercenters to be very different from hypermarkets.

Biggest one I have visited is the Cora at Houssen near Colmar.

J'aime Carrefour! Was a Godsend when i spent several summers in France taking care of my son - the local Carrefour was just a km away.

Great memories of the cafeteria - where we'd go at lunch often for good food at a good price.

Carrefours have recently slashed prices i read to meet competition such as L'Eclerc (?sp) and Aldi types - Carrefour is called the world's 2nd largest retailer after WalMart but has been on rather hard times lately. Interesting enough seems to be owned by several interests including some wealthy Spanish families.

It's neat to see the staff roller-blading around the store. They no longer give out platic bags however as many of the 'grandes surfaces' don't anymore.

That said we have hypermarches just as big as Carrefour in my home town and have had since the 1970s - a tourist would not stumble on these and Super WalMarts dot the landscape.

Oui J'aime Carrefour - Ouf!

LeClerc is a longtime favourite of mine.
On one week long vacation staying in a gite with friends we sheepishly admitted to having dropped into a hypermarche every day... they said they'd probably been twice daily! :)

I love the French hypermarches. They're like a mini vacation within our vacation! The first one we visited was near Caen, and I've been hooked ever since. There must have been 50 check out lanes!

I don't remember if it was Nice or Toulouse, but we went to one with 70 checkouts - and all were open.

My wife loves Hypermarches because she finds unique & interesting dinner & serving plates there - and at really cheap prices. Our dinner guests are "wowed".

As others have stated - don't go there on a Saturday.

Stu Dudley

I believe there are other reasons the big discount chain stores are not in big city centers, besides being too big.

France in particular has Draconian laws designed to protect smaller shops, like no Sunday hours for stores on the Champs Elysees.

But for the same reason Wal Mart isn't in Manhattan, Carrefour threatens smaller stores and it would also not be surprising if they skirt some of the labor laws the way Wal Mart does.

I remember looking through a wine book and some of the highest rated vintages for a particular year were house labels from the discount chains, including Carrefour IIRC.

The thing is, if you're staying in the center, it's just not worth going out to the end of a subway line to pick up some stuff at discount.

At a "Giant", in the south, (I shop at a SuperG here in the states...) they had a unique "fromagerie". They had selected and cut little bits of several kinds of cheese...you know, the kind you're supposed to serve on an ideal cheese tray of a hard, soft, goats, sheet, etc.
It was PERFECT for the two of us for selected picnics or just bread, cheese wine and "vous" dinners. And was inexpensive!
... wish they'd do that here.

>Super Walmarts weren't around in 2000?<

They were around and I have visted, but IMHO they focus more on non-food and compared tot hypermarches less on food.

But I did like US supermarkets (especially Albertson's). A lot bigger than Dutch supermarkets, a lot of products we don't see in the Netherlands and very clean and neat! But somehow I had thought they would even be bigger!

What I also like from hypermarches are the huge amount of check-outs and all the other shops before the actual hypermarche. One stop shopping!

Yes Dutch supermarkets are a pain - terribly congested and often long lines - and if you are in at closing time and don't scurry to the caisse you'll get a chorus of yells to do so.

Not consumer friendly at all. Tot Ziens!

The French call a hypermarket 'grande surface', very appropriately. Fascinating to see some staff on rollerblades!
There is, of course, a great social cost to the expansion of grandes surfaces - the death of small, family-run shops in many towns and villages, in spite of attempts by many authorities to check their growth by strict planning rules, like in UK, but their great financial muscle (Carrefour is world's second largest retailer after Walmart, with $87b a year in revenue) eventually get them what they want.

One nice thing about the French hypermarches is that there is competition among them. There are at least 4 or 5 chains that I know of ( Carrefour, Auchan, Cora, E Leclerc, Geant) Sometimes 2 or more can be located near each other. We are stuck with WalMart only here.

Carrefour actually tried to crash the US market some time ago with forays into the East Coast... but flopped. Tesco, UK behemoth, is currently trying on the Left Coast, starting with small convenience stores. But it's a tough WalMart dominated market to crash.

Carrefour doesn't care about the U.S. market anymore now that they are #1 in China and Brazil. Right now they are trying to get into India before Wal-Mart does.

>Sometimes 2 or more can be located near each other.< Imagine in Dijon and neighbourhood, 2 Carrefour, 2 Leclerc, 1 Cora, 2 Geant Casino and a lot of smaller ones like Intermarché, Super U, Marché U, Monoprix. You never have to go far. :-)

Sam Walton
got the idea for Walmart after he'd seen French hypermarkets.

The first Carrefour i ever saw was way back in 1969, in Grenoble by the youth hostel. I freaked out first that there was such a store nearby and secondly that it was open to 10pm at night in a Europe that at that time rolled up the sidewalks bout 6-7pm.

The first ever hypermarche was a Carrefour in Sainte-Geneviève des Bois (just below Paris). It opened in june 1963. It had a surface-area of 2600 m2. An average hypermarche now has a surface-area of 8 to 10.000 m2.

The largest hypermarche in surface-area is a Carrefour in Villiers-en-Bierre; 25.000 m2. Number 9 in turnover.

The largest hypermarche in turnover is an Auchan in Velizy; € 343 million a year! It has a surface-area of 16.000 m2.

The Auchan in Val-d'Europe also has a surface-area of 16.000 m2. Number 52 in turnover!

... and that's what makes Auchan Val d'Europe bearable even on a Saturday, compared to a place like Vélizy! :)

For those not familiar with the metric system; to convert to square-feet; multiply by 10,8. So the largest Carrefour is 25.000 x 10,8 = 270.000 square-feet!

Acoording to Wiki the largest Wal Mart Supercenter is 24.000 m2. An average Super Center is 17.000 m2! So in surface-area they are on average larger than a hypermarche. But an average hypermarche also has a lot more food and a lot of extra stores before the actual hypermarche (which are not included in the average surface-areas above).
So in general, IMHO, hypermarches are somewhat larger in surface-area.

I like visiting supermarkets when I'm travelling; especially in the US. You can tell so much about the locals by seeing what food they eat! In the US there's lots of brightly coloured artificial food. Lots of low fat stuff too.

We have Carrefour hypermarkets in Belgium, but they're not as good as the ones in France.

>The largest hypermarche in surface-area is a Carrefour in Villiers-en-Bierre; 25.000 m2.<

Do they have shuttle buses in the store?

((I))

Ha, ha.......I surely wouldn't go there if I was in a hurry!

There is speculation that WalMart is eyeing buying Carrefour, which has several separate wealthy families and entities that own it and thus would make possible a takeover as they would reap huge profits from the sale.

This is only scuttlebut i've read but who knows - otherwsie WalMart could never compete in France without buying some big player.

Is there similar opposition to the new hypermarches as there is to the opening of Walmarts? I was thinking I noticed fewer small markets and delis this last trip to France and wondered if this was a result of larger markets.

doesn't seem to be as there are so many everywhere - but mainly well out of town on busy approach roads, or in the case of LeClerc often it seems in industrial zones.

The opposition comes from preventing these stores to open on Sundays - to protect workers and small stores as well. Indeed one candidate for President of France has made it a campaign pledge to let more small mom and pop stores open on Sunday but not les grandes surfaces.

Currently small stores owned by Muslims are often open on Sunday but i think this is a religious ruse perhaps.

Small stores can be open 24/7 as long as they have no employees (100% family operated). That's why almost all of them are run by immigrants who are willing to sleep on a pile of potatoes if they have to. In my neighborhood (a Chinese-Indian-African-Arab mix north of Gare du Nord), some of the grocery stores are open until 4 a.m.

The anti hypermarket law is based on the size. Without looking it up, I would say that it is something like "any store in excess of 5000 m² needs prefectoral approval" which means that hypermarkets have to put a lot of money on the line to obtain the approval ("we'll build all of the roads and pay for the street lighting, and we're not forgetting the orphans' fund either"). In Paris it is even stricter, say something like 2000 m² which is why all of the Franprix supermarkets are just a tad smaller than you would like (i.e. 1990 m²).

As for Sunday openings, the law is being chiseled little by little. In Paris there are something like 6 or 8 "tourist zones" where stores may open on Sunday "if a cultural activity is involved" -- the Champs Elysées and Bercy Village are among the authorized zones. I would say that within 5 years, Sunday openings will be authorized just about everywhere, especially in a country that prides itself in giving absolutely no concessions to religions.

Jack: as usual very edifying info for a non-French - thanks.

I don't think the anti-Sunday opening is at all due to religious sentiments. My French son just told me about polls he's seen that say 50% of French label themselves aetheists. The church is moribund in France - even having to import African priests.

Rather it's my understanding that labor unions are the bulwark against Sunday openings - to protect the traditional family Sunday - the ubiquitous Sunday family meal, still going strong from visits to my in-law family shows.

The Sunday meal began as a tradition perhaps from after folks returned from Mass but now nearly noone save old folks go to Mass it seems - 92% or so of French do not go to church - but the cherished Sunday dinner followed by a walk or some excrusion is strong. And this is what i understand is why the unions are so strongly opposed to Sunday liberalization.

I do note that several weeks before Christmas the grandes surfaces can be open it seems.

......hypermarches are worth the long
walk just to view the Wall O Yoghurt!

PalenQ, I think the current rule is something like 6 or 8 Sundays are authorized for anyone to open. 3 or 4 of them are usually in December, and the others are usually reserved for the 2 annual sales periods (January and July) -- or local events.