Le Samaritaine in Paris to close?
 

Just read on www.metropoleparis.com/ that the Paris the very old department store Le Samaritaine is about to close. The Paris newspaper Le Parisienne said so. It's in that great art deco building at the Pont Neuf. We used to like their food market in the basement but it was closed in 2003. Does anyone now in Paris know what is happening there?

There's a long thread about this already, but since Fodor's is WAY behind in indexing, you'd have to go back painfully over the threads of the last few days or weeks to find it.

Right, Eloise, I did a search and nothing recent came up. Here is the page from Metropoleparis

http://www.metropoleparis.com/024bistr.html

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34633696

this is the latest from america/france news.

La Samaritaine staff to strike over store closure

PARIS, June 13 (AFP) - Unions covering workers at the landmark Paris department store La Samaritaine announced a strike from Tuesday midday through Wednesday to protest plans to close the century-old building for renovations required to bring it up to fire safety standards.

Earlier the unions had told AFP they had launched an appeal for a strike of unlimited duration.

The unions hope the "show of force" against the store's owner, luxury goods group LVMH, would avert a total closure of the building during the eight-to-10 years it is estimated are required to undertake the work, the delegate of the CGT union, Madeleine Charton, said.


She said the 750 employees - who have been guaranteed their usual wages until they find other jobs - wanted the renovations done in stages, fearing a total shutdown was a pretext to close the store for good and transform the prime location on the Seine river into a more lucrative project.

© AFP

S_Holmes:

Excellent work, old chap!

Can I appeal to you the next time I can't find a Fodor's thread and am too lazy to go back painfully to thread No. 1292 as I once did?

If you remember the name of just one contributor of a thread then you can enter their name in the search box, find a thread they posted to, click their name and then scan posts to locate the one in question. In this case I recalled that BTilke had given comments on that thread.

Someone posted this tip a while back -- that the way to find a thread not yet indexed by Fodor, but that is at least a couple of days old, is to do an advanced search on Google, limiting the search to fodors.com.

I'm glad we got to see the Samaritaine all lit up on a night cruise a month or so ago:

http://www.rozault.com/France2005/so...maritaine.html

I imagine those lights will be going dim if they close. But the rumor is that especially if Paris gets the 2012 Olympics (the reason it was displaying those multi-colored lights), the owners want to turn the building into a luxury hotel, which I guess would have better profit margins.

Thank you for the tip, S_Holmes!

If I could only remember which of "the usual suspects" had posted to a particular thread, I'd be all set!

La Samaritaine closed today for unknown lenght of time. They said it would remain a store and only a store. wait and see!

And here I sit wearing Le Clip that will now become a beloved memento of that store. Which by the way was incredibly hot the day we were in it which necessitated the buying of Le Clip and you know where this story goes.....

Merci beaucoup, coco, for the update.

bonjour cigale, all right?
last minute report : yesterday at the closing time of the store (7pm), about 300persons (employees and customers) stayed in the shop until 10pm, some of them were crying... A lady had been to that store for 50years!

Favourite Samaritaine memory is a TV advertisement from the 80s:

Store doors open to reveal (very convincing) Queen Elizabeth look-alike (Handbag, hat), who is escorted by manager to her Rolls Royce.

Chauffeur follows with large box, which he places on the seat beside HM.

As the car pulls away, HM opens the box, plunges her hands deep inside and extracts -- a magnificent crown, which she places gingerly on her head.

HM faces the camera and says in very heavily accented French:

"On trouve vraiment tout, chez.... La Samaritaine."