On June 15, 1963 opened in Essonne, in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, the first hypermarket in France, a Carrefour which celebrates its 60th anniversary on Thursday in a context where these large format stores remain essential, even if they suffer. ..
On June 15, 1963, in Essonne, in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, the first hypermarket in France opened, a Carrefour which celebrates its 60th anniversary on Thursday in a context where these large format stores remain essential, even if they suffer from a certain disaffection and a tarnished image.
Alain remembers it very well: he was 10 years old when the Carrefour de Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois opened its doors. For the first time in France, fresh products, textiles and household appliances were sold under the same roof, in self-service.
His parents went there “twice, three times” before resuming their habits with small local traders, but his wife Odile, 67, and himself, became loyal customers, he explained to the beginning of June. AFP. This, even if their shopping trolley is no longer as full as before due to inflation.
Over the course of its 60 years of existence, the “hypermarket” store format has carved out an essential place in the lives of the French, to the point of becoming a symbol of the consumer society. Whether under brands that remain relevant – Carrefour, Auchan, Cora, E.Leclerc or Casino – or others that have disappeared definitively, such as Mammouth, Continent, Rallye or Euromarché.
In France, we speak of a hypermarket when its commercial surface – excluding the reserve for example – is greater than 2,500 square meters and it sells foodstuffs. The largest are over 20,000 square meters.
There are 2,255 of these behemoths in mainland France, according to the specialized media LSA. Nearly 2 out of 5 euros spent in supermarkets are spent in a hypermarket.
“Deprecated image”
With their gigantic car parks on the outskirts of cities, their neon signs and their kilometers of shelving, they today suffer from a “depreciated image”, observes Vincent Chabault, sociologist and author of a “Praise of the store” (Folio).
They have also suffered from changes in French consumer habits and the emergence of competitors: top-of-the-range specialists on the one hand, discounters on the other, as well as e-commerce for non-food products that they sold on a large scale.
Despite everything, if its original concept, “everything under the same roof”, “died a long time ago”, summarizes the consumer expert Olivier Dauvers with AFP, it is still “70 billion d ‘annual turnover euros’.
The “hyper” remains for many French people an obligatory passage for shopping, even a place of life and “sociability”.
The importance of mass distribution and in particular of the hypermarket, in everyday life has been noted in particular in the literature. Nobel Prize 2022 Annie Ernaux devoted a book in 2014 to her Auchan de Cergy-Pontoise, “Look at the lights my love”.
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2023-06-15 02:00:32
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