French Say Au Revoir to the Old Ways of Shopping

Once upon a time, this was just another quiet village in the Oise Valley north of Paris where people did their shopping the French way.

When they wanted bread, they went to the baker. When they wanted milk, they went to the creamery. When they wanted meat, they went to the beef butcher or the horse butcher. And so it was with fish, pastry, wine and so on.

After several stops, which always included a ritual handshake with the shopkeeper followed by an exchange of complaints about one’s liver problems and other ailments, the shopper had the ingredients for the evening meal.

About 10 years ago, modern townhouses began to sprout in the pear orchards at the edge of town. By 1981, St. Brice had its first supermarket.

Since then, things have changed so radically in this once-quaint little village, as in hundreds of such places all over France, that culture purists are worried that the country is in danger of losing a piece of its soul.

Napoleon described England as a “nation of shopkeepers,” but until recently the description had been more true of France. In 1988, for the first time, the French bought more than half of their foodstuffs (51.4%) at supermarkets and the even larger “hypermarkets,” rather than at the traditional small shops. This milestone set off alarms all over France and has recently become the subject of worried television documentaries.

“These little shopkeepers are the people who give life to a city, who animate its streets,” said Jean Royer, 69, the longtime mayor of Tours in central France.

As minister of commerce in 1973, Royer pushed through a law designed to protect the petit commercants from encroachment by supermarkets and their even bigger kin.

The “Royer Law,” which requires a special jury--half of its members shopkeepers--to approve the construction of a large supermarket, was an attempt to calm militant shopkeeper movements that flamed into violence periodically until the early 1970s.

Lately, however, even Royer admits that the law has been largely ignored and ineffective in stemming the tide of the modern food distribution system. “It needs to be updated to prevent the anarchical proliferation of the huge stores,” he said in a recent interview.

Meanwhile, the number of supermarkets and hypermarkets--at least 27,000 square feet of sales space, but some much larger--has increased sharply.

In 1960 there were only seven supermarkets in all France. At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Commerce listed 6,493 supermarkets and 747 hypermarkets. In that period, an estimated 100,000 small shops closed their doors.

According to the Ministry of Commerce, for the past seven years there has been a net loss of 20 small businesses a day in France.

The main attraction of the supermarkets and hypermarkets is, of course, price. Because of their larger volume, the supermarket can offer lower prices than the specialized shop, the hypermarket even lower prices.

Wealthier Neighborhoods

Increasingly, the little food boutiques where knowledgeable shopkeepers guide the customer to the best Camembert, the spiciest blood sausage, the golden tea cake perfect for dipping into lime-flavored tea, are concentrated in the wealthier neighborhoods of the major cities. Bourgeois central Paris is one of the few places in France where most residents have plenty of specialty shops but little access to supermarkets.

“The specialized stores that resist are the ones that go upscale,” said Claude Fischler, a French sociologist who specializes in food habits at the Center for Scientific Research in Paris. “The trend is not substantially different than in other countries. Quality tends to go upscale in the market, and you have to pay the price for it.”

Fischler and other food specialists have little sentimentality about the disappearing specialized food store. Fischler blames the image of France as a nation of shopkeepers on a “mythology” created by foreign, particularly American, food writers.

“I remember attending a meeting of the American Institute of Wine and Food two years ago in Dallas with one of these famous food writers,” he said. “She came out with the most amazing statements about France. She gave a picture of the country that was that of 17th-Century Europe as seen in Walt Disney World. She said literally that this was a nation of farmers and shopkeepers. But if you look at the figures, you find that the farmers are way under 4% of the population. Shopkeepers are not that much more important. There is no reason why France shouldn’t accept modern food distribution. The only reason it didn’t happen earlier was the Royer law.”

Here in St. Brice, the STOC supermarket that opened in 1981 was small by American standards, only 11,000 square feet, but it offered residents an opportunity to buy most of their foodstuffs under one roof, with no handshake and no talk of liver ailments. Several of the town’s small shops were forced out of business by the competition.

Now, the few remaining shops and even the supermarket are threatened with extinction by the arrival of a hypermarche --86,000 square feet, 48 checkout counters--that sells not only food but practically everything else, from tires to lamp shades.

Butcher Maurice Ledoux said his business fell by 40% after the Continent Hypermarche opened in July. Dry goods shop owner Marcelle Oggiano said her shop is doomed, with trade down by more than 50%.

Taking his lumps along with the little guys, STOC director Thierry Chandeze said he was forced to lay off nearly half of his staff of 28 after business declined by 40%. “If this continues,” he said, “we will have to close in two years.”

Personalized Service

Chandeze said the only way supermarkets like his can compete with the hypermarkets is by offering more personalized service, the kind of service people used to find in the small speciality shops. “In the hypermarkets,” he said, “the customer is only a number.”

As if on cue, an elderly woman of the neighborhood, the only customer in the store, approached Chandeze with a jar of preserves in her outstretched hand. “I can never get them open when I get home,” she complained. He obliged her with a smile, a clear example of his new personal touch.

Unfortunately, Chandeze will not get a real chance to put his theory into practice. Because of the severe decline in sales, the management of the chain that owns his store sent him a dismissal notice. His only solace, he said, is that an even larger hypermarket is under construction a few miles away; he hopes that it will drive the one in St. Brice out of business.

The same sort of retail shakeout is taking place in communities all over France. Culturally and economically, it is one of the most important developments of the century. Exactly 200 years after the French Revolution, it has created a revolutionary change in the French landscape.

Although they were slow to get started, the French supermarket/hypermarket corporations have taken to the trade with a vengeance, often outdoing their American and European competitors.

The biggest of them, Carrefour SA, started in 1960 with a small market in the mountain city of Annecy and now has 115 hypermarkets, including 45 outside France. Carrefour dominates the Spanish, Brazilian and Argentine giant market business and recently opened its first hypermarket in the United States, a sprawling 170,000-square-foot store in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Along the way to building their empire, Carrefour executives often had to fight their way into stores through picket lines of angry shopkeepers. When followers of the militant leader Gerard Nicoud, president of the most active union of shopkeepers (Cid-Unati), scattered nails on the parking lot of a store near Toulouse, Carrefour’s Jacques Orsel reacted by appealing to customers not to move their cars. Then he offered a piece of candy for any nail a child brought to his office.

‘No Nails’

“Ten minutes later there were no nails,” he said the other day in an interview.

Orsel, now director of markets and communications for the company, does not believe that the small shopkeepers have seen their day, although thousands have been driven out of business by the hypermarkets.

Like some evolutionary force, he said, the hypermarkets have served to destroy the weak and allow the fit to stand.

“The shopkeepers who remain are the good ones,” he said. “They are the ones strong enough to stay after a hypermarket has been put up.”

Hypermarkets generally have much lower prices than their smaller counterparts. Flank steak, for example, can be about half the price it is at an independent butcher’s. Even a long baguette is cheaper by at least 10 cents a loaf than bread in the markets.

But there are many personal things, so ingrained in the French food culture, that people miss in the big stores.

“In the traditional French market, there is a folkloric, sentimental, amusing side,” Orsel said. “These were the public places dating from the Middle Ages, much less impersonal than the hypermarkets. They had a convivial side. A shopkeeper talked with his customers.”

Of course, France will never lose all of its traditional food shops. The National Institute of Statistics reported in February that the French buy more than half of their food from the supermarkets/hypermarkets. However, the institute reported that only 11% of the bread and 40% of the meat is purchased in the big markets.

“It appears that a large number of French have remained loyal to their bakers and their butchers,” Fischler said.

Hoping to benefit from this loyalty is St. Brice butcher Bernard Barre, 41. Barre is the kind of dedicated, attentive shopkeeper one often encounters in France. He lives several miles away, but two nights a week he sleeps in a small apartment above the shop so he can supervise the 3 a.m. meat deliveries.

Handshake and Smile

He greets every customer with a handshake and a smile. He responds to a customer’s demand for a lamb chop or a beef tongue as though it is the most interesting and profound request he has ever entertained.

Before he came to St. Brice, he worked as a meat manager of a huge supermarket chain with 127 butchers. But he missed the personal touch of his own business.

When Barre bought the St. Brice shop three years ago, he knew the Continent Hypermarket was going to be built on the edge of town. “But I thought there would still be room for at least one small shop like mine,” he said.

While the two other butchers in town have been foundering, Barre said he has been able to hold his losses to about 10% or 20% of his trade. He does especially well for holiday feasts when customers come to him for special cuts of meat.

If one or both of the other small butcher shops fail under pressure from the hypermarket, Barre figures he will survive and prosper.

“It is a risk to take--maybe a gamble,” he said in a recent interview conducted under loops of dangling pork sausage at his shop. “But I have customers here who are my friends.”