Food Fight in the Aisle de France

Forget, for a moment, those quaint French shops where le boulanger makes and sells his baguettes, le boucher dispenses cooking tips with his meat cutlets and everyone has time to chat about the weather.

Now take a walk down the road here to Carrefour, a windowless, featureless one-story building spanning the length of three football fields. Inside, young price checkers whiz about on roller skates, reporting to 70 checkout clerks by walkie-talkie headsets. Thousands of shoppers push carts through the aisles, snapping up everything from apple tarts to kitty litter to computers.

That is shopping the way the French more often do it. And therein lies a dilemma that has come to preoccupy this nation, creating a stark choice between economic reality and cherished national treasures that has rattled the French self-image.

The neighborhood boulangerie, boucherie, fromagerie, patisserie and poissonnerie are disappearing, ignobly sentenced to death by increasingly price-conscious, time-pressed shoppers. Forcing those shops out of business are the hypermarches, or hypermarkets, such as the Carrefour in this western Paris suburb.

In the past five years, 2,000 of the country’s 37,000 small bakeries have closed. But hypermarkets, introduced here in 1957, have sprouted like mushrooms. Today, France has more than 1,000, twice the number of a decade ago and, for its population, the most in Europe.

The government, riding to the rescue of the small merchants, is slapping tough new restrictions on what it disdainfully calls “these big money-making machines.” Decrying “the dictatorship of the hypermarkets,” the National Assembly is moving quickly to adopt laws limiting hypermarket construction and banning sales of “abusively low-priced goods.”

The result has been a raging debate between the would-be saviors of yesteryear’s charm and the ordinary shopper, who is joined, of course, by the hypermarkets themselves. Supporters of the new laws say such extreme measures are required to protect a valued French icon from the greedy hypermarkets. Opponents see yet another case of crude government interference in the marketplace that will lead only to a higher cost of living.

Bernard Morrot, editor of the mass-circulation newspaper France-Soir, recently blamed the woes of small merchants on “the anarchist consumer. All these crude people see is that their bag of potato chips is cheaper at the hypermarket. They don’t care about the rest.” (Still, even Morrot’s newspaper ran a survey that found an overwhelming majority of consumers oppose the ban on low-priced goods.)

In fact, most French shoppers are deeply conflicted. They sniff at crass commercialization in America, which they see as a free market run amok, and they lavish praise on their neighborhood stores. But the convenience and low prices of the hypermarkets are hard for even the well-heeled to ignore. More than half of French food purchases are made at larger supermarkets.

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“Morally, I know it’s not right, but the hypermarkets are so convenient,” said Ann Margarit, who lives near Montesson. “I just don’t have time to go from here to there for my shopping.”

But she hopes the new laws will remove some of her guilt. “Even if I have to pay more, it has to be,” she said. “If we don’t do this, the small merchants will disappear and our small villages will die.”

Life here, as in other postindustrial Western societies, is undergoing remarkable change. With the economy in a slump and unemployment hovering at 11%, the French are spending less money.

In addition, the growth of two-career couples has changed shopping and eating habits; many now rely on fast-food outlets for their evening meals. Few have the time for a daily shopping trip, once a trusty feature of French life. Instead, they stock up in weekly runs to the supermarket and supplement those trips with rarer visits to the local mom-and-pop merchants.

Villages Threatened

Just as America’s malls and warehouse stores devastated Main Street, the French hypermarkets have appeared on the outskirts of cities and siphoned off trade from town centers. The hypermarket aisles contain such a vast array of nonfood items that few local merchants have been immune.

“It’s an economic, political and cultural issue,” said Claude Fischler, a food sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. “We already have villages in this country that have been totally deserted by their inhabitants. We have to find some way of getting into the next century without abandoning huge parts of this country.”

On the other hand, he added: “Let’s not get into a nostalgic singsong. There are a number of traditional small bakers who make very poor breads. And there are new entrepreneurs who are making bread on a semi-industrial scale that is just as good.”

While prices remain important, the battle for the consumer’s hard-earned francs centers on quality. The remarkable success of the hypermarkets has been due, in no small part, to their ability to offer a level of quality that approaches and sometimes exceeds that of their smaller competitors.

A good example is the giant Carrefour in wealthy Montesson, about 10 miles west of the capital. It is part of a $30-billion company, the largest hypermarket chain in France, with more than 200 stores from Brazil to Taiwan. It makes everything from toilet paper to televisions under its own label, selling them alongside popular brands.

On an ordinary Saturday, this store draws 35,000 shoppers who can buy just about everything they need under this roof, from books and bug spray to $80 bottles of Dom Perignon.

Despite the range of goods, Carrefour manages to offer the kind of quality food found in many smaller stores. It employs 22 bakers who make 4,000 baguettes a day from fresh (not frozen) dough and a wide variety of pastries--all in ovens visible to shoppers.

Roasting chickens can be chosen right off the rotisserie, as at the neighborhood butchery, and a Carrefour butcher cuts the bird to the customer’s specifications. Other knowledgeable workers preside over a 50-foot-long table heaped with fresh fish, helping shoppers make their selections and cleaning and skinning the fish while the customers wait.

“We’re a giant store, but inside there are many artisans,” said store manager Gilles Roudy. As Fischler, the food sociologist, put it, the hypermarkets have created “something that looks a lot like the old French outdoor market.”

While the large stores may equal the small ones in quality, personal service is another matter. The neighborhood bakers in Montesson, as everywhere in France, greet regular customers by name and with a handshake. And when a baker goes on vacation, he thoughtfully posts a sign in the window that directs loyal customers to his nearest competitor. (Naturally, that competitor is not the hypermarket.)

But while the traditional baguette sells for about $1 at the bakery, it is 40 cents at the hypermarket. That difference can add up in a country where each person, on average, eats more than half a baguette every day.

In fact, one new law has singled out bread as one item most often subject to “predatory pricing” by hypermarkets. Of the 150,000 products for sale in the average hypermarket, 500 are sold at a loss to get customers in the door, according to government studies. And government officials blame those low prices for all manner of national economic woes, from unemployment to homelessness to rural emigration.

“These hypermarkets are destroying business in the villages,” said Jean de Saint Guilhem, an official in the government Ministry of Small Business. “They need only half a person to make 5,000 baguettes when a traditional small-scale baker uses two or three people. So it costs the country jobs, and we all have to pay for that.”

Protecting ‘Little Guys’

The new law would prohibit selling anything below cost, a move that strikes many opponents as dangerously close to state price-fixing. In fact, laws banning below-cost sales were passed three years ago but have rarely been enforced. The new measure stiffens penalties and sets up a council to monitor compliance.

“We must distinguish between savage competition and normal competition,” Saint Guilhem said. “When someone sells products at a loss, they aren’t taking into account the fact that they are destroying the equilibrium of social life.

“Even in a free economy, you must protect the little guys,” he added. “These hypermarkets generate big sales, but they don’t create jobs. It is the small merchant who does that.”

Government officials contend that consumer prices overall will fall once the law is put into place because hypermarkets now inflate the prices of other goods, a charge the hypermarkets deny. In addition, the government contends that shoppers faced with the plethora of goods at a typical hypermarket often buy more than they need.

The powerful lobbies behind the government initiative are the small merchants, farmers and food distributors, who complain that the hypermarkets use their considerable clout to demand unfairly low wholesale prices.

The government also has won support from rural French worried about the precarious economic health of their villages. Rural populations have dropped so sharply that some mayors are offering subsidies to butchers and bakers willing to open new shops in their towns.

No Apologies

Officials at the hypermarkets make no apologies for their success.

“It’s a vital market out there, and everyone is going to have to adapt,” said Christian d’Oleon, corporate spokesman for Carrefour, which posted a 25% increase in profits last year. “We will continue to seek permission to build new stores.”

But even hypermarket managers acknowledge the important role of small merchants in French life.

“I’m like everyone else,” said Roudy, the Montesson store manager. “On Sundays, when we’re closed, I buy my bread at my neighborhood boulangerie.”