(reference – whenever I think in threes, I think of Jenna Marbles and her three looks)
In the late 80s to the early to mid 1990s, three French stores tried to set up shop on United States shores, and all three failed miserably.
When I think of the term “hypermarket”, my brain automatically begins playing the song, “I Just Can’t Get Enough”, and I begin to picture flashing lights and arcades and stupid kids screaming. Not a giant white box that is the size of three football fields that sold everything from groceries to fridges. Certainly nothing something inspired by the French.
But that was Carrefour. (which, when I first saw the name years ago I mistakingly read it as “carrie-four” at first–I believe its pronounced “CAR-four”) The Philadelphia location which opened in 1988 was so big that people who were assigned to do price checks wore roller skates to get around the store faster. Now that I’m thinking, my hometown WalMart tried doing this in the mid 90s when they had their Super Center renovation, they had a guy on rollerblades. My newspaper even did an article about him. I can’t imagine he lasted very long at WalMart due to liability reasons, having a guy rollerbade around a crowded store. Carrefour didn’t have this problem because … nobody came. This place had 60 registers and nobody came! It lost $29 million in its first year. 3
(A rare interior photo of the Philadelphia location. I found this on on Reddit [archive])
One problem was, they didn’t advertise as well as they should. 1 I’ve been searching off an on for the past week about more info about these stores, and I’ve only found one newspaper ad from their short foray in Voorhees, New Jersey, and one commercial.
(Another rare color interior photo, this one from New York Magazine)
From what I’ve been reading, at the time, Americans just were not ready to go into a store that sold “radios and radicchio”. 2 This quote from the New York article:
I feel like Chris just descried a modern day Sam’s Club. See, too ahead of their time.
By September 1993, it was over. The Voorhees New Jersey location had only been open a year. These giant vacant stores were cut up into smaller stores.
The second store, didn’t last nearly as long as Carrefour. Leedmark, opened by the French hypermarket company E.Leclerc had one location in Glen Burnie, Maryland. The rough translation on the photo above:
Michel-Edouard Leclerc In the United States
Michel-Edouard Leclerc opens the first Leclerc Center in the United States named Leedmark on May 31, 1991 in Baltimore, USA. (Photo by Alexis DUCLOS / Gamma Rapho via Getty Images)
Michel-Edouard was livin’ it up in Glen Burnie. I mean check this out:
The dude walking by is like, “why would I want a shirt with my own country’s flag on it?”
The little TVs at the registers were supposed to “entertain” people in line. I suspect lines were never long enough. 5
The store opened in May of 1991. Two years later, in October of 1993, the store was failing just like Carrefour. Nobody wanted to shop in such a giant store. 4 It was announced that the store would close by January of 1992. 6 The building was cut in two, one half was a WalMart and the other half was a Mars grocery store. From what I’ve seen on flickr, it looks like in the last ten years Mars has closed and the entire store is a giant WalMart.
The final store is Galeries Lafayette, which is not a Hypermarket, but a high end department store from France. Opening in the old Bonwit Teller department store at Trump Tower, the store was announced in the Summer of 1991, and opened on September 28th of the same year. The French company took a giant risk of opening an unfamiliar store during a retail slump. 7 So many stores pooped the bed in the early 90s. I mean just in my area of Hampton, Virginia, Miller & Rhoads, Thalhimers, Hess’, Bradlees, Builder’s Square, all gone in the early 90s.
aw, why does this ad look like Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna character? If she was French. “C’est toujours quelque chose!”
On opening day, shoppers gathered around the Bourjois display and marveled at the brightly colored French makeup. 9
The following Summer they had a Bastille Day celebration. They also lost 17 million dollars that year. 8
Two Summers later, it was over, on August 31st, 1994 it was announced that operations at the store would wind down. There wasn’t enough in the store to make it different from the other stores on 5th avenue in New York City. 10 It was soon replaced by Nike Town.
Honorable mentions, because they actually lasted until the early 2000s:
biggs biggs actually lasted in the U.S. until 2010. While Bigg’s wasn’t a chain in France, it was owned by the French company Euromarché. I asked around on twitter, and this was the first biggs that opened in the Eastgate area of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s now home to a giant Jungle Jim’s grocery store.
Auchan While the Illinois store flopped early on, Houston Texas held on to the French Hypermarket chain Auchan (pronounced “O-Shawn”) until 2003. Check out this commercial. Look at the kick ass bird logo flying through the store and letting us know about the deals on soda pop and sun tea jars.
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1. Wise, Deborah, “French Hypermarket Adjusts to U.S.,” New York Times, February 20, 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/20/business/international-report-french-hypermarket-adjusts-to-us.html
2. Kanner, Bernice, “Really Big Business,” New York, October 7, 1991. 20, https://books.google.com/books?id=4ugCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=Carrefour,+New+Jersey+store&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZlM-h6bzkAhUto1kKHd94Ab4Q6AEwCXoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=Carrefour%2C%20New%20Jersey%20store&f=true
3. Sternquist, Brenda, European retailing’s vanishing borders ( Westport, Conn. : Quorum Books, 1994), 113. https://archive.org/details/europeanretailin0000ster/page/112
4. Dresser, Michael, “Huge Leedmark store may close doors soon 2 ½ -year-old Glen Burnie ‘hypermarket’ pressed by creditors, starved for cash,” Baltimore Sun, October 27, 1993. http://archive.is/f9lkt
5. Thomas, Kevin, “Huge store opening in Glen Burnie Leedmark officials refuse to call store a hypermarket,” Baltimore Sun, May 22, 1991. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-05-22-1991142230-story.html
6. Grimsley, Kristen Downey, “LEEDMARK TO CLOSE MARYLAND MEGA-STORE,” Washington Post, November 2, 1993. http://archive.is/XOJdr#selection-1295.0-1402.0′
7. Barmash, Isadore, “
COMPANY NEWS; A Store on Fifth Avenue Will Be ‘Totally French’,” New York Times, May 30, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/30/business/company-news-a-store-on-fifth-avenue-will-be-totally-french.html
8. Strom, Stephanie, “Executive Leaving Galeries Lafayette,” New York Times, April 27, 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/27/business/company-news-executive-leaving-galeries-lafayette.html
9. Trucco, Terry, “BEAUTY; Bonjour, Bourjois!,” New York Times Magazine, November 3, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/magazine/beauty-bonjour-bourjois.html
10. Zuckerman, Laurence, “Galeries Lafayette to Close Its Doors,” New York Times, August 31, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/31/business/galeries-lafayette-to-close-its-doors.html
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