Drownout France

At the French Supermarket

At the French Supermarket

Yoga milk. 12 Juin.

Only now is Wal-Mart making waves in the US by joining the economy-priced businesses of medium-sized goods retailing and the groceries. Marks & Spencer's in the UK has been doing this for a long time; go into any store on a busy street, pass their clothes and cosmetics, and you will find a huge supermarket in the basement (or somewhere). Sort of the way New York City drug stores sell just about everything from toys to detergent to glasses to beer to computer printers to candles to candy to shampoo and prescriptions.

Following on some previous comments, I decided to investigate the supermarket more closely.

Monoprix, as the name suggests is a low-price place and I decided to look at the grocery there in detail. I could have gone to Au Bon Marche and wowed you further.

Several interesting facts about the French grocery:
- the Frenchman likes a semi-prepared meal as much as any Yankee. Food is available at all stages of preparation, from raw pasta to fresh stuffed shells to reheat-me to eat-me-here's-a-fork.
- the Frenchman is not a twentysomething postcollege bachelor. That is, frozen pizzas, jars of pasta sauce, crates of beer, chips (corn or potato), sliced white bread and peanut butter, nor any of the staples of such existence are in comparable abundance here as in the US. In certain heavily male districts (the Albertson's on El Camino in Mountain View), the store bulges with bachelor food: huge aisles with 1000s of frozen pizzas, palettes of diet sodas. Not so here.
- the Frenchman loves small packages. Everything is small. You don't economy-size it.
- the Frenchman eats things soon. Things don't seem to be stored. Indeed, very few things are frozen at all. Even the fish are in the refrigerated section, stored in the way the US market would store milk or cheese.
- the Frenchman likes to go to many shops. The butcher is elsewhere, as are the drugstore items, as are, for that matter, motor oil, chainsaws, and automatic weapons.
- Enormous selection and variety. It's not just a difference in taste (e.g. few pizzas, instead...1000s of quiches). There are very many things, represented with small selections of each (except the friggin' yogurts).

What explains this? There could simply be structural reasons for some of it:
- small apartments = smaller package, shorter storage time
- cultural bias against storing food very long.
- cultural disinterest in 'super size', but interest in fresh or "natural"
- more hetergeneous citizenry hails from more european backgrounds, therefore demanding more variety (?)
- no cars, people need to walk home with what they buy (same in NY though)
- smaller scale, less economized production, marketing, and distribution dynamics. It's easier to sell one kind of thing with small variations, hence the US system pushes through beef, pizza, and potato chips at huge volumes (ignoring salmon eggs, carrot mousse, and pesto sauces).

See it and believe. Gallery of pictures from my trip to Monoprix.

Posted by amol at June 13, 2002 12:28 AM