Drownout France

At the Hypermarket

Auchand's nut section. 5 Juillet.

France has these things called hypermarches which you might expect to be something like a cross between Dean & Deluca and Wal-Mart.

Interested in all things ultra-consumerist, we made a special trip to the middle-class periphery of Paris to visit Auchand, the chain which--along with Carrefour (literally, "crossroads")--dominates this business in France.

There is a kind of ecstatic consumer pleasure I experience at Target in particular. The stores are just so huge, well-lit, clean, usually rather empty (not sure if it's always like that, but it usually is when I sail through a nowhere town on one of my road trips out of NY/SF), and full of cheerful signs and energetically wrapped products. This happens at Wal-Mart too, but I have noticed that it and K-Mart tend to be a bit more shabby.

Auchand was WAY bigger than any Wal-Mart I've ever seen. It was two floors, each with warehouse-height ceilings, each with roughly the square footage of two football fields. Maybe you've seen Wal-Marts this big. There were pigeons flying around in the rafters.

We went on Friday night and, boy, was it ever crowded.

Generally, there was less "consumer ecstasy" in this place. Less clean, less pulsing with brands and logos and such. Maybe I'm a stranger in a strange land or maybe the ideas of consumer-goods packaging are still a bit traditional here. If you must know, I was kind of disappointed by this big hypermarket thing. We know it well in the USA: big shabby retail.

Posted by amol at July 10, 2002 10:31 AM