"La M

Walking through the streets of Paris last week, a shopper in search of one of the city's fast-blooming supermarkets stopped at a small butchershop to ask directions. "You mean the plague?" growled the butcher. "It's around the corner." The butcher had reason to growl. Since the first U.S.-style self-service markets opened in Europe a few years ago, "la methode americaine" has sparked a revolution in food retailing. The familiar cubbyhole specialty store, with its high prices and limited stock, is on the way out. Rising to replace it is the big, flashy market that offers customers everything from plastic-packaged carrots to caviar, silk stockings and camping equipment, and all at prices 10% to 20% below the old-fashioned competition.

By U.S. standards, Europe's supermarket boom is still in its infant stage. Most of the new self-service stores are not super-duper markets in the giant, U.S. sense, rarely have more than 3,000 sq. ft. of floor space (v. 10,000 for the average U.S. super), stock only an average of 1,000 to 2,000 items (v. 5,600 in U.S. markets). Some stores still do not sell frozen foods, leave the meat to the outside butcher; only a few are big enough to produce their own brands of canned goods. But they all have one thing in common with U.S. markets: high-volume, low-markup operations, which give customers more for their money and the operators more profit.

Serve Yourself. In France there are close to 3,000 new self-service grocery stores doing so much business that retailers speak of a "commercial revolution." Many of the stores are independently owned and operated, but the biggest push comes from the chains. France's big Felix Potin chain has already turned half of its 96 stores into self-service markets, plans to convert all its stores to self-service by 1961, reports that sales automatically double when customers realize that they can shop faster, more easily and more cheaply at self-service. Two years ago, Paris' big (14,000 sq. ft.) Ternes-Alimentation grocery store decided to try out the "American discovery" by spending $240,000 on a self-service system for their customers. It will be rewarded this year with estimated sales of $1,600,000, compared with a pre-modernization gross of $600,000.

The drive for bigger and better markets is moving even faster in Italy, which got its first look at U.S.-style retailing three years ago when Grand Union set up a Supermercato at an international food congress in Rome. Virtually every major Italian city has at least one supermarket--and plans for more. Two supermarkets are operating in Turin, two more in Bologna, another two in Naples. Rome alone has seven supermarkets. Last week Italy's big La Rinascente department-store chain jumped into the field, bought Rome's big Supermercato S.p.A. for a reported $750,000, and expects to gross $3,000,000 annually by offering customers 2,000 items at prices 15% below small stores. One big gainer from the new supermarkets: the Italian government, which levies a 26.85% annual tax on supermarket income v. only 14% charged smaller dealers. What is more, the supermarkets pay up, which cannot be said of many small-store owners who stanchly maintain a tax-dodging tradition.

A Billion in Britain. The supermarketeers are firmly established in Britain, where self-service is already a major business. Ten years ago, there were only 500 self-service stores, doing less than $50 million annually. Today, Britain has more than 5,000 self-service stores, with a total annual gross of nearly $1 billion, and at least 90 new stores join the ranks each month. This week, Britain's fastest growing chain, Cookie (Allied Bakeries) Magnate Garfield Weston's Fine Fare Ltd., will open three big supermarkets in a single day, plans to double his chain of 39 stores within the next year. Weston, who controls Loblaw's Groceterias (228 stores) in Canada, and National Tea Co. (917 stores) in the U.S., is also training his super sights on Germany, where scores of new markets have opened this year in the heavily industrialized areas of the Rhine and Ruhr.

The small grocers are fighting the supermarkets hard. France's Federation des Syndicats de l'Epicerie complain that "thousands of small independents have been forced out of business. If the wave continues, another 10,000 will have to close down in the next two years." Germans complain of the "foreign menace" to their livelihood, while Italian shopkeepers lobby insistently to prevent local city governments from granting licenses to the new stores. But the trend is all to the supermarkets. When a big new market opened in Milan recently, the strong Communist element there attacked it as an imperialist plot, until they discovered that workers were swamping the store at the rate of 23,000 customers a week. As one Milan supermarket manager says, comparing a neat package of sugar with the fly-flecked open sack from which old-fashioned grocers dispense their sugar: "Let's let the customer decide."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.