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Mass retailing in France and urban landscape transformations: emergence and development

Nathalie Lemarchand et René-Paul Desse

Résumés

Cet article examine l’émergence de la grande distribution en France et son impact sur le paysage commercial et urbain du milieu du XXe siècle à nos jours. Succédant aux grands magasins comme nouvelle forme moderne du commerce de détail, la grande distribution s’est progressivement adaptée aux évolutions sociétales, économiques et culturelles de la société française. Des supermarchés aux hypermarchés dans les années 1960, ces nouvelles enseignes ont prospéré dans les zones périurbaines, modifiant les habitudes de consommation avec l’évolution de la motorisation et des modes de vie. Les banlieues sont devenues des centres d’activités commerciales diversifiées, avec de grands magasins spécialisés, des galeries marchandes et, plus tard, des parcs commerciaux plus compacts et mieux conçus, avec des installations de loisirs intégrées. La concurrence du commerce de détail en banlieue et du commerce électronique a entraîné une réduction de l’activité commerciale dans les centres-villes, avec une augmentation de l’inoccupation et de la dépendance à l’égard des magasins franchisés. La législation a tenté de réglementer l’expansion des zones commerciales périphériques et de préserver le commerce de détail urbain, avec un succès limité. L’essor des achats en ligne et des modèles hybrides tels que les « drives » (« click-and-collect ») ont remodelé la taille des commerces de détail, tandis que les plateformes logistiques telles que les entrepôts d’Amazon sont devenues de nouveaux points de repère commerciaux. Récemment, de nouvelles tendances de consommation sont apparues, soulignant le vif intérêt des consommateurs pour le commerce de proximité, les produits locaux et la vente de seconde main, reflétant les préoccupations liées à la mondialisation et à la durabilité. La grande distribution, consciente de ces changements, s’implante d’une part dans les villes avec des surfaces de vente plus petites, et ouvre d’autre part de nouveaux rayons « bio », « local », voire « seconde main ». L’évolution de la grande distribution n’a pas seulement redéfini les habitudes de consommation, elle a aussi remodelé les paysages urbains français en systèmes plus complexes et polycentriques.

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Introduction

1Retail trade has always adapted to the transformations of societies in which it represents a major component. Today, as in the past, this adaptation leads to changes in the retail sector that are reflected in the spatial organisation of towns. With the aim of providing a general overview of the transformation of French retailing in the mid-20th century, namely the emergence and development of French retailing networks, this article provides the reader with a synthetic overview, without neglecting the analytical dimension of the phenomena.

  • 1 This distribution is accompanied by another, more associated with a representation that continues t (...)

2On the eve of the second modernisation of the retail trade with the arrival of supermarkets and hypermarkets on the city’s outskirts, the city centre remained without any major competitors. The pattern is fairly simple, and follows the urban hierarchy between large cities and smaller centres, as well as the distribution of urban functions: the city centre, generally symbolized by monumental architecture and associated with department stores, is the most important business district, while in the city’s neighbourhoods we find the “small” retailers, i.e., small entrepreneurs in small establishments catering the secondary functions of daily life1. In the former, which involves going “into town,” one finds shops that accompany social and cultural rituals, such as weddings, the start of the school year, and annual celebrations, such as Christmas. To the latter, the familiar shops, bakeries, butchers, grocery shops and shoe repair shops, where the liveliness of the main street can be felt, not far generally from the market place where goods as well as news are exchanged.

3The opening of the first hypermarkets at the beginning of the 1960s took place in a French society undergoing a major economic transformation (the famous “Trente Glorieuses”): women joined the labour market en masse, the economy recovered, mechanisation increased, and economic tertiarisation intensified. Cities grew wider and the pace of social life changed. Large-scale distribution, hypermarkets and then chains of specialised shops were then established on the outskirts of cities and in the suburbs; first in a separate location and then, little by little, in the form of shopping centres and shopping areas. Since then, France has been experiencing a reconfiguration and reconsideration of its commercial pattern, similar to the one experienced by many Western countries, sometimes with a time difference and specificities. In placing this emergence of French mass retailing in its context, we will look at its particularities in terms of its forms, as well as its consequences on the commercial and urban landscape, but also the response that public policies have sought to provide. Finally, we will conclude with a discussion of the more recent changes that are underway, and the new challenges facing the French large-scale retail sector as a result of new societal debates involving new paradigms, such as sustainability and globalisation.

Commercial outskirts: a mass retailing pioneering front

  • 2 Dossier entitled La France moche, published in 2010 by Télérama, a weekly press magazine whose read (...)

4Mass retailing in its current commercial forms was first created in the suburbs, where there was no retailing at all. This situation has led relatively modest retailers to innovate, and to rapidly transform themselves into national or even international retail groups. In the space of a few decades, this large-scale distribution, relying on its own shopping centre developers, such as Ceetrus and Nhood of the Auchan group (Mulliez family group) or independent property companies such as Klépierre or Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, has produced a characteristic landscape of retail areas. Along the commercial corridors, the signs of hardware, gardening, sports and ready-to-wear shops form an offer as completely as in the city centre; the size of their signs (Venturi, Brown et Izenour, 1977) “guide” the motorist to his destination. This landscape of the “retail estate”, which has become familiar but was denounced for its “ugliness”2, typically combines access roads, signs and parking lots (Hays, 1993). This process began in the early 1950s.

The emergence of the discount stores and the “big” retail stores (1949–1958)

  • 3 While these competitors achieve margins of 30-40%, it reduces their margins to 11% on average.
  • 4 This distinction became irrelevant in the 1970s, when “small retailers” became owners of large reta (...)

5The first wave of commercial innovation came at the end of the rationing period imposed on the population after the Second World War. It marked the advent of self-service and large-scale food stores. These innovations had some difficulty in spreading in France, with one exception, the discount store, which was introduced on both sides of the Atlantic at practically the same time. In France, the first discount shop opened in 1949 by Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau, a small town in Brittany. Unlike his competitors at the time, he advocated shortening distribution channels by cutting out intermediaries, reducing margins, while introducing the value of productivity (no credit, no luxurious premises)3. Rapidly, the success of the formula led Leclerc to create a network of independent retailers, adhering to the principles he advocated, and joining together in the “Leclerc movement”. It is still these principles that govern the movement today. It spread to a national scale when, in 1958, the first Leclerc Centre opened in the Paris region. In the early years, its relatively small size allowed it to fit easily into the central and peri-urban setting. Other retailers then switched to discounting, and made it the key to their success, such as Darty, a brand for household appliances, or FNAC for books. Soon, all the large new food retailers were to follow these principles, and form the food and specialised companies of what was to be known in French as “la grande distribution” (large-scale distribution). The expression “large-scale distribution” refers to the fact that these are very large companies, but the association was frequently made with what characterised them visually at the time of their development, i.e. “large sales areas.” This designation marks their difference from “small retailers”, which were, and still are associated with the independent retailers who have remained in the city centre4.

6Their success gave rise to a social and political reaction similar to that which accompanied the birth of department stores in the 19th century: a debate on the disappearance of the “small” shops caused by the “unfair” competition of these department stores. The economic arguments used, which are still relevant today, are the power to negotiate better prices with suppliers of goods, due to the volumes purchased, and thus to sell to a broad clientele attracted by low prices. The financial resources of this new generation of French major retailers, founders of this “mass retailing,” also give them the capacity to invest and open more stores in shopping areas on the city’s periphery. As we will see later, these arguments are now being amplified with the contestation of globalisation, of which this large-scale trade is seen nowadays as the standard-bearer.

The locking of the periphery by hypermarkets

  • 5 In other words, a large sales area mainly devoted to the food trade, combining fresh and dry goods, (...)
  • 6 Translation by the authors.

7These new forms of food retailing constitute a disruption to urban tissue by their size and location. The first supermarket to open in the Paris region in 1958 was on a surface area of 400 m². During the 1960s, there was an acceleration in the opening of supermarkets, or so-called French-style hypermarkets5. The first French hypermarket opened in 1963 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, an inner suburb of Paris, with a sales area of 2,500 m² and 400 parking spaces; it had been preceded two years earlier by some two “Superbazar” stores in Belgium. J.-P. Grimmeau (2013, par. 3) emphasises that they already had all: “These are the elements that define the hypermarket today. [] The four shops mentioned are all characterised by their large surface area, which was unheard of in Europe at the time (more than 2,500 m²), by self-service, by the combination of food and non-food products and by the presence of large parking spaces6”.

8The pilot phase of this new concept lasted four years. From 1967 to 1968, the model was reproduced throughout France and Belgium, and soon throughout Europe. The hypermarket had enough goods for customers who had a car and a refrigerator to go to the shop once a week to make their purchases. This possibility is in line with the interests of families whose daily rhythm is changing thanks to the increase in women’s professional activity outside the home. It also symbolises the fact that even food shopping, which used to be associated with the daily rhythm, can be done on a weekly basis. From the 1980s onwards, new commercial sectors, traditionally associated with the city, also appeared in outlying shopping areas. In 1986, Leclerc innovated with its “Jewellery Rides”, placing jewellery, a symbol of luxury, within the hypermarket, alongside dairy products. But it also sold books, the symbol par excellence of knowledge and cultural leisure, which occupied vast shelves, and then pharmaceutical products (drugstores). Finally, new shops and services, such as travel agencies, were offered. The hypermarket, and more widely the brands installed on the outskirts, profoundly change the relationship to “shopping” by associating place, time and categories of products.

LARGE-SCALE FRENCH FOOD RETAILING

Large-scale food retailing was born at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s in a post-war society that was very slowly opening up to mass consumption. The pace of change accelerated in the 1960s with the establishment of a consumer society. Leclerc (1949), Carrefour (1960), Auchan (1961), Promodès (1961) and Intermarché (1970) innovated in particular in the discount and the size of the shops (first supermarket then hypermarket). The influence of the American model, particularly the supermarket, is obvious. From the 1960s onwards, French entrepreneurs attended training courses organized by National Cash Register, a manufacturer of self-service store cash registers based in Dayton, Ohio. To improve sales, the American company came up with the idea of organizing seminars led by Colombian Bernardo Trujillo for company directors and trade executives. Between 1957 and 1963, 2,350 of the 13,000 participants came from France (Chatriot et Chessel, 2006). With a few principles favouring the periphery, such as the right location rule and the construction of car parks, the peripheral boom could begin. The French “model” with its large number of hypermarkets is the exception in Europe, even if Mediterranean Europe is getting closer to it, whereas Northern Europe essentially favours the supermarket size. In 2024, large-scale food retailing (2,300 hypermarkets and 9,300 supermarkets) accounted for 63% of food purchases, down from 68% in 2010 (INSEE 2020; 2024). Since the mid-2010s, the market share of the largest hypermarkets has been eroded by a certain return to proximity, with mini-markets. All the groups are opening smaller shops but also new venues, such as “Click and Collect,” called “Drive” in France (Auchan opened the first food drive in Leers (Nord department) in 2000). A large number of stores are being renovated, combining more contemporary architecture with merchandising that is better adapted to customer comfort. At the same time, departments are devoted to organic products, and store managers are emphasizing their efforts to source local produce. Ultimately, large-scale food distribution is at a crossroads in its history. Several announcements of mass layoffs at Auchan and the financial and even stock market difficulties of Casino would rather herald a decline. In reality, if the three major companies listed on the grant, like Carrefour and Casino or family-owned, like Auchan are in decline, the three brands Leclerc, Super U and Intermarché, which are groups of independents, are doing well. Closer to local markets, not hesitating to anchor themselves in the territory by helping local associations, these independents are more reactive. This was the case for the spread of "drives" on French territory: in 2024, these three brands had a total market share of 62%. As for the internationalisation of these French companies, it is still important, representing 40% of total sales, but it is in severe decline. Carrefour, which was for a long time the second company in the world, after Wal-Mart, is now only in eighth position, withdrawing from the Chinese market and in strong stagnation in Argentina. Auchan also is in steep decline internationally, particularly in Russia, where it is preparing to sell its 230 stores. For a long time, this internationalisation compensated for the saturation of the French market and made up for the poor results of the shops in France.

9The hypermarkets will gradually be located in the suburbs of the metropolitan areas, depending on the land opportunities, which itself depends on road construction. The number of French hypermarkets doubled in the 1970s, and again in the 1980s. In the following decade, the expansion movement was, however, in deceleration, due in part to a slowdown in consumption (Desse, 2013). Major retail groups, and some politicians, blamed the regulations for holding back their development and preventing new openings. In reality, several studies show that the French market was saturated, as the best locations on the outskirts had been occupied.

Peripheral shopping centres

10The import into France of the American Regional Shopping Center dates from the end of the 1960s. In the Paris region, from 1969 to 1974, a belt of about 15 of them, based on a specific model associating department stores and shopping malls, were located in the suburbs. These were planned operations involving large shopping centre developers. Belle-Epine, Créteil-Soleil, or Les Quatre Temps in the La Défense district, bring together 250 to 350 shops. The first public-private partnerships were set up, particularly for the control of land and access by motorways or public transport. Little by little, however, the department stores, due to a lack of success, were replaced either by a hypermarket or by specialised retailers, thus increasing the number of visitors to these large shopping centres.

  • 7 By 2023, 840 shopping centers, both in the periphery and in the city center, will share 25% of the (...)

11In the region, the first equipment in the suburbs was initially the hypermarkets. The second stage consists of transforming these isolated (mainly) food stores into peripheral shopping centres with a shopping mall of twenty to sixty shops. Moreover, the branches and franchises of national brands must be in the hyper-centre, but also in the first two or three peripheral centres depending on the size of the agglomeration (Desse, 2001). There is a perceptible fear in the retail sector that the outskirts will become real competition for the top-of-the-range offer of the city centre. From the 2000s onwards, many of these peripheral shopping centres have had to invest in their renovations and have taken advantage of this to improve the architectural quality of the centre and the landscape of the shopping area with better signage. At the same time, new centres such as Val d’Europe near Disneyland Paris or Westfield-Carré Sénart, also in the suburbs of Paris, have shown the way to a new architecture where glass is very present, providing brighter, more pleasant spaces. The restructuring of old regional shopping centres is moving in the same direction but with, moreover, uncertain results, as renovations of old buildings prove to be complex to achieve.7

Peripheral shopping areas

12Step by step, retailing on the periphery increased with the installation of new sectors in large and medium-sized specialised stores: furniture, clothing, sports shops, hardware shops, etc., forming extensive unplanned retail areas accompanying the general movement of peripheral housing, and the ex-urbanization of urban production and service activities.

13Accompanying the post-war French suburbs, composed of new flat blocks and housing estates, furniture shop owners were assured of having a clientele in search of family equipment; followed the car dealerships along the first express ways at the entrances to cities with big stores. With the opening of the first hypermarkets, the movement accelerated and entire areas devoted to retailing emerged in which the furniture trade and dealerships very quickly repositioned themselves, benefiting from increasingly important customer flows near these attractive new stores. But overall, this movement remained a limited phenomenon until the 1980s. The periphery retail landscape that we know in 2024 is therefore around forty years old. The number of specialised stores increased and diversified from 1985 to 1986, and then specialisations became more refined, as in the case of household equipment, which became sectorised: kitchen shops, lighting shops, etc. As with hypermarkets, diversification continued year after year.

  • 8 Translation by the authors.

14The landscape of retail areas is highly standardised but unplanned. The big retailers offer their national brands in a profusion of advertising panels. Although it literally only refers to the first approaches to a town, in the space of a decade the term “town entrance” has become synonymous in France with heterogeneous landscapes, second-rate architecture and overabundant advertising (Soumagne, 2014). This unplanned retail area is characterised by minimal, parallelepiped, enclosed and blind buildings announcing “la fin des vitrines — the end of shop windows” (Péron, 2004), in spite of a policy of landscape restructuring that has been in place for the last ten years. A few major operations have been undertaken over the last two decades, and each time, the local authorities that have envisaged restructuring these areas have been obliged to scale down their objectives, as they can only operate in public spaces, i.e., the road network. In most cases, large retailers and shopping centre developers have preferred these heterogeneous architectures and this accumulation of car parks to costly reorganisation. However, some shopping centre companies have made this their trademark. For example, Frey, which hitherto specialised in shopping centres, sees the restructuring of shopping areas as a way of “… developing its business into that of an urban planner”: This new type of operation inevitably leads to a shift from a traditional retail urbanism to a “retail urbanism of project, like the complex re-qualification operations carried out in the heart of metropolises8 (Jehl, 2019, p. 11).

15Over the last twenty years or so, new architectural and environmental concerns have emerged in the design of these retail areas. Inspired by the American lifestyle centres, new retail parks are gradually moving away from the retail warehouse agglomerations, either by occupying the new retail areas, or by sometimes adjoining the old ones. The characteristics of this new generation of retail parks are seen in their more compact forms, better articulated between their components, and a more sophisticated architectural and landscape design emphasising the integration of these concerns. In addition, there is a wider range of commercial activities, including, in particular, the restaurant and leisure sectors. The latter are also moving into older commercial areas to a large extent, but frequently reinvesting premises that have been left vacant. Recently, public actors (municipalities and inter-municipalities), in a prior negotiation, demanded these new types of retail parks, sometimes with, in return, an extension of a tram line. On the whole, these areas are undoubtedly the most frequented spaces in French cities, with significant differences depending on their composition and geographical location.

ATTEMPTS TO REGULATE FRENCH-STYLE COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Since the Le Chapelier law of 1791, retailing in France has, in fact, been governed by the rule of free competition and freedom of establishment. By guaranteeing freedom of retailing, this revolutionary law has become one of the cultural and quasi-constitutional foundations of the French economy. The passing and promulgation in 1973 of the Royer law on the orientation of retailing and the craft industry created a clear break, making it possible for local authorities and the State to intervene. The Royer Act took place in an environment that was becoming increasingly favorable to the development of State action, with the aim of reducing tensions between the emerging mass retailers and “small retailers”. The law created a supervisory body, the Commission Départementale d’Urbanisme Commercial (CDUC), which ruled on all retail projects likely to reach or exceed the threshold of 1,500 sq. m. of sales areas for towns with a population of 40,000 or more, and 1,000 sq. m. for smaller towns. The ambitious law was intended to give these commissions the means to “work” on retail planning.

In 1993, the change of name of the CDUC to the CDEC (Commission Départementale d’Equipement Commercial) showed the failure of such an objective: at best, the work of the various CDUCs has made it possible to slow down the expansion of retail space, but rarely to think about the spatial balance between the center and the periphery, the functional mix, etc. In 1996, the Raffarin law lowered the CDEC threshold to 300 m² in sale areas. At the end of the 1990s, the number of authorizations to open new stores or extend existing ones multiplied. From 2005 onward, CDECs authorized between 3 and 3.5 million m2 depending on the year. In 2008, the Loi de Modernisation de l’économie created the CDAC (Commissions Départementales d’Aménagement Commercial), raising the threshold for submitting a dossier for the opening of a retailing business to 1,000 m². Since 2010, a number of laws have obliged elected representatives of local authorities to set out the principles for future retail developments in the Territorial Coherence Patterns, or SCot, on which the CDACs base their decisions. In 2021, the Climate and Resilience Act will make new retail developments more restrictive by emphasizing the principle of Zero Net Artificial Area (ZNA) by 2050. Over the last fifteen years or so, the rate of land artificialization has slowed in France, but retailing, particularly on the periphery, remains the main culprit (De L’Estoile E., Salin M., 2024). After the Covid phase, new retail space starts fell, while the level of authorizations remained stable (1.7 million m² authorized in 2017 for 557,000 m² in 2023). From this ballet of acronyms and changes in regulations, we can conclude that there have been no really major changes in the pace of retail openings in France. More than the regulatory system so decried by mass retailers and retail property professionals, it is the market, and therefore consumers, who have the final say (De L’Estoile E. et M. Salin, 2024). This French-style urbanism, working on the basis of legislative and regulatory formalism and the apparent laxity of the Commissions, is not to be found in neighboring European countries (Desse, 2013). The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany do not have such important peripheral concentrations. The reasons for these differences are to be found elsewhere than in different national regulations.

The shrinking of city centre shopping space

16Department stores, convenience shops and fewer specialised retailing outlets, such as antique shops, now constitute the key sectors of the city centre shopping space for the larger and wealthier medium-sized towns. Today, department stores contribute to the heritage value of this central space, through their architecture, but also often their history, along with some local brands. In the 19th century, department stores and convenience shops were the first forms of “modern” retailing, dominated by a few merchants, such as Aristide Boucicaut, founder of the “Bon Marché” in 1852, who served as a model for Emile Zola’s hero in his novel “Au bonheur des Dames”. Fixed prices, price displays, but also reimbursement and promotional prices, as well as free entry to encourage visits and regular attendance, were launched at the “Bon Marché”, transforming the relationship between commodities and shopping areas for an entire society. It was also these department stores that, still with the aim of encouraging regular visits by a clientele combining consumption and pleasure in an entertaining atmosphere, launched a restaurant area within the shop, generally on the upper floors, and exhibitions, concerts and parades to punctuate the life of the shop.

17In France’s medium-sized towns, central retailing still accounted for the largest share of sales units in the 1970s, but from the 1980s onwards, periphery retailing began to compete with it. Today, this share represents an average of one third of the commercial apparatus and only 25% of this sector employment in towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants in France, excluding the Paris metropolitan area (INSEE, 2016). Another interesting indicator is the market share of retailing in 2020 the city centre now accounts for only 16% of retailing turnover, local shops for 14% and periphery areas for 70% (Sabbah et Madry, 2021). Faced with the competition of the large-scale distribution on the periphery, the retailing city centre shrinks, tending to retreat to a few dynamic shopping streets. Franchised retailing takes hold and participates in public policy in encouraging a similar retail landscape in many cities, with the arrival of national and international clothing and leisure brands. This relative resistance to the central space is also linked to the efforts of public actors to redesign public spaces and the restoration of the built environment, which sometimes gives rise to the gentrification of certain central districts that have been “museumified” and touristified.

18The 1970s were thus marked by the irruption of urban planning concerns in retail sector activity. At first, the municipalities put in place simple accompanying measures, such as the reinforcement of the public transport network or the creation of pedestrian streets. Then, in a second phase, they were involved in designing retail planning operations, such as integrated shopping centres in city centres. Behind this new approach is the desire for cities to reshape their central retail fabric against an increasingly aggressive periphery. The pedestrianisation movement reached France late, in the early 1970s, after Germany, the United Kingdom, and the countries of Northern Europe. The first major operation dates from 1972, in Rouen (Lemarchand, 1992). Subsequently, the spread from the metropolitan areas to medium-sized towns, and then to smaller and smaller towns, took place. In order to fight against the competition from the new periphery centres, the central area must be revitalised by making the most of it. Retailing is the fundamental phenomenon of attraction for pedestrian areas.

19These public policies have been accompanied by major changes in the commercial landscape of town centres, with a decline in independent trade and a strong increase in large-scale distribution in the form of franchises and branches, particularly in the women’s clothing, leisure, and fast-food sectors. After a dynamic effect, for the last two decades, the commercial balance sheet is more mixed, and commercial vacancy is taking hold in many medium-sized towns. Often linked to public transport infrastructure such as the tramway or the metro, these streets, described as the city’s shop windows, attract many people, but can be places of appearance rather than places of real consumption (Germes, 2010). After a period of relative calm at the beginning of the 1990s, the construction of shopping centres integrated into French town centres is starting anew. Since the beginning of the 2000s, operations have multiplied on the waterfronts. The revitalisation of the first basins and docks is based on a functional mix, with retail and leisure activities being the driving forces, as in Bordeaux (Quai des Marques) or Le Havre (Les Docks Vauban) (Gasnier, 2013). In France as elsewhere, the latest openings often present some novelties in terms of overall architecture, notably the search for natural light with numerous glass roofs, such as the Confluence shopping centre in Lyon, Les Terrasses du Port in Marseille.

Current reconfigurations of the commercial apparatus in central areas

20In this new context, the commercial apparatus of French town centres is undergoing two major changes: it is shrinking spatially and is restricted to a few commercial specialties. The main consequence of pedestrianisation policies or the creation of an integrated shopping centre has been to strengthen the attractiveness of certain areas, while marginalising others. As soon as they open, these new locomotives accelerate the commercial turbulence and modify the location strategies. As commerciality increases, so do the rents. The independent retailer can no longer cope with this trend, and is thus replaced by a franchisee or a branch. For certain national brands, the aim is to position themselves less than 200 meters from the main entrance of the shopping centre, if not to be present inside. In this context of exacerbated competition, a trivialisation of hyper-centres is becoming widespread. In addition to the ever-changing decor, linked to the morphology and architecture of the town, the standardisation of the commercial offer, on a European scale, is underway.

21Until the 2000s, commercial vacancy in French town centres did not exceed an average of 6 to 7% of the commercial apparatus, corresponding to normal turnover linked to retirements or some bankruptcies. From 2007 onwards, an upward trend began: 8% in 2014, and 14% in 2020 (Bouvier et Madry, 2017; Sabbah et Madry, 2021). Behind these averages, there are very strong disparities between towns. For example, the town centre of Béziers, in the south of France, went from 3% in 2001 to 25% of empty cells in 2015; Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany, was close to 19% in 2018. Pascal Madry’s work on commercial vacancies in 350 French town centres (excluding Paris) has shown three types of central areas that were not affected by the commercial vacancy before COVID-19: the central areas of metropolises (+300,000 inhabitants); the central areas of tourist towns, either coastal, such as Saint-Malo, or inland, such as thermal spas or mountain resorts; and finally, a few isolated medium-sized towns, particularly in the centre of France, far from other competing towns (Madry, 2016). Everywhere else, the central and even more peri-central areas of medium-sized towns and small cities are being emptied of shops at an increasing rate. As a general rule, a town with a population of 20,000 to 200,000 only retains one or two shopping streets, where the few large retail chains in the form of branches or franchises are concentrated. Independent retailers are the big losers in this development, as they do not have the financial capacity to evolve.

22For public players, the room for maneuver is narrow. In search of commercial engines for their town centres, which are considered to be the showcase of their city, several local authorities in medium-sized towns have set up watchdog units to offer large commercial cells to large retailers, thus enabling them to bring in brands likely to have a knock-on effect on the rest of the street. In 2018, a five-year policy to revitalise the central areas of small and medium-sized towns was launched, based on functional diversity and combining environmental and social objectives. The COVID-19 pandemic will have blurred the results of an initial assessment of 100 of the 222 towns and cities included in these five billion euro national “Action Cœur de ville” plan. Published in March 2021, 537 very different operations were aimed at trade, ranging from the implementation of a digital platform dedicated to local traders to urban planning. However, it is difficult to believe that this plan will reverse the latest trends in the commercial field.

Strengthening peripheral centralities through fun shopping

  • 9 In 1996, an article on cinema facilities was introduced in the commercial planning regulations. In (...)

23Each large peripheral centre is accompanied by the establishment of fast food restaurants or more traditional or themed restaurant chains. The first step was taken in the non-commercial use of these spaces, which was then accentuated by the arrival of multiplex cinemas (Bourdin, Gérard & Perrut, 2005). The phenomenon arrived in France in 1993, initially on the city’s outskirts, before French law encouraged a rebalancing between the outskirts and the central areas9. The latter have land opportunities on the outskirts that allow them to open vast cinema complexes with at least eight cinemas of great comfort, and a large lobby to encourage the consumption of drinks and sweets while waiting for the screening. Finally, the multiplex, if it has parking spaces associated with the complex, can largely take advantage of the spaces in the commercial centre in case of an influx. For multiplex promoters, the cost price of a seat is half as high in the suburbs as in the city centre for much greater comfort. Thus, in the suburbs, the opening of a multiplex means not only a new leisure facility, but also the establishment of a locomotive for the whole of the surrounding commercial centre, both being able to benefit from their respective customer flows.

24Real and large fun shopping spaces that combine commerce and leisure, such as the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta or Mall of America in Minneapolis, remain rare and modest in France. At the beginning of the 2000s, combining retail and leisure seemed to be the formula of the future, but today it remains difficult to implement it in a commercial strategy. As the rents paid by leisure businesses are lower than those paid by commercial businesses, developers of shopping centres or commercial areas favour commerce over leisure (Delaporte et al., 2018). In France, only the Atlantis shopping centres in the Nantes metropolis and Oddysseum in Montpellier have real fun shopping complexes. Elsewhere, a multiplex, sometimes a climbing wall or a bowling alley offer a nucleus of fun centrality. Otherwise, the EuropaCity mega-commercial centre project, planned in the city of Gonesse, located on the outskirts of Paris, was abandoned following the negative decision of the French government (Lemarchand, 2021), which had initially supported the project. The debate is therefore open as to how to describe these new spaces, and whether they can constitute credible alternatives to declining city centres. Even if imperfect, these new peripheral centralities are intended to be different and to convey a positive image, as leisure activities remain highly valued in our society. In fact, by developing mixed partnerships, public players (local authorities) and private players (real estate companies, large retail groups) are collaborating to make certain peripheral commercial centres more attractive in the face of competition from the town centre, but also, and above all, in the face of competition from other peripheral centres.

Transformations and new landscapes of the commercial apparatus

25Over the last two decades, mass retailing has entered a new phase of change characterised by a partial dematerialization of the act of purchasing with the help of new communication technologies. It has taken many years for these new forms of sale to spread throughout society (Lestrade, 1997). Thus, the Internet and the microcomputer were accessible from the beginning of the 1990s, but e-commerce only really took off in the early 2000s.

E-commerce: a false dematerialization and a difficult adaptation of the retail sector

  • 10 In 2005, e-commerce sales amounted to 8 billion euros (4% of French retail sales). It will rise to (...)
  • 11 Cdiscount was founded in 1998 to sell CDs and DVDs before expanding its offer. It is now the leadin (...)

26There are major e-commerce differences between countries, between, say, the United States and the countries of the European Union, and within Europe between the Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom that are the pioneers of electronic commerce, and southern and especially eastern Europe, which make little use of the new technologies. France is in a median position. In 2019, the gaps narrowed: 68% of American individuals aged 15 to 74 are e-commerce users, compared to 60% of Europeans, with the British and Germans leading the way with scores of around 72% (FEVAD, 2019). In France, the inflection in the curves of on-line sales took place in the years 2005–2007, with a very sustained progression since10, and an acceleration in the pandemic confinements. The field of e-commerce was initially occupied by so-called pure players, such as Amazon or Cdiscount11, but the major distribution groups quickly felt the need to create a website: Darty, the brand devoted to computer products or household appliances, FNAC, to cultural products, but also the major food retailers, such as Auchan, Carrefour, Super U or Leclerc, quickly started using click and mortar. Now they all have their own on-line platform and the health crisis has led to an increase in on-line orders for food shopping, which was the slowest sector to convince consumers to use on-line commerce.

Hybridization of sales techniques promotes interaction between the virtual and physical shop

27The rapid development of smartphones and tablets has changed consumer behaviour. At any given moment, they can connect to e-commerce websites, but also receive information on new products or on the day’s sales in a given shop. With the spread of the smartphone, consumer journeys are becoming increasingly complex, with “physical and virtual channels being sometimes linear, sometimes embedded in each other, reinterpreting traditional forms of shopping” (Thevenet-Deparis, 2017, p. 122). However, although this new approach to shopping is developing, it is far from being widespread. On the consumer side, while the smartphone equipment rate for 18-24 years old is 98%, it is only 62% for 60-69 years old and 44% for the over 70s (FEVAD, 2019). Not to mention the 13 million French people who are not connected or are very uncomfortable with these new technologies because they are too poor, elderly or suffering from illiteracy. Faced with these changes, large-scale distribution has the financial capacity to adapt, whereas independent retailers are quite helpless, with the creation of a website and their presence on social networks often being their only answers. To help them in this process, towards which many are reluctant, several municipalities offer them aid and technical assistance, some of which are financed by national trade aid programs.

The “drive”: a French specificity in the process of expansion

28With the rise of e-commerce, the question arises as to the impact of this change on the spatial pattern in force today. Will the dematerialization of the act of purchasing penalise one urban area more than another? As for this dematerialization, in most cases it cannot be total. In 2023, 60% of the 160 billion turnover of e-commerce corresponds to purchases of on-line travel, accommodation, tickets for shows or even dematerialised music (FEVAD, 2024). For these sales, the problem of delivery does not arise. Even if their carbon impact is not negligible, these transactions are not visible in the commercial landscape. For the other half, the products ordered are heavy or even very heavy and the transport of the product sold to the customer requires an efficient and ultra-fast logistical organisation between the production sites and the region or town of the buyer. This raises the problem of managing the “last mile” between the logistics centre and the customer’s home. The questions linked to these issues are central to geographers, because the new choices of commercial location are likely to have strong repercussions on the spatial structure of cities (Mérenne-Schoumaker, 2016).

29The French food retail industry has developed a strategy of setting up drives, enabling it to respond to several difficulties: the limitation of the opening of new large commercial surfaces; the cost of delivery and, finally, the reluctance of consumers to order food shopping on-line. In 2000, the Auchan group developed the first drive, which was subsequently copied by all the major groups. With its 7,000 drives at the end of 2024, the French example is quite original, as the spread of the model has only just begun among its European neighbours (the first Belgian drive opened in 2014, by Carrefour), or in the United States with Wal-Mart (Pernot, 2021). These drives are taking an increasing share of the market from traditional hypermarkets, at a time when the latter are experiencing a decline in sales. Drives are a format specific to supermarkets, mostly still associated with the outskirts, alone or next to a hypermarket or supermarket, in the event that the customer takes advantage of his or her visit to the drive to complete his or her on-line shopping with others on the spot. Recently, especially in large cities, a few “pedestrian drives” have appeared (240 in 2024).

30The other e-commerce format, that of the pure players, was initially a commercial model combining only “on-line ordering and delivery”. In this formula, the physical shop disappears and is replaced by warehouses. This model has renewed and transformed the mail order format born at the beginning of the 20th century, and based on the distribution of a catalogue of products. This is how French mail order companies, such as “La Redoute”, “Blanche Porte”, “3 Suisses”, all companies founded in the 19th century in the north of France as spinning mills, became leaders in France in mail order sales in the fashion and decoration sector, a niche they continue to occupy after converting to e-commerce and targeting their customer profiles.

31Amazon is undoubtedly the company that has best optimised its flow of trucks and vans from a network of warehouses. It currently has 33 logistic sites in France for parcel production, covering the “useful” territory that is the highly urbanised zone along the Lille-Paris-Lyon-Marseille axis. The sixteen smaller centres ensure the final delivery to the customer; one covers Paris intra-muros. As is the case in many countries, including the United States, the Amazon phenomenon has led to numerous reactions, some favourable, others opposing the arrival of the e-commerce giant, taking aim at its competitive effects, its wage policy, or yet its encouragement of hyper-consumption. These warehouses are the heart of the new commercial landscapes. Some are gargantuesque, as it is for Brétigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris, with its 150,000 m2 on three levels; connected to the Francilienne motorway, it has the particularity of using 4,000 robots, which makes it possible to increase the density of storage and speed up order processing (500,000 per day maximum). This type of development plays a central role in the strategy of setting up competition in territories that are often economically stricken. In other words, officials also intervene to try to locate the planned warehouse within their region or county, something Amazon has to take into balance but can also take advantage of. Mathieu Strale (2016) analysed the setting up of an Amazon distribution centre in Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgundy, on the A6 Paris-Lyon motorway in 2012. Competing with Beaune, further north, Chalon was chosen because the public subsidies were higher. Following the closure of the Kodak factory (3,500 jobs) a few years earlier, the municipality and the department of Saône-et-Loire were prepared to use the Economic Reconversion Fund (financed by the French State) to attract Amazon. Strale calculated that the company received a grant of €5,500 per job created, making it one of the most expensive business location operations of recent years. While this employment is welcome, particularly in depressed regions, it fluctuates according to the time of year. On average, only half of the workforce is hired on a stable basis, whereas the remaining workers are employed on a seasonal basis.

32If this e-commerce is clearly visible in the landscape of the French suburbs, it can also be seen, or felt, on the traffic routes through the noria of lorries and vans that rush towards the consumer’s residence. If they fail to move to the commercial areas, at the risk of not immediately finding the coveted object, it is the pure player company that comes to them, generating CO2 and other greenhouse gases, especially as the order implies a promise of delivery in 24 hours or even in 2 hours for Paris (Dablanc et Andriankaja, 2011). Finally, alongside the warehouses and the increasingly diversified and electrified fleet of vehicles, Amazon, like many pure players, has been opening physical shops in the United States since 2015. In France, although pure players in all sectors have opened shops, this remains a limited process and some do so in association with a physical retailer. This new stage of “dematerialised” commerce, which for a time seemed to threaten physical commerce, is taking off at the same time as new concerns are being voiced by consumers, public players and society, leading to the emergence of new forms of commerce such as “local” commerce or the sale of second-hand goods, which seems to be challenging the large-scale distribution system in France and elsewhere.

“Local” or “proximity” trade

33Local trade or commerce de proximité” (proximity trade), which are often used indiscriminately by public and private actors, as well as by consumers, takes a new dimension in the context of the challenge to the “global” model, frequently symbolised by the large-scale distribution. The local is more than a place and a scale; it is a prism for understanding and acting on trade and consumption. Local consumption thus becomes synonymous with “being close”, that is, a place of understanding and of action. This “return” to the local has been accompanied by social and political demands, coupled with health crises that predate the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, meat producing scandals (beef, chicken) in the food industry have led to a certain distrust among consumers of large-scale food distribution. As a consequence, people have been looking for less “anonymous” places to buy meat and food, which goes along the promotion of short circuits in they consider that the “proximity” to the seller or producer ensures greater confidence in the products themselves, as well as to be of better quality. These health crises happened at the beginning of the protest against globalisation, symbolised by large-scale distribution companies such as Carrefour, Auchan and McDonald’s (Lemarchand, 2017; 2021); the latter are accused of aggravating the climate crisis by building square meters of retail space to the detriment of agricultural land, and of encouraging consumption that worsens the destruction of the planet’s resources. Large-scale distribution has understood this, since it now insists on its promotion of local food producers with whom it has contracts. Finally, we can observe the arrival of large food retailers in local commerce: Carrefour Contact, U’Express, A2pas…, which position themselves as neighbourhood grocery shops. They were first established in town centres, before colonising the peri-urban districts, particularly those undergoing rehabilitation.

Second-hand trade

  • 12 The Emmaus Association (now called EMMAÜS Solidarity) was founded in 1954, establishing the movemen (...)

34Accompanying two major societal debates, that of the purchasing power of the French and that of the environmental crisis, second-hand trade is experiencing growing success. Thrift shops or second-hand shops are not yet an invention of modern trade, but the questioning of certain forms of consumption, on the one hand, and the transition to e-commerce on the other encourage their visibility in the social space (Rassat, 2021). However, it is important to distinguish three main categories from second-hand shops: the first is associated with charity circuits, such as the Emmaus Association’s “Solidarity Shops”12 or the Red Cross; the second category is associated with the environmental movement, such as the Ressourceries and Recycleries, which are often set up or encouraged by the public authorities, and finally, a third category, that of the “classic” market economy, which has historically included second-hand dealers, antique dealers and second-hand shops, and which has grown with the e-commerce of on-line retailers such as Leboncoin and Ebay. This would not be complete without mentioning the large-scale retailers that have “opened up” their websites and shops to second-hand products.

35At first, there were signs specialised in this trade and sectorised into furniture and decoration, renewing the second-hand market niche, then in video games and electronic equipment or ready-to-wear, these shops being based on a deposit and sale system. Nowadays, it is common to find in stores selling new products, alongside the shelves devoted to new collections of goods. Depending on the shop, these products can either be recovered from consumers, who thus benefit from a purchase voucher on the shop’s new products, or negotiated with recovery companies, which have already sorted the products. Once again, supermarkets are adapting to societal transformations and “recovering” growing market formats to integrate them into their own system. By engaging in this sector of second-hand trade, supermarkets can hope to respond to several strategic questions; that of using part of their sales areas that are becoming less profitable by reallocating them to these departments; that of limiting the loss of customers or even encouraging new customers to visit their shops, and finally, by enriching their discourse on their environmental strategy in highlighting a recovery policy.

Conclusion

36As we can see, large-scale distribution has diversified over the decades, both horizontally and vertically, and has found the means to transform itself, to adapt to new forms of consumption, moving from gigantism to a small format, advocating mass distribution, and then affirming its proximity to local producers, and to “made in France” seeking to limit the effects of a challenge to a dominant capitalist model increasingly provoking social rejection in France. Over these 70 years, not all of them have been able to keep up with these changes, but overall, this adaptation of French large-scale distribution has accompanied the transformation of the French social, economic and cultural landscape.

37Its establishment on the periphery was a movement that is inseparable from that of the populations, and from the emergence of new peripheral polarities, combining economic and cultural dimensions. This spatial movement did not occur on its own; it is also an aspect of the social transformations that are leading developed countries to become consumer societies. Tomorrow, even more than today, the commercial city will take its place in a more complex city. The polycentricity of the territories and a dissociated life rhythm lead to a plurality of forms and formats of commerce, which must, in turn, adapt to consumers who claim a multi-identity based on territorial, social and cultural belonging. In this social, economic and cultural game, large-scale distribution, whose shops are still the primary commercial spaces for purchasing and consumption in France, Belgium and many rich countries, has a great capacity to adapt and absorb innovations by integrating them into their operations.

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Notes

1 This distribution is accompanied by another, more associated with a representation that continues to nourish the common association of the large sales area with the big retailing companies, and the small family businesses associated with small surfaces, although the model is no longer operating at all.

2 Dossier entitled La France moche, published in 2010 by Télérama, a weekly press magazine whose readership is classified as upper-class and left-wing.

3 While these competitors achieve margins of 30-40%, it reduces their margins to 11% on average.

4 This distinction became irrelevant in the 1970s, when “small retailers” became owners of large retail stores, and more recently, major retail groups opened small stores.

5 In other words, a large sales area mainly devoted to the food trade, combining fresh and dry goods, supplemented by departments devoted to a wide range of non-food products.

6 Translation by the authors.

7 By 2023, 840 shopping centers, both in the periphery and in the city center, will share 25% of the retailing market; of these, 4/5ths will be on the periphery. In the same year, no new shopping centers were opened in France.

8 Translation by the authors.

9 In 1996, an article on cinema facilities was introduced in the commercial planning regulations. In 2023, there are 249 multiplexes in France, half of which are in the suburbs, accounting for 60% of cinema attendance (Vie publique, 2024).

10 In 2005, e-commerce sales amounted to 8 billion euros (4% of French retail sales). It will rise to 31 billion in 2010 and 160 billion in 2023, corresponding to 16% of retailing sales. Source: Médiamétrie, FEVAD, 2024.

11 Cdiscount was founded in 1998 to sell CDs and DVDs before expanding its offer. It is now the leading French e-commerce company, the market leader being Amazon.

12 The Emmaus Association (now called EMMAÜS Solidarity) was founded in 1954, establishing the movement that Abbé Pierre, its founder, had initiated in 1947. Emmaus is a social solidarity movement committed to combating poverty and exclusion, which today has many structures and is present in 37 countries on four continents (https://emmaus-france.org/).

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Référence électronique

Nathalie Lemarchand et René-Paul Desse, « Mass retailing in France and urban landscape transformations: emergence and development »Belgeo [En ligne], 3 | 2024, mis en ligne le 02 janvier 2025, consulté le 18 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/74762 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130dt

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Auteurs

Nathalie Lemarchand

Géographe, Professeure des Universités, Université Paris 8, UMR Ladyss (7533)
ORCID 0000-0003-3189-6850
nlemarchand02@univ-paris8.fr

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René-Paul Desse

Professeur Emérite des Universités, Université de Bretagne Occidentale
rene-paul.desse@univ-brest.fr

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