One of the world’s largest retailers once tried to break into the U.S. by opening a mega store in Northeast Philly. It did not go well.
We start with a headline from the February 1 issue of the Philadelphia Daily News in 1988: “Carrefour Opens Without Much Hype.”
Based in France, Carrefour is a massive retail chain. The company operates more than 12,000 stores across 30 countries. For comparison, Walmart has just under 11,000 stores in 24 countries. So, yeah…it’s big.
Like Walmart, Carrefour pioneered the idea of a superstore. By combining food and department store products in one location, Carrefour’s “hypermarkets” offered an early version of the big box shopping experience.
And in the late 1980s, Carrefour tried to export its model to the United States. The retail giant chose Philadelphia as its U.S. testing ground for the “hypermarket” concept.
In 1986, Carrefour announced plans to build its first U.S. hypermarket on the site of the former Liberty Bell Park racetrack in Northeast Philadelphia. It quickly sparked curiosity — and skepticism.
At 330,000 square feet, the Northeast Philly Carrefour would be roughly four times the size of the average Kmart.
Is that what American consumers really wanted? As one economist told the Inquirer back then: “We’re not accustomed to buying a sofa and carton of milk in the same shopping trip.”
But Carrefour’s problems weren’t limited to its novelty. The store’s workforce was not unionized, drawing the ire of local labor leaders. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 quickly put up television and radio ads urging people not to shop there.
Union president Wendell W. Young III, a well-known Philly progressive, told the Inquirer he wouldn’t organize Carrefour workers even if they wanted to form a union. “They wreak havoc in the retail business with these monster-type stores,” Young said.
In early February of 1988, Carrefour swung open its doors to American shoppers. The maiden store had 61 checkout counters and 50,000 products. Some of the employees — dubbed “super go-fers” — wore roller skates so they could more efficiently zip through the seven-acre facility.
Carrefour’s opening day also included union picketers. Labor leader Wendell Young III vowed to keep up the pressure. “We’ve got to do the old Ho Chi Minh and establish ourselves like a mosquito that’s going to be there all the time,” Young told the Inquirer.
Young even convinced union locals across the Northeast to spend $1 million on an ad campaign targeting Carrefour — even though the company had just one U.S. location at the time. Daily News columnist Larry McMullen dubbed the battle: “David vs. Monsieur Goliath”
The battle between Carrefour and union leaders got increasingly nasty. At the end of 1988, the union accused Carrefour of firebombing a trailer used to coordinate pickets. In 1989, Carrefour sued the union, accusing it of verbally and physically abusing customers.
In 1990, the two sides reached a truce. Carrefour dropped its lawsuit. The union ended its picket and boycott. Carrefour seemed to be on steadier footing. The company even announced plans for a second U.S. store in South Jersey.
Young and his union even did what they claimed they never would: organize Carrefour’s labor force. By 1991, Carrefour employees had joined Local 1776 — the same union that had once picketed them.
But the tranquility wouldn’t last long. On Labor Day 1993, word came from Paris that Carrefour would close its stores in Philadelphia and South Jersey. With little warning, the American experiment was over.
Carrefour executives said the stores simply weren’t popular enough to sustain their size. In France, they said, people would travel long distances to visit a “hypermarket.” But Americans simply had too many options in the form of mid-sized supermarkets and department stores.
A company official also told the Inquirer that the French store didn’t have a big enough footprint in America to negotiate the kind of supplier deals its competitors enjoyed. “If we had grown faster,” the executive said, “maybe we would’ve succeeded.”
And that does seem plausible. After all, the Carrefour “hypermarket” concept is familiar to American shoppers today. Superstores (with largely un-unionized workforces) dot the country today.
In fact, the first Walmart Supercenter opened the same year as Carrefour’s debut in Northeast Philly. Perhaps, if the French chain had held on longer we’d all be shopping at Carrefours today.
But Carrefour bailed, swiveling its roller skates back toward France. And instead of becoming the retail giant’s first American triomphe, Philadelphia became its Waterloo.
Originally posted by Avi Wolfman-Arent (@Avi_WA) on Feb. 1, 2024.
