French Supermarkets Are Now Opening on Sundays—Sans Employees

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- For decades, French unions have fought extended opening times for stores, defending laws that forbid everything from corner groceries to warehouse-size hypermarkets from making staffers stock shelves or sit behind cash registers in the wee hours and on Sunday afternoons. Such rules, the unions say, ensure that workers get needed time off and protect them from exploitation. Two French retail chains have come up with a way around those regulations: opening sans employees.

Grocery group Casino Guichard Perrachon is leaving 200 outlets open after employees go home, with self-checkout machines in their stead. Rival Carrefour SA in May began testing a similar idea in Paris’s posh 7th arrondissement with a market that’s open 24/7. The stores lock their liquor cabinets and close meat counters and cheese-cutting stations, but shoppers can select what they want from other departments then proceed to the automated checkout. Security guards, typically outside contractors, keep an eye out for shoplifters. “We’re responding to customer demand,” says Alexandre de Palmas, director of Carrefour’s convenience store division. He says hundreds of shoppers show up during the late-night hours, and there’s more traffic earlier in the evening “because people aren’t worried the shop will be closed when they get there.”

French retailers say they need longer hours to remain competitive. In the largely stagnant market, the only way to grow is by taking share from a rival, and today there are more entrants than ever, with low-cost chains such as E.Leclerc, Lidl, and Aldi expanding across France and e-tailers taking a greater share of sales. “The internet has changed the game, and we have to adapt,” says Sebastien Corrado, marketing director for the Casino group, which launched its program last December. “We’re finding a way for physical retail to compete.”

Unions call the strategy risky: Late-night partygoers and messy shoppers could wreak havoc. Worse, they say, the stores are normalizing the idea that consumers should be able to shop at any hour, letting companies require employees to work undesirable shifts. “Sunday should be for rest, for spending time with friends and family,” says Joanny Poncet, a union representative at Casino’s Franprix chain. “There’s no reason consumers can’t plan ahead and shop another time.”

Grocers have long been allowed to open on Sunday mornings, but the afternoons had remained sacrosanct. Owners say they’re giving customers what they want and insist self-checkout machines haven’t spurred job losses. If anything, Casino says, it means more staff on Sunday mornings to stock stores so they’re ready to go when workers leave for the day. The company says a hypermarket in Angers, two hours west of Paris by train, now sees more than 1,000 customers on a typical Sunday afternoon, about as many as during the morning shift staffed by clerks. But France had 195,000 checkout clerks in 2014, down from 220,000 in 2005, and the shift to automated checkouts threatens to accelerate the decline.

The trend toward longer hours got a big push in 2015 when Emmanuel Macron, economy minister at the time, tweaked the rules to allow shops in tourist zones to remain open all day on Sundays. Now, Macron’s government is trying to make it easier for stores to stay open late into the evening by reducing the number of hours they’re required to be closed overnight. But the French state doesn’t always move in sync: Agnes Pannier-Runacher, a junior economy minister, suggested in an August radio interview that the late-night shops might be violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

Cedric Lecasble, an analyst at MainFirst Bank AG, says France is simply following a practice that’s been widely adopted in Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. While France’s unions will put up a fight, he says more automation is inevitable, whatever a store’s opening hours. “As consumers get used to making smaller, more frequent purchases and with e-commerce making it so they can shop whenever they wish,” Lecasble says, “it’s hard to envision that the unions will be able to block this forever.”

On a recent Sunday at a Casino outlet in Les Lilas, a suburb just east of Paris, a security guard at the door tells customers there’s no alcohol available. The shelves are less well-stocked than usual, but no one complains. Line Niget, a chiropractor, says she prefers to shop during regular hours, but the convenience is hard to resist. “If you offer a service, people are going to come,” she says. Lucas Ghosn, a student, says even when clerks are present, he tends to choose the self-checkout. “I buy just a few items,” he says. “The regular registers are usually full of people making bigger purchases.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rocks at drocks1@bloomberg.net, Dimitra Kessenides

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