Word: carrefour
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...retailer with 26 stores, plans to open more?a lot of them. So do other "hypermarkets," giant retailers from Europe and America that are taking over some of Asia's prime selling grounds. Despite threats by governments to ban them, not to mention rocket attacks, chains, including France's Carrefour and U.S.-based Wal-Mart, are ramping up plans to open hundreds of new outlets throughout the region over the next several years. The onslaught threatens to run local retailers right out of business. Says Boonyoong Vimuttayon, a Bangkok grocery store owner who has seen her sales decline by more...
...That's not to say the foreigners are unstoppable. Both Wal-Mart and Carrefour, the world's second largest retailer, tried and failed to crack the Hong Kong market in the 1990s. Hong Kong consumers seemed to prefer familiar neighborhood chain stores. Carrefour lost $400 million between 1996 and 2000 on four Hong Kong outlets. "It all ended in tears, really," says Alan Treadgold, director of retail research for ad agency Leo Burnett Worldwide in Sydney. "They just couldn't make the format work...
...sales?now less than 20% of its total revenue?to a third of total revenue within five years. That means building new stores not just in established economies like Japan but also in countries with fast-emerging consumer cultures like China, where there are already 42 Wal-Mart and Carrefour outlets and dozens more on the way. In South Korea alone, analysts predict the number of hypermarkets to swell to 230 within three years, up from nine...
Some observers criticized the police response to the riots as sympathetic to the mobs or lax. In a throng surrounding a Carrefour megastore in an upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires, a woman told TIME that police officers were encouraging people to head for the store. But when demonstrators marched on government buildings and set fires outside the Presidential Palace and on the ground floor of the Economy Ministry building, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd...
Meanwhile, clandestine resistance cells are already operational in Carrefour, the vast slum in the capital city that remains a principal bastion of support for the exiled President. Plans have been made to place burning cars at key intersections, blocking any moves by the military to defend itself. Angry Haitians like 30-year-old Pierre, whose right arm is scarred and twisted from a fight with the police, are wooing restive elements of the army to join them when the U.S. helicopters come. Says he: "We sleep with one eye toward...