Word: hypermarket
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What is this place? Welcome to Hypermart USA, where the floor space (222,000 sq. ft.) and the discounts are both breathtakingly huge. The suburban Dallas emporium belongs to a booming category of retail store called the hypermarket. "I've never seen so much under one roof," says Martha Mason, a homemaker visiting Hypermart USA. "I could spend days in here." Sam Walton certainly hopes so. The founder and chairman of booming Wal-Mart discount stores opened his first Hypermart USA last December as a joint venture with the Cullum retail chain. Last week he opened a second in Topeka...
...competitors agree. Suddenly hypermarkets, which can cover five football fields, are springing up across the U.S. in places as diverse as New Orleans and Kalispell, Mont. The oversize stores provide the ultimate in one- stop shopping: customers can get a haircut, buy a refrigerator and stock up on paper towels in one trip. Most "malls without walls," as Walton calls them, draw crowds with an old-fashioned lure: everyday discounts. Prices are reduced as much as 40% below the full retail level. Hypermarkets make money even at such thin profit margins because they sell such an enormous volume of goods...
While the idea of a store so big seems quintessentially American, the idea for hypermarkets comes from France. A small-town haberdasher and a grocer, taking advantage of their country's lack of American-style supermarkets, teamed up in 1960 to start the first hypermarket at an intersection just outside Annecy, in the foothills of the Alps. They named their store Carrefour, the French word for crossroads, and it was an instant success. Their prices were so low that shoppers expected them to go out of business, a rumor they gleefully perpetuated by keeping their front windows coated with whitewash...
...While hypermarkets have spread across Canada, which has 22 such stores, they have only now become a hot concept in the U.S. One reason is that America has so many competing discount stores and supermarkets that the Carrefour concept had trouble gaining acceptance. Analysts estimate that Bigg's, a Cincinnati hypermarket opened by Euromarche, a French firm, has lost at least $9 million since it was opened three years ago. But the large U.S. chains believe they can make the idea work by selling name-brand goods at paper-thin markups. K mart announced last September that it will form...