Word: leclerc
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GROCER Eouard Leclerc of Landerneau, France, and Homebuilder John Long of Phoenix, Ariz, have much in common: they are both young entrepreneurs who have startled their respective industries by bringing low costs and high volume. See BUSINESS, Apostle Behind the Counter and How to Live Like a Star...
...This man may transform the medieval French retail trade along 20th century lines." So said a high French government official last week of Edouard Leclerc, a young (32), socially minded and devout Frenchman who is sparking a revolution in French food-selling practices. Leclerc, who started out by studying to be a Roman Catholic priest, changed his mind, and decided that he could help the poor more by donning a grocer's apron and bringing down the cost of living. Nine years ago, with $40, he opened a stall behind his house in Landerneau, near Brest, offering staple groceries...
Friends at Court. France has long needed an apostle in the grocery business. With 300,000 food stores, enough to serve the U.S., with a population nearly four times as great, the French people are forced to pay among the highest food markups in the world. When Leclerc began offering 20% off on staple groceries, with up to 70% off on chocolates, razor blades and other specialties, his Landerneau competitors went to war to protect their entrenched position. They first spread false rumors that he was a tool of the church, French labor unions or the French employers' federation...
...enemies figured out other ways to attack him. Wholesalers who had previously helped him asked him to take his business elsewhere. Said one: "I like your business, M. Leclerc, but every time I sell you 1,000,000 francs worth of goods, I lose 30 million in canceled orders elsewhere." When things looked black, Leclerc's plight came to official attention in Paris. Economic Minister Antoine Pinay and other high officials saw in his crusade a way to raise French living standards without causing an inflationary wage increase, which they knew would only be soaked up in higher prices...
Ever since Paris was liberated, writers have felt the itch to put it back into a prison of their own special illusions. Of the latest, one is a bounding Basque named François-Regis Bastide, a 32-year-old Frenchman who served under General Leclerc (whose column was the first to drive into Nazi-held Paris). Another is an American who has built a rambling bastille of words in which meanings are thrown into dungeons, to be reached only through endless labyrinths of painstaking prose...