Hypermarket - History

History

Meijer, which today are very large stores which combine a supermarket and a department store, opened its first one-stop shopping center in 1934. It included a grocery store alongside a drugstore plus home products, off-street parking, gas station, and—eventually—clothing. In 1962, Meijer opened its first hypermarket in Grand Rapids, Michigan, entitled "Thrifty Acres", and calling the format a "Supercenter", and in Europe by Carrefour, which opened its first such store in 1963 at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, France. In the Americas, the format remained in regional use only until the late 1980s. The now defunct retailer Steinberg operated four hypermarkets in Québec under the name Steinberg Beaucoup from 1974 until early the 1990s.

The hypermarket concept spread in the United States in 1987, both with the introduction of stores by Carrefour, and by major American chains. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the three major discount store chains in the United States—Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target—started developing discount stores in the hypermarket format. Wal-Mart introduced Hypermart USA in 1987 and later Wal-Mart Supercenter, and Kmart developed Super Kmart.

In the early 1990s, hypermarkets selling fuel begin to make inroads in the United States. H-E-B was among the stores selling fuel in the Southwest. The concept was first introduced to the United States in the 1960s when a number of supermarket chains and retailers like Sears tried to sell fuel, but it did not generate sufficient consumer interest. In 1991, Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target Corporation) expanded its Target Greatland discount store chain into Columbus, Ohio, where it learned that its general merchandise superstores were unable to compete against the Meijer hypermarket chain. In response, Dayton-Hudson entered the hypermarket format in 1995 by opening its first SuperTarget store in Omaha, Nebraska.

Today there are approximately 4,500 hypermarket stores selling fuel, representing an estimated 14 billion US gallons (53,000,000 m3) sold each year.

Despite its success, the hypermarket business model may be under threat from on-line shopping and the shift towards customization according to analysts like Sanjeev Sanyal, Deutsche Bank's Global Strategist . Sanyal has also argued that some developing countries such as India may even skip the hypermarket stage and directly go online .