The powerful inflation is hurting the pockets of the people of France - and this is the first thing that the cashiers of grocery stores see, writes Le Monde. Talking to the employees of several large retail chains in different parts of the country, this correspondent tried to draw a picture of how the current crisis has affected his compatriots.
"Wow, I didn't see that expensive!"; "You made a mistake somewhere"; "Take that position away". Claudine Cordina, a cashier at the Casino supermarket in Le Muy (in the French department of Var), has been hearing this kind of talk on a daily basis for months. In an interview with Le Monde, the 41-year-old woman who has worked in large retail chains confesses that she always gives the same reply: "You know, if it were up to me, I would lower the prices.
The most detailed information about the purchasing power of the French and their sentiments in the face of high inflation can be obtained from such people - employees of large grocery stores who work at the cash register, Le Monde noted. "Sitting on the other side of the conveyor belt, these workers, who during the coronavirus crisis were classified as the "second echelon" (the category to which the French authorities during the pandemic classified 17 professions that provide "essential services to maintain a normal life" and therefore remain in the workplace along with doctors. - InoTV), they turned out to be the vanguard that first encountered the inflationary avalanche," the French newspaper columnist says. - It is to them that customers complain about the rising cost of living ("Everything is getting more expensive"; "Ukraine is just a pretext"), as well as about some products disappearing from the shelves ("We don't import mustard from Ukraine!"). And in recent months, cashiers all over France have come to the same conclusion: all customers, regardless of how knowledgeable they are, when they see the "total" line on the receipt, can't believe their eyes.
"I hear from every other customer, 'Oh, it's gone up again,' or 'Are you sure you got it right? - says Deborah Cabot, 41, who has worked at the Géant La Foux hypermarket in Gassin in the Var since she was 19. Since the store is close to the famous resort of Saint-Tropez, very wealthy customers - such as tourists or yacht crews re-supplying with provisions - often stop by, but even they "now look at the receipts two or three times to make sure I am not mistaken," says Cabot. "When I tell them the total amount, customers almost always comment on it in some way," she notes.
And 760 km from Gassin, in the suburb of Bourges (Cher department), the discontent of customers even resulted in an unpleasant scene at the cash register, writes Le Monde. The administrator of the local Carrefour Market store, Mireille Richard, was secretly called at the reception desk by one of the cashiers. "She warned me that customers were coming to me to complain about the crazy prices: they were sure they had been miscalculated at the cash register. In the end I was scolded, called an incompetent employee and told that I had also made a mistake," Richard told Le Monde. According to her, because of rising prices, customers have become much more aggressive - even more so than during the pandemic.
59-year-old Richard has worked in major retail chains for 37 years and knows her clientele well. Her store is mostly populated by older, poor people, and now they find that one visit to buy groceries costs them not 150 euros as before, but 200-300 - and that if they do not take alcoholic drinks and meat, says the administrator. And after paying, they often stop at the cash register and look at the receipt to see why the costs have gone up so much - and "they're still surprised," she says.
You can gauge how fast prices are going up by fuel pellets, Richard says. "Last year a bag was going for 3 euros 99 cents. Now it's eight and a half. Customers are stunned and say, 'Have you even seen your prices? And this is not the limit - we were warned that by December the price would rise to 10 euros," - Le Monde quotes her.
According to the magazine, inflation is the main concern for the French: according to an opinion poll carried out by the YouGov company in mid-September, it bothers 52% of the inhabitants of the country, thus outstripping global warming (which worries 43% of French citizens), the fighting in Ukraine (32%) and the pandemic (11%). This is quite understandable: according to the forecasts of the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), by December prices in the country will rise by 12% year-on-year, and the overall inflation rate will be about 6.5%.
According to a survey organized on September 12 by Younited and OpinionWay, rising prices have already forced two-thirds of the French to change their consumption habits: 46% of them began to save on food, and 40% - on electricity. According to Le Monde, in such circumstances, customers of major retail chains are increasingly forced to ask the cashier to cancel a product because it does not fit into the budget. And some store customers do things differently: if a delicacy taken by weight and cut up in the sausage department proves unaffordable to them, they simply discard it discreetly in empty baskets that pile up at the bottom of the cash register.
"I caught one such customer red-handed - and she simply confessed to me: 'I won't take it, it's too expensive,'" Marie-Françoise Rouault, 59, a cashier-administrator at the Carrefour Market, located in one of the luxury districts of Ren, recalled in a conversation with Le Monde. "At the end of the day, it turns out that there are three or four carts of 'abandoned' groceries to put away. But if it turns out to be unfrozen fish, we have to throw it away," laments Deborah Cabot of Gassen.
"Customers often don't want to return the food in the cutting department because they are embarrassed to say it was too expensive," comments Mireille Richard, who also has to deal with this phenomenon in her store. Some customers even come back to the store from home to return the most expensive items after they have counted them. For example, one "self-employed" customer of Marie-Françoise Rouault's store did this: she once came to return a can of tuna, which her husband had bought the day before. As Rouault notes, the lady said her husband had gotten the wrong brand of canned tuna mixed up - but that was almost certainly not the case, as the customer immediately complained about how her costs had risen. "Some people don't want to admit that even for them everything has become expensive," Le Monde quoted the cashier as saying.
Retail professionals have also observed other signs that French purchasing power is diminishing: for example, customers increasingly do not have enough money on their debit cards to pay for their purchases by the 10th or 12th of each month, and more and more customers are beginning to use the cheque books they once forgot, using them for "accounting acrobatics". "Starting on the 20th of the month, people start coming in with receipts. They think that by the time the store cashes the check, the money will already be in the account. But so far, that's been very rare," Deborah Cabo says.
Customers are increasingly using food vouchers issued by some businesses and municipal authorities to pay for their meals, collecting points on loyalty cards to prepare for the Christmas vacations, and "storming" the shelves with discounted goods, Le Monde's correspondent lists. Especially popular are the departments where products that are about to expire are sold for half price or even cheaper. "People just pounce on them, it's horrible. We fill these shelves in the mornings-and there are customers who come especially in the morning for these products. They tell us that if it weren't for these discounts, they wouldn't be able to afford meat," says Mireille Richard. According to NielsenIQ, between January and mid-August this year, of the total volume of products sold in French supermarkets and hypermarkets, 21.2% were sold at a discount, compared to 20.6% for the same period in 2021, Le Monde highlights. "We make our own diet based on what products are on sale," admits Deborah Cabot.
Claudine Cordina also notes a change in the culinary preferences of customers. "They're taking fish less often, and they're taking meat, too, if they do - usually when there's a 30 percent or more discount," the cashier says. Cordina and her colleagues discuss their regular customers, who have suddenly stopped coming in, and find out from one another that customers are migrating to discounters like the Spanish chain Dia and the German Lidl.
Marie-Françoise Rouault, who has worked in her store for 22 years, says the same: many of her regular customers are looking for cheaper places. "I had one good customer, a doctor - so I met him in a Lidl store, although the person is not of the caliber for such a store," she is quoted by Le Monde. According to the newspaper, a study conducted on September 6 by YouGov on behalf of the discount grocery app Too Good To Go, 57% of French people buy their food at discounter chains, and many other citizens are now expanding their range by shopping in different places.
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