The paper brochures are not over yet. Unlike Cora and E.Leclerc, U stores will continue to distribute them to promote promotions and new products.
The head of U stores, himself running a supermarket in Alsace, said he wanted to “leave free choice to the customer.”
“60% of customers still want flyers”
If the brand assures that it will reduce the number of flyers by 30%, especially in city centers where some stores have even given up completely, it will not stop distributing them. Many of the U stores are located in rural or peri-urban areas, where it is difficult to live without them. “In these territories, 60% of customers still tell us [qu’ils veulent] their flyers”, emphasizes Dominique Schelcher. If a flyer has not been distributed on the street or in the mailboxes, customers “come to pick it up at the store reception”.
Last week, Cora was the first major distributor to announce that it would stop distributing flyers. The distributor will finish it from January 10 in all its stores. It was followed a few days later by the E.Leclerc stores, which will end their distribution in September 2023. Carrefour, for its part, has promised 80% of digital brochures by 2024.
Digital “works less well”
The labels that renounce flyers assure that they will replace them with catalogs in digital format or that they will rely on their applications and their social networks. But these digital alternatives “still don’t work 100%” and “work less,” Dominique Schelcher estimated, stressing that reading a brochure on a phone “is not as effective” as reading a paper catalogue.
In addition, “behind this issue of brochures there is a whole ecosystem, a whole economy,” he continued, referring to the 60,000 people who work in France “directly or indirectly” in the production and distribution of brochures. “What are we going to say to these people, we stopped overnight and there is nothing left? […] I can assume that I am the last one to offer a prospect and offer the option, “he said.
The president of Système U also believes that the prospectuses retain their usefulness in the current inflationary context. Consumers “need to shop around” to choose which sign to shop at, he said.
Source: BFM TV
