SUPERMARKETS Carrefour and Día are planning overnight opening in a bid to attract customers away from Mercadona, one of Spain's largest grocery store chains.
Whilst Mercadona holds the largest market share at present, Carrefour and Día come second and third, but they want to compete more aggressively and are struggling to keep up.
Both have decided to offer longer opening hours to cater for customers who have more time to shop at night – such as shift workers.
Carrefour already has around a dozen 24-hour 'express'-type stores, very small in size and more limited in produce than its main branches, in Madrid, and intends to increase the number of these within the capital's wider region.
It opened a 24-hour hypermarket in Vallecas and has plans to launch another, whilst also widening its network of 'express' stores, known as Carrefour Market.
At present, the Greater Madrid region is the only one in Spain where retailers have complete freedom to choose their opening hours, a privilege granted to parts of the country considered 'key tourism' areas.
Whilst other regions have certain towns or neighbourhoods with the same opening-hours freedom, many local councils have actually appealed against this as they claim that only large chain stores would choose to operate outside of standard times, and that this would produce unfair competition for small family-run shops.
Día has now extended its opening times from the usual nine-to-nine, and is now trading from 08.00 to 23.00 inclusive.
Mercadona's founder Juan Roig recently said that when his stores were forced to open on Sundays, they lost money, and that the only way to break even, let alone make a profit, was to hike up prices on that day of the week.
Roig has always avoided Sunday openings as standard, and these only occur when a bank holiday falls the day before or the day after, since Mercadona never shuts for two days or more on the trot.
But Carrefour manager Ignacio Cobo says overnight opening 'pays its way'.
Despite having to increase staff numbers and pay them extra for inconvenient hours, the costs of keeping the store open 24 hours a day do not increase significantly.
The majority of overnight customers are young adults, who tend to buy food for immediate consumption, although shift workers or those who work very long hours are also among those who find it more comfortable to do their shopping after the usual closing time of 22.00.
Carrefour, originally French but now international, says it is 'a great pity' that the only region it can open overnight is Madrid, and that if it could, it would extend this to all of Spain's main cities and all towns of over 100,000 inhabitants.
They would mainly target tourist belts, which see their population double, treble or even quadruple in summer, but even in most of these areas, not only is night opening banned, but Sunday trading is not permitted.
Digital transformation manager of Carrefour, Javier López, says rules preventing Sunday and overnight opening, especially in key holiday hotspots, are a case of 'shooting oneself in the foot'.
The vast majority of Carrefour's 650 stores in Spain would open Sundays year-round if they legally could, López explains.
As for Día, it has decided to extend its opening times and has launched a new brand, Día & Go, where customers can buy takeaway products such as coffee, fruit juice and ready meals – a move that will involve revaping around 1,000 stores, or 50% of its network, at a cost of between €320 and €350 million this year alone.
Día admits that it would be 'impossible to catch Mercadona', which holds a 25% market share in Spain compared with Día's own 7.5%, but it is gunning to be the second-largest by overtaking Carrefour, which holds an 8.6% share of the national grocery market.
It is possible Día is already second from top in the online market – Carrefour represents 18% of internet supermarket shopping in Spain and Día 10%, but Mercadona is not willing to reveal its own figures.
Día's turnover in 2017 reached €57.6m and Mercadona's came to nearly four times that amount at €198m, although Carrefour has chosen not to reveal its own turnover for last year.
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