After the single-use plastic bag at the checkout, which said goodbye in July 2016, then the receipt, issued only on request since 1er August, will the commercial paper prospectus of supermarkets, distributed anonymously in mailboxes, disappear in turn?
At E.Leclerc, which aspires 23.6% of French spending in supermarkets, according to the Kantar Institute, is officially the end. His boss, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, had promised, at the end of 2022, that from September he would completely stop their distribution for all of his 734 stores in France, making, in passing, a saving of 50,000 tons of paper every year.
Unlike the receipt, whose systematic distribution is stopped by the law on the fight against waste and the circular economy of February 10, 2020, the gradual disappearance of paper catalogs is an approach that retailers are also anticipating for fear that it will one day be imposed on them.
“It’s getting very expensive”
Cora stopped distributing its own in January, Franprix and Monoprix in 2019. The Swedish furniture giant, Ikea, put an end, at the end of 2020, to the one it had been publishing for seventy years. Carrefour has announced, for its part, that it will reduce the distribution of its paper catalogs in France by 80% from 2024… to digitize them.
Ecological but also economic reasons, given the sharp rise in paper prices in 2022, “whose prices have tripled in eight months”points out a distributor according to which, “in the operating accounts, in addition to the increase in wages and energy, it is starting to cost a lot of money”.
According to the Ecological Transition Agency (Ademe), more than 766,000 tonnes of unaddressed advertising materials were distributed in 2021, a significant part of which was thrown away without being read. “There are 23 million mailboxes in France” and each receives, on average, “between ten and twelve leaflets per week, except in Paris, which is very poorly served”points out Pierre-Yves Larvor, deputy general manager of Milee, ex-Adrexo, which covers 40% of the market for the distribution of paper prospectuses.
A great way to attract new customers
But not all distributors are ready to end it. “The prospectus is much more than paper! », declared Dominique Schelcher, the CEO of System U, in a column published in several daily newspapers in December 2022, ensuring that 60% of its customers vote for them. The banner, which oversees 1,702 stores of all sizes, points out that, “for some operations, it is a difficult tool to replace”which remains a good way to attract new customers. “When the hypermarket is located 30 kilometers from the consumer, you need to encourage him to move”we note at System U.
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