TEDi has nearly 2,700 stores in Germany and several hundred branches in ten other European countries. TEDI
The brand, well known across the Rhine for its low prices, should benefit from the growing popularity of discounters on French soil.
Within a few years, the discount bazaars stormed the commercial areas bordering large and medium-sized cities in France. Action, Gifi, NOZ, Stokomani, B&M, Maxi Bazar, Normal… To this already long list, we will now have to add TEDi, a German discounter which will open its first French store in Évreux next spring.
If this simple and playful name probably does not mean much to the French, it is nevertheless well known across the Rhine, where TEDi is one of the largest retailers on the market. discount. Created in Dortmund by the distribution giant Tengelmann (Obi, Kik…), the brand has nearly 2,700 stores in Germany and several hundred branches in ten other European countries. The strength of TEDi: to offer thousands of items (hygiene, decoration, DIY, toys…), at just one euro. A “one dollar store“with Germanic sauce, therefore. On the shelves, the products, for the most part Made in Asiachange at full speed, just to keep buyers in suspense.
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A sector dominated by Action
If TEDi intends to conquer the French market – a dozen additional openings are planned by the company by 2024 in the West and North of France – it will have to deal with serious competitors. Starting with Action, voted third favorite brand of the French in 2022 by the EY Parthénon study. With ten years of activity in France and more than 700 stores spread across the country, the Dutch chain currently dominates the French discount market.
But the cake could turn out to be hearty enough to satisfy everyone’s appetites. THE discounterswhose cumulative fleet has more than doubled in ten years, are the big winners from the polarization of consumption, also called “hourglass effect”: at the top, a marked tendency to premiumization, below, a frantic race for low prices. At a time when inflation is forcing many French people to make new choices, the bottom of the hourglass is doing well, uniting well beyond the working classes.
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If the discounters are not likely to run out of customers, they could on the other hand run out of goods. Like Action, TEDi offers both products from its own sourcing and clearance items. It is this last type of commodity that the actors fight over bitterly. With the proliferation of low cost bazaars, retailers are seeing their purchasing opportunities dwindle. The pioneer of French destocking stores NOZ has already paid the price, supply difficulties forcing it to lower the curtain of around thirty of its stores in France last year.
Competition is all the tougher in that it is not played out on the scale of a few countries, but on that of Europe as a whole. In 2018, the British discounter B&M made a remarkable foray into France by buying Babou. Not so long ago, the Russian hard-discount giant Mere had also run for the French market, before changing its mind. And, umpteenth illustration of this war of the steeples, when, in the French press, the arrival of TEDi makes the headlines, in the German press, one is moved by the imminent establishment of a new Polish discounter. As the song says (French, this time), in the discount, we “does not know the crisis“.