The long journey of a large retailer

ENAR

Local markets have proven remarkably resilient when it comes to resisting the dominance of large retailers that offer fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in hypermarkets and supermarkets—those behemoths of daily shopping that you enter with an empty shopping cart the size of a compact car and leave with said cart overflowing. One operator of mega-sized retail stores, Kuwait-based The Sultan Center (TSC), closed its Lebanon stores in 2017, but at the same time, other operators steered their outlets into major expansions. Majid Al Futtaim’s Carrefour franchise, for example, ventured into Beirut’s Dora City Mall following its very large operation in the Beirut City Centre Mall in Hazmieh. But perhaps no FMCG retailer added more outlets in 2017 than Spinneys. Hitting age 20 in Lebanon in its current incarnation—it entered Lebanon in the 1940s but opened its first post-war store in Dbayeh in 1998—Spinneys opened three new outlets by end of October