Divestment Strategy in the French Food Retailing Industry: Transferring Financial Risk from Shareholders to Independent Entrepreneurs

The Casino group’s announcement that it will be selling several hundred of its stores in France, notably to the Intermarché cooperative, by the end of 2023, has sent shockwaves through the retail world. For careful observers, however, this is just one of the fundamental movements transforming the sale of fast-moving consumer goods. Over the past five years, the Carrefour group has also been divesting the ownership of many hypermarkets, handing them over to independent entrepreneurs acting as franchisees. In both cases, the integrated model, to which Casino and Carrefour groups belong, gives the impression of running out of steam, while cooperative and franchise retailing is showing excellent results. Thus, Intermarché, E. Leclerc and Système U cooperatives have gained an ascendancy that seems to be linked to an intelligent assimilation of the “good economic practices” that the integrated model has been implementing since the 1970s. A theoretical approach based on the notion of organizational isomorphism provides a relevant framework to better understand the evolutions underway, the consequence of which is to have the financial risk associated with retail activities borne by independent entrepreneurs rather than shareholders.