Quote:
Originally Posted by bilbao58
I miss that Auchan on the Tollway. The breads were really good and super cheap. Produce and seafood sections were excellent too. It was by going there that I first noticed the growing African community in Houston.
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I didn't know that Auchan ventured into the USA. I didn't see any when I lived there.
Auchan is present in many European countries, they are the most "aggressive" in terms of international expansion. Often they adopt a local name that is a simple translation of the French name, while keeping the same font and visual. Auchan, phonetically, means "in the field" in French (the correct spelling should be "au champ"). In Spain, they simply translated, and it became Alcampo ("in the field").
The Alcampo hypermarkets in Spain are the largest in the country. They often have the cheapest gas too (in Barcelona, the enormous Alcampo on the outskirts is always where I stop to refill the tank, because it's usually the cheapest gas in the entire province).
In Russia they translated it too, and they use the Cyrilic alphabet (although I think they had to close their supermarkets there since the invasion of Ukraine?).
It's funny they kept the French name for the US (especially in a country where "Auchan" would probably lead to the wrong pronunciation... do you pronounce it like the "ch" in church or like "sh" in sham, and what about the final n, do you pronounce it?). In English it could have become "Onfield" I suppose, but perhaps they thought it would be a silly name.
Interestingly, in my parents' hometown Auchan is the most "working class" of the 4 large hypermarkets, with the lowest quality (lowest in comparison to the other 3, but still higher than what you'd find in most countries). So we usually don't shop there (except when we're late because they are the one closing the latest).
So I have a somehow negative view of Auchan. Leclerc and Carrefour are better in terms of quality. In Paris there's a very large Auchan at La Défense, but I find it dirty. The Leclerc at Levallois-Perret is much cleaner and higher quality too. Both are outside the city limits though, so pain in the ass to go and come back without a car, so I go there only like twice a year at most. Inside the city of Paris proper, supermarkets are much smaller than these two.
PS: That's Auchan in Russia, in Cyrillic alphabet (here they didn't try to translate the name as in Spain, they just phonetically wrote "Auchan" in Cyrillic alphabet). The word below is "hypermarket" (in English oddly, simply phonetically written with the Cyrillic alphabet).
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