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France’s Casino supermarket chain to axe up to 3,200 jobs

French supermarket group Casino said on Wednesday it would axe between 1,300 and 3,200 jobs as part of a reorganisation following its recent takeover led by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.

Published: 24 April 2024 16:17 CEST
France's Casino supermarket chain to axe up to 3,200 jobs
A woman walks past the logo of Casino and trolleys at the entrance of a Casino shop in Ploubalay, western France on July 5, 2023 (Photo by Damien MEYER / AFP)

The revamp comes as the Saint Etienne-based group moves on from the three-decade reign of Jean-Charles Naouri. That ended with the arrival in March of Kretinsky at the head of a group of main creditors who oversaw a debt restructuring deal.

Casino, which lost €5.7 billion in 2023, is to sell off hundreds of super- and hypermarket stores across France.

The group said it would consult with unions and other stakeholders on May 6 to unveil plans to safeguard most of the nearly 30,000 people it employs in France.

Saint Etienne mayor Gael Perdriau said he expected to meet the new management team soon “to consolidate the group’s presence” in the eastern-central city.

Restructuring its operations to emerge from its debt mountain has forced Casino to sell off most of its larger-format shops to rivals Intermarche, Auchan and Carrefour. The group will keep operating its Monoprix and Franprix chains.

Until the end of 2022, Casino employed some 200,000 people worldwide and 50,000 in France. Today that is down to 28,212, the vast majority of those jobs in France.

CEO Philippe Palazzi said in a statement that “this transformation project” would play a key role in putting Casino back on an even keel.

Casino also announced an unusually long, 10-year purchasing alliance with rivals Intermarche and Auchan to “maintain and develop long-term partnerships with the agricultural world and French industrial players”.

Shares in the group were down 0.3 percent mid-afternoon at €0.030.

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BUSINESS

French barber still trimming at 90

French barber Roger Amilhastre could have hung up his clippers decades ago but he said his passion for the business gives him a reason to get up in the morning.

Published: 26 April 2024 15:01 CEST
French barber still trimming at 90

“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” the 90 year old said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.

“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than €2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off sad thoughts.

“I’m not grumpy getting up [to go to work],” he said.

France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be the country’s oldest active barber.

“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.

“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off.”

According to national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.

Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.

“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.

German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.

“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said. “Luckily, he did.”

He said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947.

But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased quiffs in the 1950s, to 1970s bowl cuts.

The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.

“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.

That same decade, the Aids epidemic worried customers, who understood little about the illness at the time.

“People were scared,” Amilhastre said. “They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer.” 

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.

Behind his bar, Surre said he remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne – you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.

He is one of several older customers to regularly drop by Achille’s – even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.

Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut. “With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.

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