Almost empty shelves for hundreds of meters, aisles blocked with adhesive tape: the Casino de Chenôve supermarket, in the suburbs of Dijon, was experiencing its final hours on Monday like around twenty other stores in the group.
These twenty-one Casino super and hypermarkets, which employ more than 1,100 employees, will close half on Monday evening and half on Saturday, due to failure to find a buyer, declared a spokesperson for the CGT union. Four additional stores should have been affected but buyers have recently come forward, he added.
“Among the twenty stores which will close […]discussions are underway with a view to a possible reopening of several of them,” assures management. In a press release, it specifies that eighteen stores and four logistics platforms do not have a “buyer identified to date”.
Very high debt
Very heavily in debt, the Saint-Etienne group, which employed some 200,000 people worldwide at the end of 2022, gradually sold almost all of its super and hypermarkets to its competitors Les Mousquetaires, Auchan or Carrefour, to concentrate on its 7,000 local stores.
In April, he announced a social plan, which should lead to around 3,000 job cuts. Since then, the eight Employment Protection Plans (PSE), for its various companies, have all been validated by the Saint-Etienne labor department, according to the unions and management.
The final number of layoffs not yet known
“The Distribution Casino France PSE, which includes the head office in Saint-Etienne as well as the stores in the historic area, plans to cut 1,900 jobs,” specifies a spokesperson for the CGT-Casino. “The PSE of the logistics subsidiary Easydis, four of which warehouses will be closed, concerns 709 job cuts,” he adds.
“The final number of layoffs will only be known at the end of the internal reclassification phase which has not yet started in certain companies, therefore not before the month of November,” according to management.