Unions feared the cuts were only the beginning and immediately announced strike action that saw all Carrefour stores closed and picketed at the weekend. Politicians condemned the French group’s decision and called for a viable social plan to deal with laid-off workers. Unions promised “a long and hard fight” to oppose closures.

“For six months I’ve been holding our stores up to the light,” said company CEO Gérard Lavinay. “The stores we have marked for closure could not be saved; the cancer was too deep. Nothing short of a doubling of turnover could offer any hope.”

He blamed the cost of staff, which Carrefour claims is 29% higher than the competition pays – a claim both unions and outside experts denied, laying the blame instead at Carrefour management’s own door.

Some 60 Carrefour shops across the country were closed by wildcat strike action on Friday, 26 February. The following day, the entire network was closed, in an action Carrefour Belgium CEO Gérard Lavinay said would cost the company €14 million.

Unions were ready to take a tough line, fearing this “social bloodbath” will only be the start. They are afraid that Carrefour’s intention is to hand over the remains of the business in Belgium to franchise holders. “They’re thinning down the company to make it easier to take over,” warned Chris Van Droogenbroeck of white-collar union LBC.

Flemish minister-president Kris Peeters met with Lavinay last week to be briefed on the company’s plans. Following the half-hour meeting, a stony-faced Peeters declined to comment on the restructuring itself, but stressed his government’s desire for as few lay-offs as possible.

Regional aid worth nearly €530,000 promised by the Flemish government to assist in training of Carrefour staff has been blocked, Peeters said. “We give strategic training support to allow people to learn, not to see them sacked,” he said. The company will also have to repay €84.6 million in tax breaks ruled illegal by the EU.

Most experts argued that Carrefour was in trouble as a result of its own inability to comprehend the nature of the Belgian market. The company was accused of failing to take account of the specific characteristics of consumer behaviour in Belgium, or the specificities of the two language communities, instead treating the entire territory as “an out of hand Département du Nord,” according to Ivan Sabbe, a member of the Flemish parliament who used to be CEO of Lidl Belgium.

“As well as a thought-out marketing strategy, every retail company has to have a clear concept,” Sabbe wrote in an opinion column for De Tijd newspaper. “But every concept, however strong the company may be internationally, has to be adapted to local needs,” he said.

If the Delhaize concept was “shopping as a pleasurable experience,” and the Colruyt concept was “quality without frills,” Carrefour was neither. “People know why they go shopping at Colruyt or Delhaize,” said BBTK union representative Jan De Weghe. “Nobody knows why they go shopping at Carrefour. That’s commercial incompetence”.

The hypermarket concept, imported from France, “is under pressure,” said Gino Van Ossel, retail marketing professor at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. “Their non-food is suffering from the competition from specialised shops. On sports articles, they run up against sports supermarkets like Decathlon, and for clothes against JBC.”

Dominique Nuytten, formerly director of neighbourhood supermarkets for GB and later Carrefour, explained: “The model of the French hypermarket doesn’t really apply to this country. Belgium, and especially Flanders, is used to a completely different retail landscape than France. Here, the local shop and the supermarket are much more emphatically present on the market.”

In the years since Carrefour moved into the Belgian market in July 2000, taking over the GB supermarket chain from GBInno- BM, it has had four CEOs, all imports from Paris. Most senior executive positions were also filled by French imports who regard a job here as a stepping- stone to better things in France.

The ignorance of cultural differences, according to one commentator, recalled the case of Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which moved into Germany in 1998 expecting to encounter no resistance from heavy discounters like Lidl and Aldi. Instead, the American giant was forced to leave in 2006, having sold off all of its supermarkets to another competitor, Metro, at a loss of €1 billion.

From a Flemish point of view, the company remains resolutely French, with few or no top executives speaking a word of Dutch. It may be an accident that all of the seven supermarkets marked for closure and nine of the 14 hypermarkets are in Flanders. By contrast, the hypermarkets and supermarkets which will be taken over by Mestdagh, should that deal go ahead, are all in Wallonia or Brussels.

The criticism didn’t only come from the Flemish side. Federal labour minister Joëlle Milquet said, “I was personally shocked by the extent of Carrefour’s restructuring, especially since this is not a case of restructuring as a result of the crisis, but as a result of a strategic error.”

The Walloon union CNE, meanwhile, accused Carrefour of “throwing workers away like old Kleenex” and thinking only of shareholders’ interests. “What is happening here is very arrogant,” the union’s Myriam Delmée said. “The only solution offered is the closure of shops and the sacking of workers. The real problem, the continuing decline in turnover, is not even addressed,” she said.

Unions and management at Carrefour were due to meet on 3 March to discuss the closures plan.

• Meanwhile in France, Carrefour last week won the coveted Top Employer award for the second year in a row. “This award is a reward for our engagement to our personnel policy and proves our commitment to all of our staff,” a Carrefour spokesperson said.

Carrefour in Figures

14 hypermarkets to close out of a total of 57, with a loss of 1,352 jobs

7 supermarkets to close out of the 61 owned by Carrefour (another 317 are franchised), with 320 jobs lost

1,672 jobs to disappear right away

2,992 more jobs under threat in other supermarkets and in the company’s Belgian HQ in Evere

3 hypermarkets and 11 supermarkets to be sold to the Walloon Mestdagh group, which runs Champion supermarkets. Some 1,795 workers affected with an immediate loss of 10-15% of pay. Carrefour staff salaries frozen

3 percentage points of market share lost if the plan goes ahead, putting Carrefour, once market leader, in third place behind Delhaize and Colruyt

Colruyt aims high

Discount retailer Colruyt has opened a new distribution centre in Beersel measuring 24,000 square metres (employees get around in little electric cars). It will be joined in July by another – 35,000 square metres – which will provide work for 370 new staff initially, rising later to 670, for an investment of €54 million.

In the course of this year, according to CEO Jef Colruyt, the company intends to create 3,000 jobs. “At that point we’ll have reached our ceiling,” he said. “There can’t be much more growth than that.”

Colruyt could single-handedly solve the problem of Carrefour’s mass redundancies. “The Carrefour workers who want to will know how to find us,” remarked Jef Colruyt. The company has doubled its workforce from 10,000 to just over 20,000 since 2000, but it employs younger people on average and demands efficiency, cost-control and, where appropriate, bilingual staff.

Bad news came last week from Ternat, however, where 270 workers at a distribution centre learned their jobs are to go. Logistics Ternat – which had been blockaded by staff, affecting deliveries to Carrefour hypermarkets – is owned by Kühne + Nagel, with Carrefour as its sole client. The company said some of the workers could be transferred to its other operations at Nivelles and Kontich. However Kontich’s own future could be in jeopardy: it also has Carrefour as sole client, and the contract runs out in June this year.