SUPERMARKETS Carrefour and Día are planning overnight opening in a bid to attract customers away from Mercadona, one of Spain's largest grocery store chains.
Whilst Mercadona holds the largest market share at present, Carrefour and Día come second and third, but they want to compete more aggressively and are struggling to keep up.
Both have decided to offer longer opening hours to cater for customers who have more time to shop at night – such as shift workers.
Carrefour already has around a dozen 24-hour 'express'-type stores, very small in size and more limited in produce than its main branches, in Madrid, and intends to increase the number of these within the capital's wider region.
It opened a 24-hour hypermarket in Vallecas and has plans to launch another, whilst also widening its network of 'express' stores, known as Carrefour Market.
At present, the Greater Madrid region is the only one in Spain where retailers have complete freedom to choose their opening hours, a privilege granted to parts of the country considered 'key tourism' areas.
Whilst other regions have certain towns or neighbourhoods with the same opening-hours freedom, many local councils have actually appealed against this as they claim that only large chain stores would choose to operate outside of standard times, and that this would produce unfair competition for small family-run shops.
Día has now extended its opening times from the usual nine-to-nine, and is now trading from 08.00 to 23.00 inclusive.
Mercadona's founder Juan Roig recently said that when his stores were forced to open on Sundays, they lost money, and that the only way to break even, let alone make a profit, was to hike up prices on that day of the week.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com