One could almost hear the celebratory whoops coming from Amazon execs in France on Tuesday when they began reopening their six warehouses in the country. The company shut them down nearly five weeks ago when labor unions successfully sued for failing to protect 10,000 workers from the novel coronavirus.
“This is excellent news for our employees…for our customers, and for all French small and medium businesses that rely on Amazon,” Amazon’s France CEO Frédéric Duval cooed on French radio, promising to offer “continuous improvement in customer experience.”
It’s not such excellent news, however, for Amazon’s competitors.
For the past month, the company’s legal wrangles in France have served as a live experiment in how the world’s consumers might change their shopping habits if Amazon—the $1.2 trillion behemoth that’s No. 2 on the Fortune 500 list—was suddenly no longer an option.
For shoppers and companies alike, the results are mixed—and perhaps a sobering lesson for businesses about how to survive in an Amazon world.
Amazon shut its French warehouses on April 16 when a French judge sided with the unions and ruled that it had failed to adequately protect its workers from COVID-19 in its crowded, fast-paced warehouses. The judge ordered Amazon to sell only “essential items” and imposed a fine of 1 million euros (or nearly $1.1 million U.S.) per violation.
The company argued that it had gone beyond most others’ protective measures, issuing workers with facial masks and hand sanitizers and, as much as possible, imposing social distancing. But Amazon execs calculated that the court order could easily cost them 1 billion euros a week in fines. Rather than try to figure out which items were legal, they shut the company’s warehouses in France and countersued in late April, losing in court a second time.
The monthlong battle left 67 million French without the country’s biggest online retailer at the very moment that almost all physical stores were closed—until France’s severe seven-week lockdown ended on May 11. For those shut in at home in France, any trip to a pharmacy or food store during the lockdown required a government form stating the reason for leaving the house.
The impact of Amazon’s shutdown seems to have been almost immediate.
“We sold enormously all the things that Amazon usually sells, like PS4 players and books,” says Marie-Hélène Thomet, a sales representative in the city of Lyon for FNAC, the French retail chain whose 880 stores across France sell electronics, stereo equipment, and home appliances. “Our sales just about doubled.”
Sales rocketed about 40% in April for French online retailer Cdiscount, according to CEO Emmanuel Grenier, although he has declined to estimate how much was due to Amazon’s shutdown. “We’ve seen sales accelerate week after week,” he told a French journalist. The company began by selling CDs and DVDs in 1998, two years before Amazon launched in France, and before Amazon overtook it last year, it was France’s biggest online retailer. Just three months ago, Grenier told a journalist the company had seen sharp growth in 2019 because of “a generational revolution,” he said. “The young are totally connected.”
Thomet predicts that millions more French might have been converted into online shoppers during the country’s two-month lockdown.
Even so, FNAC rolled out strict COVID-19 rules when it reopened its physical stores on May 11, after the seven-week lockdown. Those rules included requiring customers to wear facial masks and limiting the number of people allowed to enter the store at any one time. Indeed, the moment the stores reopened last Monday, shoppers converged, seemingly desperate to leave their home.
“The French retain their pleasure in going into a store, browsing, touching,” Thomet says. “Good stores are like showrooms in France.” But even so, many are still likely making purchases online. “Afterward, many of them take time discussing with their family and maybe then they order it on the Internet,” she says.
But then a new question: From which website will they buy?
Thomet says they will need to work hard to cling to the business they have gained. “It is too early to see if we will keep the clients we got from Amazon,” she says. “But why not?”
There are clear reasons, as customers in France soon discovered—and as Thomet herself says, “we see that people want to get things immediately.”
Beyond Amazon, that is difficult in France. Delivery during the lockdown was already slowed down, with La Poste, France’s postal service, offering only three deliveries per week, rather than daily.
In a country where people were accustomed to waiting for service, Amazon introduced same-day delivery in 2016 and owns the French delivery company Colis Privé. With Amazon gone the past month, those of us shopping in France were left hunting on sites we had barely ever used.
When my rice cooker broke midway through the lockdown, I bought a new one on Cdiscount; it took several days to arrive. I found three Hunter x Hunter manga comic books—a request from my child’s friend for his birthday—on FNAC’s site. Two arrived a few days after my purchase; the third was left at a nearby drop-off center.
Many consumers might well be as relieved as Amazon execs that the company’s warehouses in France have reopened. Duval, Amazon’s CEO in France, said the reopening would be staggered over three weeks, allowing enough time for workers to be trained in new health-safety measures.
“We think of this as a victory,” says Stephane Enjalran, national secretary for the Solidaire union, which led the lawsuit against Amazon. He said that under the union agreement, an independent expert would examine Amazon’s six warehouses for two weeks to make sure they were COVID-19 safe.
Yet after weeks of legal battles with the company, Enjalran has decided to abandon his Amazon shopping habit. “I will find another way,” he says. “It will be difficult, of course.”
On Tuesday, he discovered just how difficult life without Amazon might be. Just as Amazon workers began returning to work, Enjalran—who is also a part-time high school philosophy teacher—went online to try to find a textbook he needed.
He could have bought it with one click on Amazon’s Kindle site, he says. But he stopped himself. “I looked everywhere,” he says. “FNAC did not have it.” Finally he found a PDF of the book, which was in the public domain. “For me, Amazon is finished.”
The same can probably not be said for millions of French shoppers.
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