ALKHOBAR/RIYADH, 8 April 2005 — Traffic jams, 45-minute checkout queues and a mad shopping frenzy marked the opening on Wednesday of Geant, the French hyper store at the Dhahran Mall.
The opening ceremony was led by a child customer and was held in the presence of an estimated 70,000 shoppers and senior Geant executives including Fawaz Abdulaziz Al-Hokair, owner of the Riyadh-based Geant Saudi Ltd.
Mohammed Adil, Geant’s chief executive officer, said that the Geant in Alkhobar is the largest in the Middle East covering an area of some 250,000 square meters. “It is a part of the French retailing giant Groupe Casino; which is designed to provide an entirely new shopping experience for people of the Eastern Province,” said Adil. He said that Geant stocks and sells thousands of products ranging from groceries, bakery, textiles, fashion goods, shoes, electronic items, sports goods, household accessories, cosmetics and much more.”
He said that “Geant’s entry in the Eastern Province is a very exciting time for us and we believe that by situating ourselves at Dhahran Mall we give consumers the added convenience of a one stop shopping destination. This hypermarket incorporates a very high standard of display and merchandising and is today a leader in the market in aesthetically designed hypermarkets”, Adil claimed. “It has raised the bar and set new retailing standards in the industry”, said the Geant CEO, while expressing regrets that “Geant management could not accommodate more visitors to the store on the opening day”.
Spelling out the features of this hyper store, he said that “the Geant store will be best shopping destination in the Eastern Province with hundreds of thousands of items on its shelves”. He said that “the company’s strategy is to provide a huge range of quality products to customers on best prices”.
As thousands of customers flocked to the newest hypermarket, the patient ones were rewarded with good opening day bargains. Television, computers, toys and most grocery items were priced 30 percent to 50 percent lower. “The prices are great no doubt, but I don’t have the patience to stand at a checkout queue for almost an hour, so I am leaving with nothing.”
A female shopper who had two shopping carts overflowing with items ranging from diapers to potatoes said, “It was worth the hassle because I saved a lot of money today. I spent almost four hours in the store.”
Outside Geant there were some tiffs and argument going on between impatient drivers. Parking was a nightmare and some careless drivers added to the problem by not parking straight and occupying two spaces instead of one. The age of innocence it seems will be lost for the small, sleepy town of Alkhobar. But the consumers are not complaining. They are hoping to be once treated like customers with respect and right prices.e
The super store in Alkhobar is the second Geant hypermarket out of the four planned in the first phase of expansion in the Kingdom, starting with Riyadh. Geant has plans to open similar hypermarkets in every city of Saudi Arabia under a five-year mega project launched by the company in partnership with the French Groupe Casino.
