Pourquoi Delhaize ?

L'enseigne Delhaize (inconnue chez moi) était t'elle la seule présente dans la région, au moment des faits, avec Colruyt ?
Existait t'il par exemple des Leclerc, Auchan, ou Carrefour (si on peut comparer) ?

Bonjour Jack,

L'enseigne Delhaize n'était pas seule présente dans notre pays (et région).
Colruyt étaient aussi bien présent.
Il existait d'autres grandes surfaces. Sarma, Unic, Macro...
Par exemple GB (devenu Carrefour) comptaient aussi grand nombre de magasins sur tout le pays.
Il y a eu un hold up dans un GB à Houdeng-Goegnies (Hainaut) le 07.05.1983. Deux hommes masqués et avec des fausses barbes ont attaqué le magasin. Sur la table dans le bureau du directeur se trouvait 7.000.000 de FB. Les gangsters n'ont emporté que 865.000 FB;
Leur voiture est retrouvé près de l'autoroute Mons-Bruxelles. Peu de personnes pensent qu'il s'agissait des TBW. Le modus operandi était différent etc. On n'en a plus parlé après et je ne sais pas d'ailleurs si on a trouvé les gangsters qui ont commis les faits.
J'ai toujours trouvé fort étrange qu'il n'y avait que Delhaize et Colruyt visé comme supermarchés.

Delhaize était probablement la firme la mieux implantée à l'époque. Ses supermarchés étaient aussi fort proches des autoroutes.

La thèse du racket sur cette firme est séduisante pour la période 1985. La comptabilité de la firme a été vérifiée par les enquêteurs sans résultats. Mais peut-on vérifier totalement la comptabilité énorme de ce géant de la distribution (avec ses filiales américaines)?

L'expansion de Delhaize s'orient vers les Etats Unis en 1975, sa filiale Food Town Stones exploite alors 22 magasins.
1983: Food Town Stones est rebaptisé Food Lion, et en moins de 10 ans la filiale passe de 22 à 226 supermarchés.
1985: Delhaize ouvre à Atlanta un magasin ouvert 24h/24 et 7j/7, avec une gamme de 35000 produits à des prix très compétitifs...

L'expansion rapide de Delhaize a t'elle pu rendre jaloux certains concurrents ? un petit pays comme la Belgique bâtissant un empire en Amérique n'était pas du goût de tout le monde, à mon avis.

Quelle a été la réaction de la clientèle dans la période qui a suivi les attaques de 1985 ?
Les clients ont t'ils boycotté l'enseigne Delhaize ?

Il y a eu une perte de clients sur un temps assez limité pour cette enseigne. Ce ne fut pas très significatif et n'a pas eu d'impact positif pour les autres supermarchés.

A titre personnel, cela n'a pas empêché ma famille de continuer à fréquenter les Delhaize surveillés par la police.

michel a écrit:

Delhaize était probablement la firme la mieux implantée à l'époque. Ses supermarchés étaient aussi fort proches des autoroutes.

La thèse du racket sur cette firme est séduisante pour la période 1985. La comptabilité de la firme a été vérifiée par les enquêteurs sans résultats. Mais peut-on vérifier totalement la comptabilité énorme de ce géant de la distribution (avec ses filiales américaines)?

Je ne pensais pas au racket, mais plutôt à une déstabilisation du groupe Delhaize, en s'en prenant directement à ses clients.
Mais je vois que ça n'a pas marché, les Belges sont courageux..
Il faut donc chercher ailleurs.

Il ne faut pas voir dans les dehaizes un lien particulier. Simplement cette chaine de supermarché avait des points de ventes pas trop grand, pas trop petit et assez nombreux dans la région. Une épicerie de quartier était trop petite, un GB trop grand, que reste il ? Les delhaizes ou éventuellement les Colruyt ! (heuuu... je ne sais plus très bien l'orthographe).

Regardez les autres supermarchés dans la région (ou je réside), il n'y a pas grand chose d'autre...

Par contre, les autres points comme les trois canards, l'auberge et son concierge sont peut être plus interessant.

Pourquoi un GB serait-il trop grand? Il existait aussi des GB de petite taille. Il est vrai que les Delhaize étaient fort nombreux à l'époque.

Pour une simple raison tactique. Il est beaucoup plus facile de surveiller l'ensemble d'un petit objectif qu'un grand ! Imaginez vous ce genre d'attaque au GB (devenu carrefour) à Waterloo ? Ils ne savaient pas surveiller les entrées et les sorties. Regardez chaque Delhaize qui furent victimes des TBW, ils pouvaient être facilement contrôlés intégralement.

Dans le secteur visé par le TBW, ou y avaient ils des petits GB ? Seul les Delhaizes avaient ce genre de taille. Du monde, assez grand mais avec la possibilité de controle.

Je pense en effet que les petits GB se trouvent plus dans les centre-villes. En tous cas, en ce qui concerne ceux qui existent actuellement et qui ont gardé le nom GB.

Il est possible aussi que les tueurs aient attaqué des Delhaize pour laisser croire à un racket sur cette firme.

Non, à mon très humble avis, ils ne pensaient certainement pas à cacher quoi que soit, les Delhaizes convenaient très bien à leur objectif. Aussi simple ! (Horriblement simple)

Regardez l'affaire de la Pastorale. Nous voyons quoi ? Deux "malades" d'une association néo-nazie dont le chef explique qu'is doivent surveiller un couple de dangereux espions, de simple personne absolument pas "espions" ! Cela se termine comment ? Ils les massacrent !!!

La piste du chantage me semble peu probable pour une raison simple, c'est qu'elle se pratique différemment.

Il arrive regulierement que se genre de firme soit menacée mais la methode est tout autre que l'assassinat de sang froid.

Mais ce n'est que mon avis

Le syndicat UFCW, affilié à l'AFL-CIO dont les liens avec la mafia ont été

prouvés, a mené une véritable guerre contre Food Lion, depuis les

origines... voici un exemple de ses méthodes :


The Washington Times



February 7, 1994

The war against Food Lion, Phase II


Edition: 2
Section: A

COMMENTARY

EDITORIALS
Page: A



Article Text:

The death struggle between the Food Lion supermarket chain and the grocery store unions goes on, as labor does its best to destroy a business that it wasn't able to unionize. As part of its strategy to ruin Food Lion, the unions handed a trumped-up story of unsafe food-handling to the ABC news show "PrimeTime Live." Diane Sawyer and her producers worked hand-in-hand with the union, and then did their best to pretend that it had little or no role in the broadcast. The story, which was p resented as "investigative" journalism, hit Food Lion hard - so hard that the chain is closing 88 stores this year. More than 1,300 full-time workers will lose their jobs and 2,200 part-time employees will have to look for work. The union's strategy is working, and now that it has Food Lion on the ropes, it is trying to throw a knock-out punch, this time by alleging that the store sells unsafe baby formula.

That's hardball. It's one thing to plant a story! that a grocery store is selling old fish the stench of which has been removed with Clorox, but another thing altogether to say that there is bad baby food on the shelves.

This charge is part of an official "corporate campaign" launched by the United Food and Commercial Workers International and other food service unions against Food Lion. With a corporate campaign, as union literature brashly explains, labor can put recalcitrant food stores out of business by leaking safety and health charges to the media. The UFCW launched its corporate campaign after failing repeatedly to convince Food Lion workers they would be better off in the union. That failure did not mean solely a loss in union dues; it was a direct threat to the inflated union wages and diseconomic work rules that the UFCW has wheedled out of other grocery chains, such as Safeway and Giant. Because of cheaper, more efficient workers, Food Lion is able to price its goods cheaper than other chains. In ord! er to compete, those chains must then renegotiate their contracts with the union. In this way, the other grocery stores become accomplices in the union's corporate campaigns against non-union upstarts. When Food Lion announced last year it would begin opening stores in the Washington area, officials at Safeway and Giant made it clear to the UFCW that it would have to do something about the threatened competition. Who said labor and manageme nt can't work together?

For a truly successful corporate campaign, however, the unions can't come out and make charges themselves. It would be obvious to everyone that union complaints about a non-union shop might be a little biased and self-serving. And so it was that a previously unheard of outfit called "Consumers United with Employees" (CUE) went to the Food and Drug Administration last week with its complaint that Food Lion has expired infant formula for sale. This "consumer" organization is of course a front group, run out of the offices of the Food and Allied Services Trades union.

! The CUE "report" - as propaganda is euphemistically referred to in the press these days - was called "A Formula for Disaster" and was full of apocalyptic language. According to the CUE press release, "The study details the shocking results of an investigation concluding that Food Lion . . . has repeatedly sold infant formula beyond its expiration date. Such sales violate both state and federal law." These "shocking" results are actually just a compilation of year's worth of regular state food inspection reports in which Food Lion had the sort of trivial violations that are common in the industry. Though it sounds frightening that baby formula has gone past its due date, the date is there not to indicate when the formula goes "bad" but just a s a limit on the length of time the manufacturer will guarantee its nutritional content. Also note that the CUE did not compile statistics on the number of infant formula violations in union shops, though such a comparison would be! most instructive.

The union front group also did some rudimenta ry investigative work itself, going to Food Lion stores and looking for any past-date baby formula. The group "found that 37.5 percent of the 317 stores visited were selling outdated infant formula." This is a wonderfully misleading statistical backflip. The impression given is that more than a third of the baby food sold by Food Lion has gone bad. All the figure really means is that in a third of the stores the union group "inspected," it was able to find at least one can of formula that had gone at least one date past due and hadn't yet been removed.

Even if that finding is enough to cause concern, given the unions' stake in ruining Food Lion, it's at least worth investigating all the possible ways past-dated formula might have ended up on shelves. For example, it would not be a difficult thing to go into a store, put a can of some time-sensitive product at the back of the shelf - mixed in with the most recent and later-dated shipment. A week later, someone migh! t come back to find that the can was still there, past its due date and an affront to food safety.

The corporate campaign against Food Lion amounts to little more than a large-scale dirty trick. The real story here has nothing to do with infant formula and everything to do with a high-stakes, big-money gambit to kill off competition.

Extrait de http://www.aim.org/publications/special_reports/foodlion.html

Part I: A Union's Revenge

A dirty secret which ABC News did not share with its audience was the origins of the scheme to smear Food Lion. ABC producers wittingly became accomplices of the powerful United Food and Commercial Workers union in a campaign intended to destroy the grocery chain.

Food Lion is an uncomfortable bone in the throat of the UFCW. The company began in 1957 as a single store [Food Town] in Salisbury, N. C., and its low price policy enabled it to grow to 22 stores in 1974, all in North Carolina. It was bought that year by Delhaize, a European supermarket chain, and expanded rapidly under the new name of Food Lion to more than 1,000 stores in 1994, with 65,500 employees and gross annual sales of $8.2 billion. A $1,000 investment in 1957 would have matured into stocks worth $31,200,000 by 1992. The company claims that its prices average 15 percent lower than competitors.

The burgeoning giant was an attractive target for the UFCW, with 1,123,000 members [1979] in food stores, supermarkets and meat packing houses. Under federal law, 30 percent of workers had to

sign cards asking the National Labor Relations Board to hold a representation election. But workers who already earned salaries and benefits equal to or higher than those at unionized stories saw no reason to pay dues to the UFCW. The campaign flopped. The UFCW fell far short of the 30 percent minimum and abandoned its campaign.

The UFCW's embarrassing failure followed a trend distressing to labor barons--the fact that workers no longer consider unions relevant. Membership has declined to less than 15 percent of the work force in 1996 from a peak of 35.4 percent in 1945. Of the 16.4 million workers in unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO, 6.9 million work for local state and federal governments.

Nonetheless, even in defeat the UFCW wanted revenge. With much public fanfare, the UFCW launched what labor people call a "corporate campaign"--to punish Food Lion and its owners because employees refused to unionize. The UFCW's motive was economic. If non-union sentiment spread beyond Food Lion, the union risked losing dues income from workers in other chains. By hurting Food Lion, the UFCW would bolster the market shares of other chains, thereby expanding its own membership.

The UFCW's strategy was not any great secret. William H. Wynn, the UFCW president, told Progressive Grocer magazine in January 1986, "Our goal is simple: to hurt the employer economically."

Another union official, Thomas McNutt, Sr., told Regardie's, a Washington business magazine, in July 1988, that the UFCW intended to "bleed" Food Lion economically "until they either agree to do business with him or are forced out of business." Regardie's quoted McNutt as saying, "If we can't organize them, the best thing to do is to erode their business as much as possible."

Des choses dont on n'a finalement que très peu parlé chez nous...

michel a écrit:

Des choses dont on n'a finalement que très peu parlé chez nous...

Exact, comme du conflit Supervalu Delhaize, qui se résoud miraculeusement en quelques mois.

1) achat par Supervalu de certaines activités de Food Giant,propriété de Delhaize depuis 1980 :

"Super Valu Paid $81.8 Million in Cash MINNEAPOLIS -- Super Valu paid $81.8 million in cash last July to acquire West Coast Grocery Co., Tacoma. The firm also paid $10.4 million in cash last February for certain assets of Southern Supermarket Services, Lafayette, La., and $16.7 million in February 1985, along with the assumption of some liabilities, to buy the assets of the Atlanta distribution center of Food Giant."
(extrait de Supermarket News, juin 1986.

2) perte financière liée à cet achat, dû au non respect de certains engagements par Food Giant :

"In 1985, Super Valu created its Atlanta Division when it acquired the warehouse and distribution facilities of Food Giant. Through this division the company supplied Food Giant, Big Apple, Cub Foods, and independent stores. Food Giant, according to a 1988 Financial World report, "refused to implement Super Valu's turnaround plan for store upgrading," and the retail stores that Super Valu owned through the original transaction and a later acquisition of stock lost money for the company. By 1988 the company had divested itself of these stores, but operated or franchised seven Cub stores in the Atlanta area."
Source : answers.com

3)Fort bizarrement, Delhaize cède 51 % de Food Giant début 1986
à Supervalu :

"Super Valu Buying Food Giant Control

ATLANTA -- Super Valu Stores, Minneapolis, has agreed to buy 51% of the stock of Food Giant -- chain based here that operates 57 stores under the Food Giant, Big Apple and Cub names -- from Delhaize Freres, Belgian firm that has owned the chain since 1980.

At the same time, Food Giant's Cub division has been spun off into a separate corporation and Super Value will acquire 20% of the new, as yet unnamed firm. The closing of the transaction is expected to be April 1. The purchase price was not disclosed."
Supermarket News, mars 1986.

A noter la démission du CEO de Food Giant ainsi que celle de Ralph
Ketner, fondateur historique de Food Town devenu Food Lion en 1983,
et qui est resté en poste jusqu'en février 1986 !

A noter également le contrat "léonin" (mais pas en faveur de Delhaize!)
qui liait Supervalu à Delhaize dans le cadre de leur joint-venture
"Super Discount Market".
Delhaize n'a réussi à s'en débarrasser que fin 2001, soit 15 ans après
l'accord, en vendant certains magasins (Save-a-Lot) à Supervalu et
en déclarant le autres en faillite !

Source : SEC info

Delhaize Group has a 60% ownership interest in Super Discount Markets, a U.S. supermarket company located in the Atlanta market that filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2001. Prior to such date, Delhaize Group, after a strategic review of its operations, had decided to sell the nine Save-a-Lot discount stores and close the 19 Cub Foods supermarkets of Super Discount Markets. Delhaize Group determined that an investment necessary to make Super Discount Markets successful in the highly competitive Atlanta market could not be justified. At the end of 2001, Super Discount Markets did not operate any stores. Super Discount Markets had an agreement with SuperValu Inc., its other shareholder, which required Super Discount Markets to purchase a minimum amount of its general store inventory on an annual basis from SuperValu Inc. through February 2005. Inventory purchases under the supply agreement with SuperValu Inc. were approximately EUR 114.5 million, EUR 152.8 million and EUR 133.9 million in 2001, 2000 and 1999, respectively. Additionally, Super Discount Markets also paid franchise fees to Super Valu Inc. These fees were approximately EUR 0.1 million, EUR 0.4 million and EUR 0.4 million in 2001, 2000 and 1999, respectively.

Cela ne semble pas expliquer quelques assassinats ?
Faut il étudier séparément les différentes affaires que certains veulent absolument relier ?

Merci ella pour cette longue et bonne traduction.