France: Francs Before Fondles

French shoppers are inveterate food feelers—they pinch tomatoes, squeeze head lettuce, pull artichoke leaves, even give cheese a little poke before stashing it in their shopping sacks. Michel Turquet, 46, a former supermarket manager with a technocratic bent, hopes to change all that. If he gets his way, francs will come before fondles.

Turquet owns Super-Marché de Poche, Paris' first computerized grocery store, which in the space-starved city sells 1,700 articles in its 240-sq.-ft. display area. A customer is given a plastic envelope and directed to the shelf space, which bears one sample of each product, plus a pile of punch cards. As he shops, he selects white cards for spices, blue for canned goods, red for dairy products, and so on. Finally he gives the cards to an operator who feeds them to a computer; in seconds the machine spews out a list of the items, prices and a total. Minutes later, a clerk appears from the stock room with the order. So rationally arranged is the selection that a list of 50 or more goods takes only a few minutes. And with only three assistants, Turquet can handle 30 people at a time during rush hours without creating bottlenecks.

While unfamiliar to Americans, computerized shopping is not completely new in Europe. It has been tried without notable success by smallish markets in Normandy and Sweden, and at least one big Swedish food chain has rejected electronic shopping. "Our customers wouldn't enjoy running around collecting cards instead of merchandise," says Paul Brundin of Gothenburg's Turitz & Co. "Shopping should be fun."

After a month of operation, Turquet believes that his pristine store, where the whir of a Bull-GE TAS-84 computer has replaced the clang of pushcarts and the monotony of canned music, is a going concern. His profit margin is 15%, his stock turns over every two weeks, and, says he, "the 2% other supermarkets have to deduct in theft losses ev ery month pays my rental fee for the computer."