A union of independent supermarket owners demands that the new president protect their rights against bigger retail stores. “Large conglomerates are sweeping up the businesses in the alleyways, by selling stuff like batteries, tissues and potato chips.” Kang argued that there is no way local businesses can compete with the cheaper prices offered by the large chaebol stores. “We at the local village supermarkets are living every day as a fierce battle for survival,” said Kang Gap-bong, the head of the KSCA, a nationwide union of 52 local, independent supermarkets. Since the 2000s, more chaebols have shifted attention from manufacturing to the service sector, forming new subsidiaries every year to “infiltrate the alleyways,” as the process of their expansion into the retail industry is often called. The biggest players in the retail business - like E-mart and GS25 - are owned by different chaebols, or family-owned conglomerates.Īccording to the Korea Supermarket Cooperative Association (KSCA), for every large-scale supermarket that opens, an average of 22 small supermarkets have disappeared between 20. Hence, the beginning of shopping at massive (and massively convenient) chain grocery stores.īut the country’s lax regulations on chaebol expansion also plays an important role in cultivating the age of E-mart. Now, shopping has changed into a family activity at large-scale discount stores.”Īccording to Lee, around the time the country’s first E-mart opened in Seoul, net income for ordinary consumers was on the rise, which meant there was a larger domestic market for spending. “In the past, a housewife would go to a marketplace and fill up her bags. “The meaning of ‘shopping’ started to change in the `90s,” said Lee Im-ha, the author of Reading Modern Korean History Through Culture. More than twenty years after that first E-mart opened in Seoul, there are now over 500 large-scale discount supermarkets, over 10,000 SSMs (super supermarkets, generally smaller than the really large stores) and around 30,000 convenience stores in South Korea. (Source: Shinsegae Corporation, which owns the discount store) A promotional video of E-mart’s first opening in 1993.
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