Competition and Saturation in West European Grocery Retailing

Abstract

The international (and, increasingly, global) nature of grocery retailing is promoting the need to consider developments across numerous markets in order to understand fully any given country's market characteristics. However, compared with the breadth of research on various aspects of UK grocery retailing, there is a relative paucity of work across the same range of topics and scales in European contexts (broad national-level comparisons excepted). The paper therefore extends work on UK retail change, assessing the extent of corresponding or diverging development trajectories elsewhere in Europe. Key indicators are used to map spatial variations in competition, saturation, and internationalization at a subnational scale. Inferences are made regarding likely patterns of future development through the identification of growth opportunities that may be exploited by organic expansion or merger-and-acquisition activity. Some speculative merger-and-acquisition scenarios are also considered, which suggest the validity of regulatory concerns over local competition and spatial monopoly.