These are ghost stores that ensure the proper functioning of home food shopping deliveries. Supermarkets without customers, which see delivery people from the Getir, Frichti or Gorillas platforms parade at any time of the day and night. These «dark stores» could soon be considered as retail businesses, which is not currently the case. A text from the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion plans, in fact, to allow them quite easily to change status. This measure greatly displeases the mayor of Paris, hostile to the unbridled development of these stores without storefronts, and which does everything to limit their expansion.
Very fashionable since the health crisis, the «dark stores», but also the «dark kitchen», the equivalent of restaurants without a room, are accused by the town hall of Paris of threatening the local trade, by slipping in the head people the following question: why go down to do your shopping when someone can take care of bringing it to you? Thus, delivery companies have taken over many empty commercial premises to store their food. The Parisian urban planning workshop lists the presence of more than 80 warehouses of this type in Paris and its inner suburbs. Several brands have even set up in the basements of buildings – although the local urban plan forbids them because of the noise pollution they emit – or have taken over commercial premises without making a request for a change of use. .
To cope with this expansion, the Paris municipality sent inspectors to ensure the legal compliance of warehouses and did not hesitate to sanction some with fines. But the ministerial decree could open a way of salvation for the platforms. Indeed, the text explains that can be considered as trade «any permanent point of withdrawal of purchases ordered by telematics». In other words, it would be enough for companies to install a withdrawal counter at the entrance to their warehouses for it to become a business.
First deputy mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire took offense, Saturday August 13 on Twitter, to the content of the decree. He nevertheless told AFP that he was hopeful that the government would block the measure. And if this is not the case, it does not exclude a legal action. For his part, the Minister for the Ecological Transition confirmed that a draft decree and another decree were «being drawn up», and that they would try to «better regulate the development of dark stores and dark kitchen». In the meantime, the latter continue to extend their web.