Traffic is said to be 30% cheaper: Benjamin Maréchal explains how the Belgian group competes with Action!
Red prices at Colruyt, own brands in textiles and very good value lots. Trafic seems discreet but from its HQ in Charleroi the group has a few tricks to knock out its opponents.
Published on 08/27/2024 at 5:30 p.m.
To put it simply, hard discounters have only three obsessions: price, price and differentiation. Trafic has understood this well. At the entrance to its 90 stores, you first cross a textile area. “And our competitors don’t have that,” proudly explains Erik de Batselier, the group’s marketing director. “We want to offer a pleasure purchase.” Our eyes are drawn to red labels. “We regularly take price surveys at competitors and we align ourselves.”
Did you know that Trafic offers its own clothing brand: Matt. The risk with a hard discounter is quality. We ask the manager if his T-shirts shrink after the first machine due to a lack of sufficient fabric. “No, generally the big brands produce 100 or 200,000 T-shirts and the factory has enough left to produce 5,000. We recover these reels of fabric and we manufacture clothes with our own brand. Everything is designed in Charleroi. Another method is batch purchases. For example, we have just bought 27,000 items of lingerie in Switzerland and we are going to sell them 70% cheaper.”
Change of scenery, we are in Héppignies behind Charleroi airport. In my memory, we have rarely seen such a large building for a Belgian group. “Our warehouse is the size of ten football pitches,” says Erik de Batselier. In front of us, a few pallets of flowers, a dozen or so crates of laundry soaps, in short, a succession of small batches. “Today, Action’s size has become an asset for groups like ours. Batches of soaps of a few tens of thousands of pieces no longer interest them. It’s not enough for them. We, on the other hand, can afford it.”
Conversely, Action, given its size, can order directly from suppliers online and can therefore impose its prices. A famous asset in the world of hard discount. “Trafic is Belgian, was born in Belgium, our decision-making center is in Belgium but we now belong in part to the French group Gifi. We are agile, we buy lots here and there and when things get stuck we can count on Gifi’s firepower to play on volumes and prices.”
