American stores that make no sense to a Frenchman

Home Depot — the hardware store as a country

The first one is always the worst. A French hardware shop is a shop: you go in, you ask a man for a thing, he finds the thing. Home Depot is a warehouse with a ceiling you cannot see, forklifts operating during trading hours, and lumber sold by the trolley-load. His complaint was not the size but the self-service — the idea that you are expected to locate, evaluate and transport a sheet of plywood without speaking to anyone. Bricomarché is the nearest French thing, and it is roughly the garden section.

Five Below — a shop with a price instead of a category

Everything is under a set price, which means the shop has no subject. Sweets, headphones, cushions, slime, a beach towel, a phone charger, more slime. He described it as being inside an advertisement. The French reaction is usually to the organising principle: a shop is meant to be defined by what it sells, not by what it costs. Action and Normal have arrived in France with something similar, at about a quarter of the volume and a third of the noise.

Dollar Tree — the same idea, lower

Once you have accepted a shop organised by price, the only remaining question is how low. Americans do not find this remarkable, which is the interesting part. He does not object to it morally — the objection is that he cannot work out what he is supposed to want.

Buc-ee’s — the one that broke him

The world’s largest convenience store is in Luling, Texas, covering 75,593 square feet with 120 fuel pumps, open every hour of every day of the year. A normal American convenience store is around 2,500 to 6,500 square feet. So this is not a big petrol station; it is a different category of building that happens to sell petrol. There is brisket. There is fudge. There is a great deal of merchandise featuring a beaver. In France a motorway stop sells sandwiches and coffee and you leave. This is a destination, and people plan around it.

Spirit Halloween — a shop that is not there most of the year

It appears in an empty retail unit in September, sells nothing but Halloween, and is gone by November. The French have no equivalent because the underlying condition does not exist: Halloween never took hold in France, so there is no season to build a shop around. He understood the business model immediately and found the vacancy it relies on more interesting than the costumes.

What all of these have in common

Land, cars and Sunday. American retail assumes cheap space, a customer who arrives by car with a boot to fill, and a week with seven trading days. Change any one of those and the format stops working. French shops are small because the streets are old and the rent is dear, you carry what you buy, and everything shuts on Sunday — so you shop more often, closer to home, in smaller quantities. Neither is a preference. Both are consequences.

The part he will not concede

That any of it is more convenient. His position is that a shop containing everything takes longer than four shops containing one thing each, once you count the parking, the walking and the deciding. I have timed this. He is sometimes right, which is the most annoying possible outcome.

No French equivalent

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it once a month.