The history of supermarket purchases and mergers in the last forty years is something similar to a soap opera and sometimes a character script is necessary to avoid getting lost among so many names.
If many in their childhood went to buy at Pryca and Galerías Preciados, now the hordes of citizens eager for food and bazaars do so in brands like Carrefour, Alcampo and Lidl.
In this interesting game of chairs there has been everything: real family sagashostile takeovers and even stories of love and hate, and also, interested name changes to tie the clientele closer.
The latter is the case of a famous supermarket whose name today seems very normal. Thus, if the oldest in the country remember when they were going to buy Pryca, many are unaware that that was the seed Big’s Carrefour that today surround the big cities.
Back with Pryca
In reality, the Pryca hypermarket chain was managed by the French group Carrefour. Your name it was an acronym of the then attractive and little exploited words of Price and Quality.
This discreet company declared bankruptcy and was liquidated in 1968, going completely unnoticed by the Spanish population at that time. A few years later, a French group of which Carrefour was a part, Hypermarket Promoterand the Simago warehouse company (of the March group) promoted the Pryca brand.
Carrefour landed in Spain at the beginning of the seventies under this same name (Carrefour, crossing, intersection of streets in French), a name that did not quite convince the company’s management because sound too gallicas explained by the brand promoter Ferdinand of Cordoba to the Being Chain.
According to what he says, the Carrefour brand disappeared from Spain for a couple of decades, until the 2000s. was resumed as a global brand of the supermarket company.
Rebaptize yourself
If you review history in detail, in the eighties, the French company decided to leave aside the Carrefour name and rename its supermarkets Pryca and Continente. In the 90’s, Pryca had more than a hundred stores in all Spain.
Finally, in 1999 the Carrefour group merged with the French group that owned Continente and all the supermarkets of the new resulting group became be called Carrefourexcept for some Pryca that had to be sold to avoid a high concentration of supermarkets by the group.
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This is how, apparently, Pryca disappeared from the public sphere of Spanish society, although in reality it is still more present than ever, judging by the great presence of the Carrefour group in Spain, a name that the vast majority pronounce with a Spanish sound although it really has to be coined as something like carfur.
Photos | Carrefour.
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