Waves of traffic are heading out from Taipei toward the suburbs, toward the open expanses in the riverbed area of Neihu. Once the cars pass the Minchuan or the Second Macarthur Bridge, the landscape becomes dotted with the large signs of major retailers. These include Costco, the third largest superstore retailer in the United States; B&Q, the largest do-it-yourself hardware chain in Britain; and Taiwan's own RT-Mart.
Shopping at these large stores has quickly become a part of leisure-time life in Taiwan.
A Mrs. Chao, who lives in Neihu, explains that on weekends or vacation days the whole family sleeps late. Once they are up, if there's nothing special on the agenda, they go to B&Q to look at stuff for the home. Then when they get tired, they go to Costco for some Pizza or muffins. Finally, they end up in RT-Mart, where they buy groceries. The whole trip takes about half the day.
She had thought that these stores were only crowded on the weekends, but on a rainy weekday in November she decided she didn't feel like cooking and went to buy some prepared foods at the RT-Mart's deli department. She discovered that there wasn't a single open parking space among the hundreds on the first and second floors of the parking structure. She was quite surprised to find that business was so good on a weekday.
"Shopping at one of these superstores is a lot like shopping at a department store," says a Mr. Ko, who works as an engineer for a chemical company in Kaohsiung. "You go when you're bored." Ko has discovered that as more and more of these stores have opened in Kaohsiung, he and his wife go to department stores less, because in department stores you can only buy clothes, but in superstores you can buy daily necessities, hardware and so forth, and the selection is better.
Shocking the world
The performance of these large retailers in Taiwan has been startling, and superstore chains from Holland, France, the United States and Britain have been arriving on these shores one after another. A hundred-some foreign stores do NT$110 billion in business a year. According to the Ministry of Finance's Office of Statistics, business in the first quarter of 2000 for these stores was up 19.54% over the same quarter the previous year, a higher rate of growth than for convenience stores, supermarkets or department stores.
Since the Dutch firm Makro opened its first Taiwan store in Taoyuan in 1989, superstores have enjoyed tremendous growth. The French retailer Carrefour followed Makro's lead, opening a store in 1989. Costco from the United States began planning its first Taiwan store in 1995, and the French wholesale outlet Casino arrived in 1999. A year earlier, the Ruentex group, which owns RT-Mart, bought out two Taiwanese competitors and increased its number of stores to 16. That same year, 1998, Tesco from Britain began to look for sites. After nearly three years of preparation, in December 2000 they finally opened their first Taiwan store in Taoyuan.
No one had expected that European superstores would be the first to establish a foothold in Taiwan, which had long taken its cues from the American market. Allen Tien, the head of Carrefour's public affairs division in Taiwan, relates that Wal
