The French department sector was hit hard by the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice, as they are so dependent on their flagship Paris stores, which in turn are heavily reliant on tourists. Both the big players, Galeries Lafayette and Printemps saw significant declines in 2016 turnover as a result. On the plus side, the opening up of Sunday trading to stores in designated “tourist zones” has provided a significant boost to the leading players, and all reported a bounce-back in 2017. As always, this sector is France is characterised by ongoing investment to maintain luxury position, in the capital at least, and all the Parisian flagships have seen ambitious new concepts and high profile launches over the last 18 months. All players lag behind online, and have looked to acquisitions to increase scale. The biggest of these was Galeries Lafayette’s acquisition of home and fashion retail brand, La Redoute, in September 2017.

This report covers the department store sector in France, including market sizes, retailers’ sales and forecasts, along with our in-depth consumer data, which analyses shoppers’ behaviour and attitudes.

There is no hard and fast definition for a department store. But, we would expect stores to typically trade from a minimum of 1,000 sq m and stock at least half a dozen different broad product categories, with any single category unlikely to account for more than two-thirds of turnover, and usually significantly less than this.

As a minimum, all department stores covered in this report sell adult and children’s apparel, lingerie, fashion accessories, footwear, beauty products and some homewares. Larger full-line stores have a much wider product assortment.

Some department stores have food halls, and these are typically upscale and geared towards fine foods and delicatessen, and so are differentiated from the everyday supermarket.

The offer usually covers a mix of concessions and own-bought ranges, increasingly with a private label element within the own-bought assortment.

National statistics offices do not collate data on the department store sector. Around Europe, department stores are typically included within the broader Mixed Goods Retailers sector. This is something of a catch-all sector covering not only large-space department stores, but variety stores, non-food discount stores and a whole host of other retailers that do not specialise in any one particular non-food product category.

For our consumer research this year we asked respondents questions on the following topics:

• Which department stores they had shopped at

• Responses to a variety of attitudinal statements about department stores.