My main concern came after noticing on the NSI that many companies have 2 different brands: one for supermarkets and one for hypermarkets. However, they are both tagged shop=supermarket, because a tag for hypermarkets simply doesn’t exist.
I know this might sound rare for Americans, as even a supermarket is huge there, but please stay open-minded and keep in mind that this is not always the case in other countries.
Please discuss here, or if not on the Wiki talk page.
Currently, a tag doesn’t exist for hypermarkets. This leads to confusion and inconsistency, where a user will tag a hypermarket with either shop=supermarket or shop=department_store. However, the three definitions are very different (see below).
I am not a native speaker, but I have not really heard about term “hypermarket” or seen it in real use, so having it as a separate shop type would also bring confusion.
For example, when a user tries to add a Carrefour (the hypermarket brand of Carrefour Group, different from Carrefour Market, see their “Our Formats” webpage), they’ll get a warning from the NSI saying “This looks like a common feature”, and if they don’t know much about the different brands, they’ll just accept the warning, leading to:
A wrong name (Carrefour Market instead of Carrefour)
A wrong brand (Carrefour Market instead of Carrefour)
(What I think is) a wrong shop (supermarket instead of hypermarket — the subject of this proposal)
That is why I think the NSI plays a (very) important role in this.
You’re Polish right? I took a look at List of retail chains in Poland, and even that page separates supermarkets and hypermarkets. These are listed as Kaufland, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, Auchan and bi1. I’m guessing the word isn’t common in Poland.
Yes, currently NSI pushes to use rather shop=supermarket
But
Most hypermarket chains (like mentioned in the previous part) are tagged shop=supermarket due to them being tagged as such on the NSI.
claim is at best incomplete as this tagging is predating NSI, and “due to them being tagged as such on the NSI” claims that NSI is cause/leading reason.
While it predates NSI. You can see how many shop=hypermarkets were present when NSI was invented.
I asked on non-OSM forum with plenty of native speakers of English and they reported that they encountered it only in quasi-technical use, not in normal language.
Not at all. Hypermarkets are commonplace in America and the idea of a dedicated hypermarket tag has come up previously in the U.S. forum and many times in OSMUS Slack over the years. Most consumers only refer to the broader category of “big-box stores”, which can include other kinds of stores that have nothing to do with groceries. But the industry jargon “hypermarket” isn’t totally unknown in the U.S. For example, this defunct chain used to use “Hypermarket” as its strapline=*:
I suspect awareness of the term is slightly lower toward the coasts, where grocery stores of all kinds tend to be somewhat smaller and there’s less familiarity with the likes of Walmart Supercenter.
The proposal links to a talk page where a number of Americans acknowledged that this is a real phenomenon. The only debate at the time was whether shop=department_store is good enough, but NSI has sided with the shop=supermarket faction for these stores.
I would say ‘hypermarket’ is also common in UK English, used to differentiate standard supermarkets from huge multi floor out of town supermarkets. For example Tesco Superstore would be a supermarket, and Tesco Extra would be a hypermarket, differentiated by the size and amount of services offered - but aside from some brands that explicitly differentiate between their different store types, it may not be possible to categorise what is a supermarket and what is a hypermarket, unless you come up with a set of criteria that defines one.
Many people from the UK are familiar with things called hypermarkets from shopping in France. It isn’t really a format that’s common in the UK, although we do have some “quite large supermarkets”.
I certainly struggled for decent supermarkets when I was working in San Jose / Milpitas (a few years ago now - maybe that situation has changed). My first thought for a “hypermarket” in the US was the Sam’s Club in Sacramento that I went around once. That might be here, but looking at that it’s only about the size of the “big Tesco” linked above.
Trying to pick a random Carrefour, I found this. Again, it’s about the same size at the others, but does have a supermarket=hypermarket tag, which might be useful.
(a detour around Sam’s Club and other shop tags)
Agreed to both - that Sam’s Club sells a lot more than just groceries and is tagged as shop=wholesale. I can sort-of see why (you need to be a member to shop there) but “membership” just involves them vetting your $50/year or whatever. Go Outdoors in the UK (a slightly smaller shop this time, but not much!) have a similar scheme. They nominally do sell to non-members but the “non-discounted” price usually makes “membership” cost-effective.
Here in Lithuania the Rimi chain of stores uses the Hyper (apparently it previously was Hypermarket) suffix for their biggest store format (as in Rimi Hyper)
Also I just did some searching and they also have stores with the same Hyper suffix in other Baltic countries (which are Latvia and Estonia)
Agree strongly with this, I would say a hypermarket is a form of supermarket, not a totally separate thing. If we want to differentiate in OSM, I would vote for a subtag like this rather than a totally new shop= value. But we’d still need a set of criteria to define a hypermarket, as not all brands have different sub-brands for their large and very large supermarkets. For example, Sainsbury’s doesn’t differentiate their supermarkets, but I think the UK’s largest in Crayford, with two floors, could still be classed as a hypermarket.
Additionally we should try to avoid it being subjective so that we don’t end up with global differences or bias towards what brands/shops get tagged as hypermarket. Just because it’s called ‘Hyper…’, doesn’t mean it is, the same way you can have a convenience store that calls itself a supermarket.
Sam’s Club is a wholesale club. I think it’s appropriate to distinguish wholesale clubs as shop=wholesale, because at least in theory they only sell in bulk. When I said “nothing to do with groceries”, I meant something like a Menard’s or Home Depot that we’d tag as shop=doityourself – those are big-box stores too.
The San Francisco Bay Area isn’t representative of the U.S. Big-box stores here (even IKEA) tend to be smaller due to space constraints. Hypermarkets are more common and more obvious in regions like the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, where chains like Meijer and Fred Meyer specialize in stores whose footprints are measured in that most American of area unit, the football field.
Elsewhere, Americans would be familiar with the hypermarkets operated by national discount store chains. They used to separately brand their hypermarket formats, such as SuperTarget and Walmart Supercenter, but in recent years they’ve dropped this branding as they’ve largely replaced their smaller stores with hypermarkets.
My experience of hypermarkets is in France.
They are synonymous with a mall imho. I was in the Auchan one at Boulogne Sur Mer buying wine and being frustrated that we couldn’t buy meat or cheese.
Should have took photos just in case.
This and others I have visited consist of a supermarket with an entrance mall which have a number of independent shops and cafes.
I wouldn’t call a hypermarket a shop, anymore than a mall is actually a shop. Both are collections of shops, a hypermarket is a collection of shops around a supermarket.
I would also prefer this, as it allows for smooth transition/introduction. Well, if the wikipedia definition is correct, and these are both, a supermarket and a department store, it could on the other hand be questioned, so I am in two minds about it.
OSMers will tell you that shop=wine and shop=alcohol should be separate, and so should shop=flooring and shop=tiles, but a hypermarket and a supermarket are definitely just the same thing
Hypermarkets are a hybrid category, combining elements of supermarkets, department stores, and malls but not quite being typical of any of these categories. The debate has historically been whether there’s enough difference from any of these categories to warrant a separate shop=* value. Any time we have a two- or three-way tie, we’re setting ourselves up for inconsistent tagging. The only reason we don’t see so much inconsistent tagging of hypermarkets anymore is that NSI picked a tag at some point.
Fortunately, data consumers are relatively flexible with shop=*, unlike say amenity=* or man_made=*. Retagging a hypermarket as shop=hypermarket wouldn’t cause it to totally lose all data consumer support overnight. Some applications might treat it more generically for a while, but given the prominence of hypermarket chains, we could probably expect most applications to update in due time.
