An upmarket chain of delicatessens and supermarkets, Piotr i Pawel, has disappeared in Poland three decades after it was founded. The last of its stores has now been rebranded under the logo of their new owner, Spar.
The firm was founded in 1990, shortly after the collapse of communism, by Eleonora Woś and her two sons, Piotr (Peter) and Paweł (Paul). Its first grocery store opened on Głogowska street in the western Polish city of Poznań (whose patron saints are also St Peter and St Paul).
A second outlet soon opened in Stare Zegrze in the same city and quickly grew popular due to its assortments of imported goods from Germany. By 2011 the chain was opening ten new shops every year, and it reached 148 outlets across Poland in 2019, reported Polityka at the time.
However, its model – with stores being something between a deli and a supermarket – proved too costly to maintain, especially as more international chains entered the Polish market. Poles have also increasingly been turning to discount and convenience stores, pushing out other supermarket chains such as Tesco.
“The average discount store employs 14 people, a supermarket with separate stands with fresh meat, cheese and alcohol must have 22-24 people on a similar surface, and a delicatessen even 30,” said Andrzej Wojciechowicz, former head of Bomi, another Polish deli chain that went bankrupt a few years earlier.
In 2019, most of Piotr i Paweł’s stores were sold to Spar Group, an international grocery conglomerate. TFI Capital Group, which a year earlier had bought the entire business, kept 20%. The rest of the chain’s stores were closed or sold off to other competitors.
In March 2020, Spar Group reached deals with Piotr i Paweł’s creditors to repay 95 million zloty (almost €21 million) of the chain’s debts, according to Wiadomości Handlowe, a retail news service.
It then rebranded the majority of stores into Spar, Spar Express and Eurospar by the end of the first quarter of 2021. However, some locations took longer due to, for example, renegotiations of rental prices with owners.
The last of these was a Piotr i Paweł outpost at the Klif shopping centre in Warsaw, which was finally rebranded as a Spar last week. “The facility has, however, been functioning as a quasi-Spar for many months,” reported Wiadomości Handlowe. “The shop was already stocked as a typical Spar outlet.”
Main image credit: Artur Andrzej/Wikimedia commons (under public domain)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
