Marek Karabon and Alex Sukharevsky

The traditional mom-and-pop grocery store is being displaced by modern trade. What’s driving this change—and what’s next?

Like shoppers in much of the developed world, Turkey’s consumers are abandoning the corner grocery in favor of the supermarkets and hypermarkets that are known as “modern trade.” The speed of this switch is breathtaking: from 2005 to 2010, traditional grocery retail in Turkey shrank from 75% of the market to 59%, while modern trade grew 11.2 % per year, almost exact in lockstep with growth in GDP (10.9%).

This retail revolution reflects similarly rapid changes in Turkey, whose populace is large, growing, increasingly affluent and 69% urban. In 2010, Turkey’s population approached 77 million, and personal disposable income per capita nearly tripled between 2000 and 2010, from $2,972 to $7,507 per year. Middle- and upper-income Turks account for almost 90% of national buying power, and their buying power has quadrupled since 2005. At the same time, the number of very low-income households has been diminishing. There are 3.2 million fewer homes making less than $5,000 a year than a decade ago. 

Growing wealth has to be seen in context, though.

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Photo from Flickr: xiquinhosilva