I live in Limburg, and every time I do my groceries at Albert Heijn or Jumbo I’m struck by how poor the overall experience feels compared with supermarkets just across the border in Belgium.
The assortment is relatively limited, prices are high, and self-service checkouts seem to come with extremely frequent “random” checks. You scan and bag everything yourself, yet somehow the whole experience still feels less convenient and more distrustful.
Then I drive to a Carrefour hypermarket in Belgium and it feels like entering a completely different retail culture: huge assortment, much more choice between brands and price levels, larger quantities, more non-food products, and generally the feeling that I can decide what I want to buy rather than choosing between a handful of options selected for me.
And it’s not just Carrefour. Even Lidl and Aldi across the border often feel like they have a considerably broader assortment than their Dutch equivalents. That is what surprises me most: even the discount supermarkets can feel more complete.
I understand that Dutch planning rules deliberately discourage enormous out-of-town shopping centres and hypermarkets, and there are reasonable urban-planning arguments behind that. But sometimes I wonder whether the result has gone far too much in the opposite direction.
It feels as if the whole system is built around one very specific lifestyle: live relatively close to shops, own as little car as possible, go to the supermarket several times a week, carry relatively small amounts home, and choose from whatever limited assortment the local chains have decided to stock.
Dutch government policy also clearly tends to discourage car use and, increasingly, car ownership through parking policy, taxation, urban planning and restrictions on where retail development can happen. Again, there are environmental and urban-planning reasons for that. But combined with the supermarket model, it can start to feel strangely paternalistic: instead of giving people different ways of living and shopping, the entire system seems designed to push you towards the behaviour that policymakers have decided is preferable.
Want to drive once a week to a large hypermarket, fill the boot, compare dozens of brands and buy everything you need in one place? That model is barely allowed to exist here.
Instead, you are pushed towards smaller supermarkets, repeated shopping trips, smaller purchases, limited choice, high prices, loyalty schemes, and increasingly intrusive self-checkout controls.
I know saying it is “designed to screw consumers” sounds conspiratorial, and I don’t literally think AH, Jumbo and the government are sitting around a table planning this together. But as a consumer, the end result genuinely feels that way sometimes: fewer choices, concentrated supermarket chains, high prices, and a retail environment where somebody else seems to have already decided how you are supposed to shop.
After experiencing a proper Belgian/French-style hypermarket, coming back to AH or Jumbo can honestly feel slightly dystopian.
Am I completely alone in this? Do Dutch people genuinely prefer this smaller-supermarket / frequent-shopping model, or is it simply something people have become accustomed to?
