In the past, Madrileños and Madrileñas bought their basic food items at traditional grocery stores. Today, however, shopping at these traditional stores is declining nationwide, while supermarkets—followed by hypermarkets—are the preferred retail outlets, according to the Report on Food Consumption in Spain.
In Madrid, one of the milestones that would mark a shift in consumer habits occurred on June 19, 1975. That was when the region’s first hypermarket, Jumbo, opened its doors on Avenida de Pío XII, at a time when walking through the aisles of a large store to fill a shopping cart was not yet common in our country. Its advertising posters promised shoppers more than “30,000 different items.”
The name of that first hypermarket, Jumbo, was inspired by the name of the mother of Dumbo the elephant, the protagonist of the famous Disney film. Its opening was not without controversy; traditional merchants saw this type of establishment as a threat to their small neighborhood stores. This is recounted in a report by EL PAÍS published twenty years later, which also includes testimonies from former employees of the hypermarket.
One such person is Soledad Fernández, who also made her debut as a cashier on opening day: “People were used to the neighborhood store. They’d pick up all their items and then had to leave half of them behind because they didn’t have enough money, which caused long lines at the registers, which back then were hand-cranked.”
Jumbo shoppers would eventually embrace the “hypermarket culture.” Until then, it wasn’t easy for Madrid residents to get used to this new way of shopping, which would revolutionize the way they did their grocery shopping.
Terror Between the Produce Section and the Frozen Foods Aisle
In addition to shopping carts, the cameras of the RTVE music program *300 Millones* rolled through the aisles of Jumbo. In 1980, Madrid’s first hypermarket served as the setting for the music video for a song by Alaska y Los Pegamoides, one of the most iconic bands of La Movida. It goes like this: “Terror in the hypermarket / Horror at the grocery store / My girl has disappeared / And no one knows how it happened.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this was the setting chosen by Alaska y los Pegamoides, since it wasn’t the first time that location had hosted a film shoot. It’s true, however, that this was long before the Jumbo opened.
The plot of land where the hypermarket would eventually be built was, before it was purchased by the Portuguese group Pan de Azúcar, the site of the Sevilla Films movie studios, where, for example, parts of the 1961 film *El Cid*, starring Charles Heston and Sophia Loren, were shot. From Hollywood to the Pegamoides: a small step for a hypermarket, a giant leap for humanity.
The history of the former Jumbo on Pío XII Avenue ended with its acquisition by Alcampo. On November 23, 1996, the hypermarket reopened as the (then) ninth hypermarket of the French chain in the Community of Madrid. Today, the store continues to operate as an Alcampo hypermarket at its original location in Chamartín.