Félix Potin, the son of farmers from the Eure, opened a grocery in 1844 and applied there an idea the trade judged suicidal: displaying his prices instead of haggling over them, selling for cash and for less, earning on volume rather than on margin. He would have to expand twice. Soon he was making chocolate, tinned goods and biscuits himself, cutting out the middlemen.
The story
The son of farmers from Arpajon, south of Paris, Félix Potin came up to the capital as a grocer's assistant. In 1844 he opened his own shop on the rue Neuve-Coquenard and applied an idea the trade thought suicidal: sell cheaper, for cash, with prices marked up and not haggled over, betting on volume rather than margin.
The method worked so well that he had to move twice for more room. The shop on the boulevard de Sébastopol, opened in 1860, was conceived as a place to stroll as much as to buy. Potin added a second innovation: he made a large part of what he sold himself — chocolate, tinned food, biscuits, confectionery — in his own factory at La Villette, which guaranteed the quality and cut out the middlemen.
He died in 1871, at fifty-one, and rests in Division 68. His successors would turn the house into a network of branches across Paris, several of whose ceramic shopfronts survive today, notably on the rue de Rennes.
The name outlived its founder by more than a century before going under in 1995. What survives is a phrase — “une tête de Félix Potin”, a Félix Potin face, meaning a face seen everywhere without anyone quite knowing why: the shop slipped photographic portraits of celebrities, by the hundred, into its bars of chocolate.
On site, do not miss
The sobriety of the tomb, for a name that was for a century on every shopfront in Paris.
Visitors' questions
Where is Félix Potin's grave?
In Division 68 of Père-Lachaise, on the eastern slope that climbs towards the columbarium. The composers Georges Bizet and Georges Enesco rest in the same Division, so all three can be seen in one go.
Georges Bizet, Division 68What did Félix Potin invent?
Modern retailing: a fixed marked price instead of haggling, cash on the counter, thin margins made good by volume, and own-brand goods made in house. He opened his first shop in Paris in 1844 and died in 1871.
Brillat-SavarinWhat is left of the Félix Potin chain?
Shopfronts. Several of the old stores survive in Paris behind their worked ceramic tiling, among them the one on rue de Rennes, now a listed building. The chain itself vanished in the 1990s, after more than a century.
Émile-Justin MenierWhere does the phrase “une tête de Félix Potin” come from?
From the photographic portraits of celebrities, there to be collected, that the firm slipped into its bars of chocolate from 1898. The phrase came to mean a face everybody knows — seen everywhere, without anyone quite knowing why.
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