Lidl stores were stormed on Thursday in France, sometimes aggressively, after an announcement of the sale of 200,000 fans and air conditioners, and other brands, such as Leclerc or FnacDarty, are also faced with an influx of customers, before the new feared heat wave this weekend.
In front of a store in a district in the north of Paris, a queue stretched on the sidewalk from 7 a.m., two hours before opening, until it reached around 200 people, noted an AFP journalist.
The crowd was generally in a good mood, but altercations broke out between some customers who tried to overtake.
“I won’t open the store until you leave!” “, shouted a manager, while customers challenged her. Another employee told AFP that only two air conditioners had been delivered.
Fights, forced doors, police intervention… The announcement of the sale of 200,000 air conditioners and fans by Lidl turns into chaos pic.twitter.com/Gi6wP4FYWJ
— BFM (@BFMTV) July 2, 2026
One of the two lucky ones had arrived at… 4 a.m., he assured AFP.
Fatou, 69, was less lucky: “I arrived here at 6:30 a.m. I was third.” “It was a lie,” she gets angry, against the discount distributor’s communication.
Other people in the crowd also rose against Lidl, feeling they were “treated like animals”.
France has already experienced two exceptional heatwaves, at the end of May and mid-June, which created unbearable living conditions in many homes.
In Sevran, a popular Paris suburb, a long queue of vehicles had formed in front of the Lidl, obstructing traffic. »It’s madness! (…) Everything is blocked,” Laurence Duchateau, a 59-year-old resident, told AFP.
Several videos on social media showed crowds trying to get discounted fans and air conditioners from other Lidl stores.
“Lidl France deplores the incidents”, reacted the brand to AFP, stressing that its employees “had to manage tensions, in a sometimes difficult climate” and explaining the lack of stocks by “the sales cycle of (its) products”: “products ordered a year in advance and arriving on Thursday in our supermarkets, at a always fixed price”.
Other brands are affected by the same phenomenon.
“People were waiting in front of stores from four in the morning”, during the heatwave, “some came to blows”, declared on BFM Business the CEO of FnacDarty, Enrique Martinez.
“The teams worked hard to serve everyone and bring as much material as possible” into the warehouses, he assured.
In Leclerc stores, “we sold 700,000 fans and coolers in three weeks”, or “an increase of almost 200%”, declared Thursday Michel-Edouard Leclerc on TF1. “We sold nearly 60,000 air conditioners, that’s also over 35%.”
“We still have some left. Now, there are problems of distribution” to take into account population movements with “departures on vacation”, he underlined.
