Shopping by computer from home is a spectacular success in France

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 20

Shopping by computer from home is a spectacular success in France

For more and more telephone users in France, a small computer screen called the Minitel is now as essential in the home as a television set or washing machine. PAUL WEBSTER, of the “Observer,” reports from Paris.

For thousands of Parisians the hard winter made no difference at all to their shopping expeditions to the local supermarket They simply tapped out their orders on a post office home computer screen called the Minitel and by afternoon the day’s groceries were delivered to their doorsteps. The banal daily exercise is one of the most striking proofs that the Minitel, a small screen linked to .the telephone, has left the experimental stage and is now in everyday domestic use. “You are still the only people in the world to have the Minitel,” the State-owned French • Telecommunications Directorate — D.G.T. — proudly insists as it marks the tenth anniversary of the first installation of a Minitel in a Paris suburb. At the time, the equipment, which looks, like a portable TV with a keyboard, was supposed to replace telephone directories with an electronic inquiry service. Today, 2>/ 2 million people or businesses use the sets for thousands of other possibilities ranging from dating to banking.

Within the next decade, the Telecommunications service expect that all 20 million private and business telephones will be equipped with a Minitel, which is installed free. By then, other European countries and the United States may also have overcome • scepticism and followed the French example. "The growth rate over the past year has been phenomenal,” a D.G.T. spokesman said. “During 1986, the amount of time spent on Minitel jumped from about eight million hours to 28 million hours.”

More than 200 million calls (compared to 76 million a year before) earned the State-run company about $2OO million, enough to cover its entire telecommunications investment programme. Built into the success story was a high risk element, as more than a million

new sets were installed for free in 12 m'onths in the hope of a consumer breakthrough. However, -luck has always blessed the programme since the local telephone manufacturing industry, much of it State-owned, desperately appealed for new Government orders in the mid70s. The industry had expanded to revolutionise the appalling French telephone system which, with 20 million lines, became proportionately the most concentrated in- Europe. But expected foreign orders for French technology failed to come through and the Minitel was designed as a desperate measure to provide work for threatened factories.

The original idea was to do away with telephone directories while offering other on-screen free services like railway timetables. Five years later, the plan

to scrap telephone directories was dropped because the Minitel had found its true role, particularly for private business.

Today more than 3000 services can be called on the Minitel while dozens of new ones appear every week. The biggest users are banks who offer all ordinary transactions through Minitels as well as immediate account information. But the new Minitel user would quickly become lost by the hundreds of other coded services that include pornography and dubious dating companies. No censorship is imposed by the Telecommunications which has also accepted a special Minitel-speak rather , like C.B. radio.

Among the hundreds of in. formation; education, quiz, entertainment services, or local council newsletters that can be obtained through simple codes, the most profitable has been 24-hour daily newspapers set up by France’s biggest publishers, in some cases they have solved the. financial difficulties of the newspapers themselves. Firms offering services pay the post office about 10 dollars an hour to rent a line arid receive two-thirds of the call price of about 12 cents a minute. ' In the case of the daily “Parisien ; Libere,” this amounts to 177,000 : hours of calls a year. j The average Minitel caller,.; apart from businesses, comes ; from the middle or upper-in- t come bracket in a 25 to 35 age i group and they already spend an i average $l6 a month on calls. . But the possibilities for big busi- j nesses are constantly increasing, particularly as special business • Minitels are sophisticated com- t puters which are being linked to , new technology or databanks, particularly in the United States. ; Copyright — London Observer : Service. ‘

But it is the purely economic possibilities that have really ensured the Minitel success. The supermarket home delivery service, set up only weeks ago, is already as competitive on prices as the ordinary' supermarket. Mail-order firms do as much as 10 per cent of their business through Minitel, which has even attracted couturiers like Yves St Laurent