Grocery god cursed Taiwan with eternal profanity, effective July
God said, let there be no French, for she had prepared something worse.
To be clear, BobaChair is agnostic and we respect religious practices. That's our faith. But our faith and the Taiwanese people's faith died a little today. Because Taiwan's supreme retail/grocery power, which literally translates to The Unification Group, though its official English name is Uni-President, arguably to make it less of a statement on the China issue, decided to permanently pollute our collective memory of the grocery experience with a devastating branding decision.
As the French supermarket Carrefour sold its 30-year-plus business in Taiwan to The Unification Group, the companies chose not to keep the brand in the country. The Unification Group will dictate the new name and the new logo, and remove Carrefour-branded products in Taiwan.
Knowing how poor The Unification Group's track record is, this is a guaranteed disaster. In 2013, they changed the Japanese-branded Hankyu Department Store to "Dream Plaza". Marriott's W Taipei and multiple local university dorms are also owned by a subsidiary of The Unification Group called "Prince Housing".
Moreover, they are obsessed with the name of the group founder's daughter/executive Shiu-Ling Kao, nicknamed "Shirley", according to wenloom on Threads. Remember this name when you read the next paragraph.
As wenloom and many sources point out, The Unification Group's annual Christmas event is called "Love Sharing" (styled as "I-Sharing" in English), which gifts participants "Syueling Coins" (it literally translates to Snow Bell Coins, or Sharing Coins according to their translation convention); Shirley personally designed an aesthetically questionable "Syueling Rabbit Popo" (or once again, Sharing Rabbit Popo) as the romantic partner of 7-Eleven Taiwan’s mascot; 7-Eleven's ice cream line is called "Syuelin Frost", which means ice-drizzling-frost in Chinese.
We can't determine Shirley's actual influence in the naming decisions. However, BobaChair can confirm that Syuelin Frost came after rival FamilyMart introduced FamiIce (styled as Fami!ce), which is a very straightforward name, that ice-drizzling-frost is definitely not based on real Chinese vocabulary, and that people on the internet absolutely hate the name and it's a well-established theory these names are all tied to Shirley.
So you must be wondering: since The Unification Group's internal dictionary seems to include entries only from baby-level storytelling and a zillion twists of Shirley's name, what's Carrefour Taiwan's fate?
Well, well, well. The tension is building. Since The Unification Group officially took over Carrefour Taiwan's shares in 2023, they have kept very quiet on this grand renaming of almost 300 Carrefour stores. Until today, the day before the Carrefour branding expires in Taiwan.
Before we reveal the new name, let's take a look at the old. When Carrefour opened its first store in Taiwan in 1987, they neatly rendered it as Chia-le-fu, which is a combination of the Chinese words for home, happiness, and luck, and it sounds a lot like the French name. Nearly 39 years later, it is now an unshakable grocery-shopping brand, with both hypermarkets and city markets.
Today, The Unification Group published the new names, plural: the hypermarkets will be called Prosperity Plaza, or Wan-chia-fu – meaning thousands, home and luck. City markets will be Uni-Prosperity, or Le-chia-kang – meaning happiness, home and richness. The internet is both underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the same time. Underwhelmed because they are so terrible and retro, exactly as expected (Wan-chia-fu was actually another unrelated market chain that went extinct in the dinosaur era), and overwhelmed because they are so terrible and retro, to the point that they genuinely madden people. Oh and the logo is gonna be ugly too.
Oh, and don't forget The Unification Group also owns Starbucks, Cold Stone, and Mister Donut in Taiwan, in addition to 7-Eleven. Imagine what happens when they need to rebrand.
The labor union that represents the grocery chain also has something to say. At a regular meeting on June 25, the union alleged that Carrefour’s old management culture during the French era was based on managers’ moods, describing it as "high-pressure, authoritarian, autocratic..., [and] exploited workers like crazy", and the meeting minutes described managers as acting as if "the whole store was [theirs]..., the laws were just for reference". The union hoped that the rebranding would be an opportunity for the corporation to agree to dialogue, instead of being in constant conflict with the union.
The real stakeholders have spoken. Pardon my French, but they don't give a croissant about the branding, they just want fair working conditions under the retail god's reign.
Researched, handwritten, fact-checked, and finalized by a real human who was born and raised in Asia. Edited by ChatGPT 5.5 Medium.
