The hypermarket is quite mortally wounded in Spain. There is an absolute winner: the Mercadona model

For years the plan was to take the car, go to the hypermarket on duty and spend a couple of hours walking through its aisles to collect everything we needed and a few other things that we could find because there was almost everything there. is passing away by leaps and bounds. From the boom of the hypermarket to its decline. It was the 90s when they became popular, but there has been a change in purchasing and consumption habits that were catalyzed by the pandemic. The 2025 data from the consulting firm NIQ (former Nielsen) collected by El País They speak of a share of 10.2% of total sales in Spain. And last year it grew by 1.2% unlike the previous year, where it fell by 2%. The problem, in addition to its small piece of the pie, is that the majority of food distribution channels in Spain grew more. The heirs of hyper. These Mercasa studies date from spring 2025 cited by The Economist where they reflect that supermarkets already concentrated 91.8% of the commercial surface in the state. And it is not the only one: the other alternative is proximity formats. It is true that the NIQ data shows that the medium supermarket (between 300 and 799 square meters) fell more than the hypermarket, but its share is four points higher. The small supermarket (less than 300 square meters) and the large supermarket (between 800 and 2,500 square meters) are the big winners: the former rose two tenths with a sales increase of 9.1% and the latter did the same by nine tenths to reach 57.1% of the market and 7.6% of turnover. Here there is an absolute winner: Mercadona, whose new openings exceed 1,500 square meters and which has also been transforming its 1,600 stores for years to replace the smaller ones. And its strategy is paying off: its share has risen to 29.5% in 2025 despite having 10 fewer stores. The Mercadona effect or how efficiency kills size. This change in trends opens a new battle for proximity: the growth is in the 1,500 square meter supermarket aka the Mercadona model or in the convenience store. Growing no longer means opening more centers, but rather having better centers: it pays more to close 10 stores because you have more efficient stores. On the other hand, last mile logistics is gaining weight: it is easier and more affordable to serve an online order with a network of small stores scattered throughout the urban center than from a distant hypermarket. In addition, the franchise format allows chains to expand their brand without assuming operating costs. The consumer has spoken. The NIQ consultancy reflects clearly this paradigm shift: purchase occasions per household have grown by 11% in 2025 and units per basket have decreased by 7.6%. In short: we buy more times but less quantity, a trend that benefits local stores and penalizes hypermarkets. Kantar’s reading points to factors such as smaller homes, a higher average age, an urban context that favors this type of purchase over American car culture. The chains are moving. The fact that the hypermarket is in decline, reducing its weight in the market, directly affects the operators that exploit this format, such as Carrefour and Alcampo, followed by Eroski and El Corte Inglés. In NIQ figures, the first lowered its share two tenths to 7.2%, the second fell from 3.1 to 2.9% and the Basque chain fell one tenth to 4.3% and El Corte Inglés did the same two tenths, to 1.6%. So they are adapting to this paradigm shift: In Xataka | Mercadona has understood that Spain no longer wants to make its potato tortillas. And he is making gold with it In Xataka | Years ago Mercadona decided to conquer the market with its white brands. And that is making gold for some companies Cover | Carrefour

In 1178 a monk realized that the moon “was beating as a wounded snake.” Today we know what those flashes are

The current tools They allow to see the universe surrounding us with An unimaginable detail Just a few years ago, but humanity has millennia lifts the sky and wondering things. What we have closer is the moon, and almost a thousand years ago someone wondered why it shone as if it were an emergency light. Today we have the answer. More or less. Flash. Although we have always looked at the sky, it was not until 1608 when we could do it with some detail. At the same time, several lens manufacturers fought to become the Telescope inventorswhich was a tube with a convex lens as a goal, a concave as ocular and … it ends. In 1609, Galileo Galilei learned about the invention and decided to build his version, to which He took advantage of good. Discovered the Jupiter satellites And, among many other things (dangerous for its time) He also documented lunar craters. In those first observations in more detail, astronomers began to wonder something: why do the moon emit flashes? What they probably did not know is that they were not the first to realize those fleeting lights. Luna beats. Let’s go back half a millennium, until 1178, the year in which Canterbury Gervasioa monk, wrote The following: “On the afternoon of June 18, 1178, after sunset, when the moon had just become visible, a wonderful phenomenon was witnessed by five men or more. There was a bright new moon, their horns were inclined to the east and sudden sparks ”. He continued: “Meanwhile, the body of the moon, which was below, twisted, so to speak, with anxiety … the moon throbbed as a wounded snake. Then, it recovered its usual state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, adopting the flame various random twisted forms. After these transformations, the moon, from horn to horn … acquired a blackish appearance” What does this say? “The author of this letter received this report from men who saw him with his own eyes, and are willing to put his honor under oath that they have not added or falsified anything in the previous story.” Quiet, Gervasio, we believe you. What he described is Know Like TLP, ‘Transient lunar phenomena“or” transient lunar phenomena. “ This is something that has fascinated astronomers for centuries, and basically it is flashes, brightness located somewhere in the lunar surface or even darkening of it. Its duration is brief, and there are several theories. Riddled. One of them points, directly, to the constant meteorite bombardment experienced by the satellite. It is the explanation most supported by evidence, and it makes all the meaning. It is estimated that the moon receives the direct impact of tens of thousands of meteorites every year. NASA Calculate That 33,000 meteorites hit the moon every year, with about 100 the size of a Pinpong ball reaching its surface with a force equivalent to about 3.2 kilos of dynamite. Studies like Neliota They have achieved relate Those impacts to the flashes we see from Earth. The frequency is about eight flashes per hour, but in times when there is a greater meteoric activity, the figure increases to twelve per hour. Impacts on the moon collected by Neliota and related to ‘flashazos’ Alternatives. There are currents of alternative thinking that relate these ‘flashazos’ with gas emissions of the lunar subsoil -as they can be radon emanationsgas that has a presence in the satellite- or by geological fluctuations. The bombardment remains the most accepted theory, but there are ‘flashazos’ than They would not be related With impacts. Whatever it is, and if that English monk of 850 years ago could find out about this, it would surely feel relieved to know that those beats of the moon, those palpitations as a wounded snake, were not the product of their imagination. Images | University of CanterburyNASA, THAT In Xataka | A meteorite fell in the Sahara in 2023. It has turned out to be the piece of moon that we needed to solve an old enigma

What is the ‘wounded man’, the most unfortunate creature of the entire Middle Ages: sick, beaten and sewn to Sabblazos

No matter what happened to you, how bad the week has gone, if you are exhausted after climbing and lowering boxes during a move, you have injured yourself, you have a fever, you have given positive in Covid or yesterday you cut the piss while cooking. No matter how bad that you find yourself and a lot that you suffer is impossible that you are worse than the ‘Wounded man ‘. If there is a unfortunate character in history, one mistreated to the limit, that is him. Nor the Biblical Job. My Héctor dragged by Achilles. Not Julio César with The gross frame dagger. He Wounded man It is the most suffering creature of creation for a very simple reason: it was created for that, to suffer, to support all the hardships imaginable by medieval minds. And yet there we see it in the codices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with resigned expression, almost unstimated. The wounded man? Exact. It is probably one of the most unfortunate names (and also one of the least original) in the history of humanity; But thus, ‘wounded man’ (‘Wound Man’), is how the diagram is known that for centuries, approximately Between the XV and XVIalthough some outstanding examples can also be found The XVIIillustrated the surgery manuals. The term says it all. The injured man was a representation in which the aesthetic and medical criteria were combined to basically show that: an “injured man.” Although saying so is to fall short. The character was a compendium of catastrophes, a creature that gathered all kinds of injuries, infections and various ailments. Virtually all misfortunes that fit in a medieval mind. Eejmplo of wounded man collected in a treaty of the Wellcom Collection. A pistoning with legs. If it is true that saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, the injured man is his greatest exponent. The figure is not only “injured.” If we showed us the portrait of a real staff, of flesh and blood, it is most likely to be unable to stand up. Not all versions are the same, but usually the injured man used to be crossed by swords, daggers, spears and arrows (some look, others have the cut tip), beaten by garrotes, full of blood cuts and with thorns stuck in the feet. Is there more? Yes. They have also bitten snakes and dogs, has run into poisonous toads and have chopped bees and scorpions. And the above is only ‘skin outside’. Inside the panorama was not much better. The images show it full of bubones that suggest that it has contracted the plague and with smallpox marks. In A particularly ruthless example of the wounded man, prepared in the XV and that today is preserved in the funds of the London’s Wellcom Collection, he is seen with a curtured penis while one of his testicles has an aspect that invites us to think that he suffers a venereal. A medieval celebrity. Today your image may surprise us (or even look exotic), but in its day, during the low Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, the wounded man was a relatively popular topic in European medical treaties. Jack Hartnellprofessor of the Univerisity of East Anglia and who has dedicated him several Essayscalculate that it has been found at least A dozen of examples in medieval manuscripts and more than twenty manuals printed in the modern age. And those are just known cases. Wounded man preserved in a xylography in the Wellcomo collection. A long (and extensive) trip. “The first known versions appeared at the beginning of the XV in books on the surgical trade, particularly in works by southern Germany related to the famous surgeon Würzburg Ortolf von Baierland,” says Hartenell in An article Posted in Public Domain Review. Interestingly, despite his battered appearance, the injured man survived the fifteenth century, the Middle Ages and the handwritten codices and sneaked into the manuals created with The new technology of printing. In 1497 we found him on the cover of a book on Strasbourg Surgery and In 1678 We can still observe it in the pages of the ‘Full Speech of the Wounds’, of the London surgeon John Browne. The wounded man lived enough to mistreat him with new weapons, not only spears, swords, daggers, arrows and clubs. In 1517 the German military surgeon Hans von Gerdorff included a version in Your field manual in which he saw how the unfortunate man was shot with cannon bullets to the hands and legs. And what exactly did it serve? Good question. Difficult response. And the reason is that its meaning, its role, the purpose it had in the surgical manuals that it illustrated, could vary over time. They recognize it From the well collection, custodian of one of the most fascinating versions that are preserved, the only English specimenincluded in a medical treaty in the late XV. “Its exact purpose is still somewhat mysterious, but presumably served as a reminder of the wounds to which the human body is prone,” He recounts The British institution. At least in some of the first versions, the injured man was accompanied by numerous annotations related to each of his injuries, sometimes more or less extensive texts accompanied by figures, which reinforces his role as a diagram. “A human index”, In words of Hartnell. In the ‘Das Buch der Clurgia’, 1497 manual, we already see it however Free of annotations. Example extracted from a Strasbourg Treaty of 1519. Art or science? Its extensive trajectory and those changes over time has led to different interpretations about what its exact use could be. Hartnell points out, for example, that at least in his first versions he served as a didactic guide, a conductive thread of the manual that facilitated its handling to the surgeon. In A German specimen From the XV we see the character surrounded by numbers and phrases, each related to a different ailment (a sablazo, a bite, an arrow … Read more

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