(FORTUNE Magazine) – SOMETIME in the mid-1990s Americans will have just two gargantuan emporiums in which to shop. One will be east of the Mississippi River and one west, each extending over hundreds of miles and numerous states. Orange juice? ''Just make a left at Wichita, ma'am; it's on the first aisle in Oklahoma.'' Shoppers now traveling through the Bunyanesque, get-it-all-here stores known as hypermarkets already have the feeling. Consider: The establishment in northeast Philadelphia run by the French company Carrefour encompasses 330,000 square feet. That's enough for half a dozen football fields, give or take a hockey rink. To march up and down every aisle in pursuit of groceries, apparel, and other general merchandise involves a stroll of a mile or so. Does retailing really need stores this size? Do we need the exercise? The candid response of most American retailers is ''of course not.'' The amount of retail mall space dedicated to each person in the country has nearly doubled in ten years to about 14 square feet. There are already far too many stores for the available business, but that won't stop the big guys. Once in place, their tactic is to absorb so much business at one location as to prevent anyone else from coming in. There are only half a dozen hypermarkets currently operating and another dozen on the drawing boards. But they have the potential to change the way consumers shop for everything from soup to tires and to drastically alter the retail landscape in large and small cities alike. Shoppers stand to gain because the hypermarket is a more efficient retail engine. Since the engine weighs a ton and costs a bundle, hypermarkets play to the strengths of big store operators like K mart, Wal-Mart, and Super Valu. Wal-Mart, run with revivalist fervor by Arkansas billionaire Sam Walton, is now singing hallelujah about the company's two Hypermart USA stores in the Dallas area, run in partnership with Cullum Cos., a well-known Texas grocer. The marts are shoving merchandise through the checkouts at the rate of $130 million to $150 million yearly, double that of any large discount store. ''The volume was beyond our wildest expectations,'' says Tom Hairston, president of Cullum. Hypermarkets were created by French merchants after World War II out of a need for efficient distribution among the ruins. Companies like Auchan, Carrefour, Euromarche, Leclerc, and Promodes then expanded across Europe until they ran out of room. Four years ago the French looked west toward the States. A partnership called Hyper Shoppes that includes Super Valu, French real estate developers, and Euromarche opened Bigg's in Cincinnati. ''The Europeans see the U.S. as the last oasis of unfettered free enterprise,'' says Peter Monash, a retailing consultant who has worked both sides of the Atlantic. He expects blood to run in the streets when the giants meet head-on. Super Valu, the nation's second-biggest grocery wholesaler, initially tried persuading its partners to open a franchise of its low-cost Cub Foods supermarkets. The French insisted on selling general merchandise, too. Voila Bigg's. Although sales averaged $1.5 million a week, nearly double the volume at a Cub store, profits were nonexistent. Consumers who loved the low food prices weren't buying much else. After the company made adjustments in its general merchandise, consumers adjusted their shopping habits. Now profitable, Bigg's opened a second location in the Cincinnati area this year. Denver is next. Super Valu, which also owns the ShopKo discount chain, will go solo with its own hypermarket version, called Twin Valu, in northern Ohio next year. K mart will open a hyperstore called American Fare in Atlanta in early 1989 in partnership with a regional grocer, Bruno's Inc. Carrefour, with 115 hypermarkets in Europe and South America, opened its Philadelphia store last February and plans another store on Long Island. Auchan, operator of 50 ) hypermarkets and other retailing ventures in Europe, will debut in Houston and Chicago. Until recently Americans have been reluctant players in the hyper competition because of the strong presence here of large supermarkets and discount stores, and even combinations of the two. While hypermarkets also include elements of supermarkets and discount stores, there are distinct differences. The ceilings are high, but in contrast to warehouse stores, the shelves don't rise much beyond seven or eight feet, giving hypermarkets the vast, see-it-all look of a discount store. The grocery aisles are designed for efficiency: Canned goods are usually sold from their cut-open cartons. Along the perimeter, however, shoppers can buy items normally sold in fancier stores: lobsters, croissants, and tortellini salad. A battery of 60 checkout lanes stands in broad testament to the stores' sales ambitions. Many hypermarkets are so big that stock clerks wear roller skates to get around. The merchandise, market position, and operating economics of hypermarkets are unique and decidedly risky (see table). A typical discount store carries 80,000 items, from screws to sledgehammers, and a big supermarket stocks 30,000. A typical hypermarket will lay in a maximum of 50,000 items. The stated strategy is to have on hand the products that represent 80% of consumers' regular needs and to avoid specialty or slow-moving items in all categories. That means, for instance, stocking golf balls but not golf clubs, refrigerators but not trash compactors, and only the six best-selling flavors of yogurt. No one is sure what combinations of goods and service produce the most sales, and several of the foreign firms have struggled to find out. Bigg's, for example, had too many similar items at different prices. It did not make money until it simplified pricing to help consumers focus on value and discontinued merchandise, like suits, that required a large inventory and personal selling. According to trade reports, Carrefour may be having similar problems. The distinction that Bigg's and others are trying to draw between themselves and discounters is that hypermarkets are not blue-collar stores. Says Pierre Wevers, executive vice president of Hyper Shoppes: ''What one usually calls discount is downscale merchandise. The hypermarket doesn't do that.'' In fact, the merchandise is distinctly tailored to attract the middle- and upper-income crowd. A discount store's focus on value is represented by an absolute low * price: $8 store-brand jeans. Those won't fly in hyperspace. Only brand-name apparel will do -- Guess Jeans, for instance, or Arrow shirts, at prices lower than those of any other competing store. At the same time, hypermarkets avoid being too fashionable because the inventory requirements and risks are too large. Operators of hypermarkets may be cashing in on what some analysts see as a division of stores into two types. The first is the niche store that concentrates on specialized merchandise -- say, high-fashion apparel for career women. Typically, the merchandise is expensive and makes a personal statement about the buyer. The second category is ever larger but fewer retail outlets for items that can be classified as commodities: food, basic apparel, housewares. Consultants refer to the concept as ''the polarity of retail trade.'' Linda Hyde of Management Horizons, a Dublin, Ohio, consulting firm owned by Price Waterhouse, says hypermarkets are trying to move more items toward the commodity end of the pole. THEY ARE also taking the cost structure of big stores to new lows. Their magnet is bargain-priced food. Although it fills only 40% of the space in most hypermarkets, food represents 60% of revenues, mainly because it sells at a gross profit margin of 10%, less than half the figure at a traditional supermarket. The gross profit margin for the entire store is about 15% -- ten percentage points below the discount or supermarket range. (An item that costs $1 must sell for $1.18 to achieve a 15% gross.) Similarly, the labor cost must be about 5% of sales, half what a typical K mart spends on labor. These kinds of operating standards, difficult in their own right, create huge logistical challenges given the size of the stores. Says Larry Parkin, executive vice president of K mart: ''If you blow it, you are going to blow it big.'' Running 60 checkout lanes -- a $600,000 investment -- and stocking the floor require a staff of 600 to 700, most of whom are part time. That's a scheduling nightmare only a computer can figure out. And, of course, about 50,000 real live customers stream through the store each week. What a pain. At Hypermart USA's first store in Garland, Texas, clerks were spending 400 hours a week just collecting carts. (The solution: Charge a deposit, payable when the carts are returned to the corral.) The size-is-all game has implications for the rest of retailing. Supermarket chains such as Kroger, whose standard for new stores was 44,000 square feet in 1983, now go as high as 69,000 square feet. The new stores become profitable in half the time of earlier models. Accordingly, Kroger plans to build fewer but bigger stores. (Those plans may change; see News/Trends.) K mart is launching a sporting goods chain called Sports Giant, whose 50,000-square-foot size will make it a center to the competition's guards. Even in its traditional discount business K mart thinks bigger is better. On average, an 80,000-square-foot store outperforms one of 40,000 square feet. And in communities where a 40,000-square-foot K mart used to do quite nicely, it will do no more. Says Parkin: ''You can have a small store in the right community and have no competition and do gangbusters, but that's not going to continue. Somebody's going to put in a bigger store.'' That other somebody might be Wal-Mart. Mr. Sam has signaled his intention in Washington, Missouri (pop. 18,000). Washington used to have a 50,000-square- foot Wal-Mart. This year Sam replaced it with a 120,000-square-foot edifice called Supercenter. It's a hypermarket for Main Street. Wear comfortable shoes.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: SOURCES: WILLARD BISHOP CONSULTING ECONOMISTS LTD.; CORNELL UNIVERSITY; DISCOUNT MERCHANDISER, JUNE 1988; MANAGEMENT HORIZONS; FORTUNE ESTIMATES CAPTION: MACROECONOMICS: HOW RETAILING'S HYPERSIZED LOOK STACKS UP