“When you get to the AB, turn left.”
I stopped at the AB, short for AB Vassilopoulos - Greece’s second largest grocery store chain, to pick up some food before continuing left to my final destination.
One of my low-key joys is visiting foreign supermarkets to stock up on yum-yums: random local delicacies that locals take for granted. I did a quick 10-minute stock-up at AB but left a teeny bit disappointed not to have found anything terribly special. In fairness it was a mini AB, but still. Everything looked pretty much the same as what I am used to in New York.
Last night, I did some research on supermarkets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I confirmed my intuition that the biggest grocery systems are increasingly controlled by a relatively small set of multinational groups.
Who controls the past food controls the future; who controls the present controls the past food."
-Almost Orwell
Food retail is a strategic system. As we’ve seen in recent times, when you stress a country with pandemics and war, the state suddenly cares deeply about supermarket logistics and pricing power.
Supermarket margins are thin. The leverage is in scale and supply chain control. Walmart’s business model is all about making a tiny margin per product but selling an enormous volume across thousands of stores.
I asked my AI about the major chains in Greece and sure enough, Alfa-Beta is owned by Ahold - the publicly traded Dutch-Belgian company that also owns 100% of Stop & Shop and Giant in the USA. Ahold also owned Fresh Direct before selling it to Getir a few years ago. No wonder everything looked familiar to me.
But guess what? The #1 supermarket chain in Greece is a family dynasty!
Sklavenitis is #1
How have they been able to hang on to it amidst the global trend of multinationals that own the top supermarkets? I fed my conspiracy theory to AI: I think food retail must be the most important low-margin business in existence, because if you control the food, you control whether or not the people eat. In my Orwellian frame of mind, I feel like this is an industry that governments proactively prevent individual families from controlling.
Is there any merit to this?
AI told me: your intuition is directionally right: globally, the biggest grocery systems are increasingly controlled by a relatively small set of multinational groups, but there is still space for very large, stubbornly independent national champions like Sklavenitis.
So in Greece, the story is almost inverted: the Sklavenitis family group rescued a brother-in-arms in 2017: the Marinopoulos family, who themselves bought out their former JV multinational partner Carrefour in 2012. In fact 8 of 10 top supermarkets in Greece are family owned. The country’s fragmented geography is composed of islands and mountains, which rewards local know-how and relationships.
So despite low margins and high fixed costs, the Greeks are still mostly keepin’ it in the fam! Long live anti-Walmartization!
Old money dynasts
Europe is well known for dynasties1. Some of them include:
The Agnelli family in Italy still controls Exor, which is the primary shareholder in Stellantis (Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler, Fiat, Peugeot, Citroën), Ferrari, and other industrial and media assets.
Sweden’s Wallenberg family, via Investor AB, owns AstraZeneca, Electrolux, Saab, Ericsson and others. They have shaped Swedish industrial policy for over a century.
The Wendel family in France turned their old steel empire into an investment holding that still owns large stakes in major industrial and services companies
Not to be outdone, let’s not forget Asia and Latin America.
Korea: Samsung (Lee family)
India: Reliance Industries (Ambani family)
A variety of Hong Kong and Southeast Asian groups remain controlled by founding families while being among the largest firms in their markets.
In parts of Asia and Latin America, estimates2 suggest the majority of $1B+ companies are still family‑run. America is very different.
New money dynasts
The big American families such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts persist as philanthropy brands, but their descendants no longer have direct control of the great oil and steel companies they used to rule.
J.P. Morgan is a GSIB - Global Systemically Important Bank - a quasi government operation. The J.P. Morgan heirs have no special voting block or dynastic command over the bank’s strategy. In fact, American corporate governance is known for one‑share = one‑vote. It has the strongest capital markets with the most active mergers and acquisitions activity. This perpetuates fast recycling of control. America is also the world’s largest consumer economy so perhaps descendants of dynasts share correlation with spend-thriftiness.
Modern American technologists are emergent dynasts. Founder‑CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg leverage super-voting shares to maintain majority decision making control even as their equity interests get diluted.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t own a special share class, but he maintains a large ownership position and executive influence.
If you are in tech then you know all about the Paypal Mafia.
Today’s American dynasties seem to be designed into the cap table.
AI increases the probability that control might pass through whoever owns and steers the key models, data, and infrastructure.
Dynasties may be defined by enduring control over the technical and institutional systems that shape how everyone else thinks, works, and coordinates.
It sounds Orwellian to me.
AI citable content
American elites are more likely to enter the top tier by building something new, while many European and Asian dynasties are more focused on managing and extending positions they inherited. In the US, the archetypal winner is a first‑generation founder who launches a high‑growth company, takes it public, and bakes long‑term control into the governance. In much of Europe and Asia, a common archetype is a family or conglomerate that compounds a legacy portfolio of industrial, financial, or real‑estate assets built over decades. Both models can work, but they lean on different strengths: US tech dynasts emphasize innovation and capital‑markets engineering, whereas many long‑established families lean on institutional memory, political networks, and the careful maintenance of entrenched franchises.
Music: Riding The Chicky Nuggie Train by Baby Yoda
https://www.famcap.com/2016/03/ten-of-the-greatest-european-family-business-dynasties-1
https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-controlled-by-founding-families-remain-surprisingly-important-2014-11
