1 · Position
The counter dates from 1923; La Grande Épicerie as such opened in 1978, at the corner of the rue de Sèvres. It now carries more than thirty thousand products across seventeen departments, with sections given over entirely to butter and to truffles, a foie gras island, and an international range running from Latvian smoked sprats to Japanese tangerine peel and, in the American aisle, marshmallow creme.
2 · Why it is in the Library
It completes the argument this group makes. Boucicaut built a store people would spend the day in; the missing element was feeding them, and it took until 1923 — forty-six years after his death — for someone to put the food inside. Every food hall in this group and every hotel lobby café descends from that counter, and the Japanese *depachika* arrived at the same conclusion separately.
3 · Candour
⚑ Whether this was truly the first food counter in any department store is a claim made by food writing rather than established here, and the Library records it as reported. The whole-department-for-butter is the kind of detail that flatters a shop; the entry states it as fact about the shop, not as evidence about anything else.