Living her best life.
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@cstross @stevendbrewer Walmart took over Woolco here a few decades ago and are still going strong, and have moved into groceries as well. They’re still here, with an awful shopping experience. I generally avoid.
Then there was the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, which went out of business last year after a run with American owners who were more interested in real estate games. Killing the oldest company on the continent is an achievement of some kind, I guess.
Pales in comparison to how spectacularly #Walmart failed in #Germany.
The U.S.A. management managed to fall afoul of regulations that were meant to prevent the Stasi from happening again.
They instituted policies of forced smiling at customers, group cheer sessions, and employees required to report any employees who dated other employees.
Reporting on people's personal lives to the authorities is a bit of a no-no in modern Germany.
https://www.ft.com/content/4d85393c-ddd6-11d9-a42f-00000e2511c8
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer Walmart attempted the same in Germany, lasting 10 years from the mid Nineties and burning through a few $bn.
Retail in Europe is really hard.@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl
1/ Yeah, that was amusing.
"Hey, let's enter one of the biggest retail shark tanks on the planet without doing any market research! I am sure nothing can go wrong with this plan!
Also, let's make the employees sing corporate songs like we do in the USA. I'm sure the Germans will love that!"
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl
1/ Yeah, that was amusing.
"Hey, let's enter one of the biggest retail shark tanks on the planet without doing any market research! I am sure nothing can go wrong with this plan!
Also, let's make the employees sing corporate songs like we do in the USA. I'm sure the Germans will love that!"
@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl
2/ Also, telling employees to constantly smile at German customers is a bad idea. Because the reaction of the average German will be:
"Who is this creepy weirdo, and what do they want from me?"
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Please read my pitch deck and front me $250M for my new AI-crash-proof startup idea?
MAKING SHOPPING FUN AGAIN: A supermarket that's also a dodgem cars arena with wine and sushi bars (credit card required for running tab before admission)
@cstross Are you sure this thing does not exist in Japan? Feels very close to quantum internet pornography…
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer Walmart attempted the same in Germany, lasting 10 years from the mid Nineties and burning through a few $bn.
Retail in Europe is really hard.@jsl @cstross @jbenjamint @david @stevendbrewer It is. I was looking recently to buy some Muji drawer units, and discovered that there’s no way to get them in Sweden. (They pulled out of their joint venture with a Swedish department store, and their delivery service only handles smaller items.)
On a tangent, one of my wishes is for Daiso to expand to the EU.
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@stevendbrewer @cstross Oh, I thought the rolls had both sushi and cinnamon in them. Otherwise, where's the crime?
You joke but we have a local pizzeria that also does food from their home country. Some of it has cinnamon in it so if you are lucky, the meat fried on the same surface for the pizzas will taste cinnamon. We do not eat pizza there but love their other food
Cinnamon does not quite work with meat or fish, the (western) brain gets confused. "Is this desert or main corse? Both?"
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@cstross @david @stevendbrewer Do you remember Tesco's attempt to enter the US market? "Fresh & Easy" - except it turned out to be neither of those things.
@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer yet Aldi Sud seems to have managed to be highly successful in Europe, the UK and the US.
More random stuff in the middle aisles, that's what's needed! Go in for a family shop, leave with a lathe and a wetsuit.
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl @bweller
Yeah, but in a weird quirk of American service culture, a lot of American shopper expect service people to be _servile_. "The customer is always right!", and all that.
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Pales in comparison to how spectacularly #Walmart failed in #Germany.
The U.S.A. management managed to fall afoul of regulations that were meant to prevent the Stasi from happening again.
They instituted policies of forced smiling at customers, group cheer sessions, and employees required to report any employees who dated other employees.
Reporting on people's personal lives to the authorities is a bit of a no-no in modern Germany.
https://www.ft.com/content/4d85393c-ddd6-11d9-a42f-00000e2511c8
@JdeBP @david @cstross @stevendbrewer I am reminded of when UPS started up in Germany and used brown uniforms.
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Pales in comparison to how spectacularly #Walmart failed in #Germany.
The U.S.A. management managed to fall afoul of regulations that were meant to prevent the Stasi from happening again.
They instituted policies of forced smiling at customers, group cheer sessions, and employees required to report any employees who dated other employees.
Reporting on people's personal lives to the authorities is a bit of a no-no in modern Germany.
https://www.ft.com/content/4d85393c-ddd6-11d9-a42f-00000e2511c8
@JdeBP @david @cstross @stevendbrewer Paywalled.
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@stevendbrewer Hey, this is the UK! We have Tesco here. (WalMart tried to break into the supermarket biz, bought ASDA—the third-ranked chain—and made a big noise. A few years later they ran weeping to the anti-trust people. Then they gave up, sold most of their stake in ASDA, and got out. Retailing in the UK is hardcore!)
I know that Walmart still have ASDA's George brand of clothes because the fuckers registered the .george TLD and don't let anyone register on it.
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl @bweller
Yeah, but in a weird quirk of American service culture, a lot of American shopper expect service people to be _servile_. "The customer is always right!", and all that.
@juergen_hubert @jbenjamint @david @stevendbrewer @jsl @bweller There was a chunk of that in UK retail culture when I worked in shops in the 80s, but it manifested itself differently.
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@stevendbrewer Ah, so that's what American X-ers drink instead of scrumpy!
@cstross @stevendbrewer Very close, at least in use! But even the worse scrumpy is made with more love than Boone's Farm.
Boone's Farm is basically Kool-aid mixed with a small amount of pure ethanol. Absolutely no love in it at all.
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@cstross And, just for reference, Target (pronounced "targé") is where Walmart shoppers go when they want to feel upscale. If you really want to experience the true depths of despair, go to Ocean State Job Lot, which is stocked with stuff that didn't sell anywhere else. Or was returned. https://www.oceanstatejoblot.com/
@stevendbrewer @cstross as a former resident of the Former US, I will say that I was at least *willing* to go into Target, because it was far more civilized, people controlled their children, and the employees generally did not seem in existential despair.
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@cstross @stevendbrewer Very close, at least in use! But even the worse scrumpy is made with more love than Boone's Farm.
Boone's Farm is basically Kool-aid mixed with a small amount of pure ethanol. Absolutely no love in it at all.
@mdm @stevendbrewer Whereas scrumpy is made with love and also scrumpy isn't ready to drink until the rat who drowned in the vat has fully dissolved.
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@jbenjamint @cstross @david @stevendbrewer @jsl @bweller
Yeah, but in a weird quirk of American service culture, a lot of American shopper expect service people to be _servile_. "The customer is always right!", and all that.
@juergen_hubert Funny thing about that, the complete saying goes something like "The customer is always right _in matters of taste_".
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Pales in comparison to how spectacularly #Walmart failed in #Germany.
The U.S.A. management managed to fall afoul of regulations that were meant to prevent the Stasi from happening again.
They instituted policies of forced smiling at customers, group cheer sessions, and employees required to report any employees who dated other employees.
Reporting on people's personal lives to the authorities is a bit of a no-no in modern Germany.
https://www.ft.com/content/4d85393c-ddd6-11d9-a42f-00000e2511c8
@stevendbrewer @cstross @JdeBP @david Oh, I remember it well. In Germany for “Whistleblower”, read “Denunziant”.
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@feorag @JdeBP @david @cstross @stevendbrewer Bypass: https://archive.is/TeuPs (but the article is not very interesting)
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@TallSimon @stevendbrewer @cstross My contribution to the vibe: Harbor Freight Tools. I describe it as a cross between Trader Joe's and Spirit Halloween. It's got a lot of in-house tool brands and has an "upscale but value" fanaticism similar to Trader Joe's.
But the locations themselves always look like they took an old K-Mart carcass which had been sitting there for years, added dividers to make it about 1/4 the area, installed third-hand shelving, hung a HARBOR FREIGHT sign and called it a day. (I'm oddly specific here because there's a location in Reno which did literally that.)
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