Interesting bit of news today on the Wal-Mart front - the company is calling it quits in Germany and selling its 85 stores to Metro AG, the country’s biggest retailer.
The question is, what can the rest of the world do that Germany is already doing?
Germany is a tough market for a foreign retailer to crack, being home ground for Aldi and Lidl. Here is a Business Week article from last year about Wal-Mart’s German business.
Nor is Wal-Mart dominant in the U.K., where it has a total of about 300 stores in various formats, mostly supercenters. Tesco Plc, the country’s biggest supermarket operator, is wiping the floor with *all * of its rivals; the company has a 31.5% share of the grocery market, almost as much as No. 2 Wal-Mart and No. 3 J Sainsbury Plc combined. Wal-Mart’s U.K. chain missed all of its quarterly sales and profit goals last year, but having said that, I certainly don’t expect them to pull out of Britain.
‘Pile it high, sell it cheap’ is the title of the authorised biography of Sir John Cohen, founder of Tesco. Presumably this is right up Wal-Mart’s street.
However Tesco has improved recently. My local (in a town of 10,000) has a good selection of produce, with the in-store brand usually available as the cheaper alternative. They have also diversified into financial products such as insurance.
The assistants have been well-trained. if you ask where something is, they will cheerfully bound into action and escort you to it.
Every time I hear about a group of residents protesting Tesco’s move to open a new store in their town, I give a :rolleyes: Given the choice between shopping in grotty little supermarkets or one big Tesco’s, I’d take the Tesco’s any day.
From the given link:
I get the strong impression they are making a forward-looking statement.
Wal-Mart are using their favourite bully-boy techniques here in the UK. They are trying to get their staff to leave their union and have attempted to bribe them with a promise of more money if they do. For their sins they were fined nearly a million pounds. Story here
Huh. Metro in Germany is like Costco and you have to have a membership card. But it’s much harder to get. IIRC, you can’t get one as an individual, you have to have a company. So I wonder if the former Wal-mart’s will start charging admission.
That type of language is actually fairly typical of press releases like this:
For example:
That’s true for the stores under the Metro brand, those are only for businesses (and de-facto businesses of certain professionals) but the Metro group is a conglomerate that owns several retail chains. Apparently the Wal-marts will be transformed into relatively similar “real” stores.
Point taken.
It seems to be, and correct me if I’m wrong, a legal clause which represents some kind of disclaimer, and which needs to be very specific in its terminology.
ooOoo I loved shopping in the Real in Boblingen … sigh
now i am jonesing for banana milk mix
Somehow America lost its touch in Europe sometime between the 1940s and today. See also: World Cup. See also: Wimbledon. 
Basically, it’s a fancy way of saying “We’re just pulling guesses out of our asses here and we’re not going to let you hold it against us if our guesses turn out to be wrong.”
Wal-Mart tried to stop their distribution depots going out on strike, by trying to de-recognise the union, and prevent people joining the union, and stopping the union having pay bargaining rights, you have to realise that UK unions are not seen as the impediment to trade and business as they once were, and unions are seen as a protection against unfair dismissal, bullying and harrassment as much as pay.
Result was that Wal-Mart had to roll over to the union this time, but it will not happen every time, and we all know it.
This is a formal process and the right to freedom of association is guarunteed under the European Human rights act.
Wal-Mart were fined heavily for this behaviour.
They bought out a middle sized supermarket outlet in ASDA, but their stores have really gone downhill, they keep replacing well known brands with items that are packaged very similarly, but are of lower quality, true these things are cheaper, but given the low quality, they are not cheap enough.
They have their strategy all wrong, if they want to get into low prices and own brand goods, then they would be competing against ALDI, but if you do compete with ALDI and stores in that market with very low prices and absolutely no frills stores, you then are not in the same game as Sainsbury, Tesco and the like, and that means you will not dominate in the UK, though there is definately a nice little niche there, but its already occupied.
I know people who will travel miles to avoid going to ASDA stores, not on a point of principle, but because ASDA are shit.
At one time, they almost had a clue, but they seem to have lost it.
I happen to have a German visitor here and mentioned that Wal-Mart is exiting the German market. She is from Berlin and said that the location is rather far, and the prices were not all that great, and the selection was odd - not the type of stuff the average German is really shopping for (I think she was refering to grocery items with that comment). At any rate, she didn’t seem all that surprised and said that even though she would go about once every other month, for the most part, she thinks the Wal-Marts here in the US have a better selection and better prices.
Just one German woman’s opinion (but she is a profi when it come to shopping for deals, so I am inclinded to take her word.)
Wal-Mart tried to get into Australia in a joint venture with Woolworths in the mid to late '80s (“Big W”), and in the end Wallyworld just gave up and left Woolies to it (Woolworths Ltd owns Big W now).
Aldi are operating in a few areas in Australia, but I don’t know how well they’re doing- their stuff generally has a reputation for being utter shit, and it seems only really, really poor people shop there.
They pay fairly well and they’re a reputable company, but I’m not convinced of their long-term viability here in Australia…