Because the person doesn't know what they are talking about. Germans will never prefer Amazon over known local stores - it's already enough to be an American company these days. People know what that means and they don't want it.
Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fake customer relations smiles, Germans find that creepy and annoying. I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster.
And then comes workers rights. Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US (good luck, Tesla in Berlin). Running a business profitable in Germany is way different from doing the same in the United States. That's both for legal/bureaucratic reasons and also customer expectations.
People in Germany also bring their own bags and actively don't want some slave to bag their items. It's a real skill not to piss off other Germans in a supermarket when you scramble to bag your stuff and take longer than a few seconds. In my experience, Aldi cashiers (well-paid btw) are better than any robot you could put there. Their speed is insane (remember to keep up with the bagging or you will get evil stares or comments for being a moron).
It's true, as an American here in Munich, buying too many groceries at once is anxiety-inducing. I have to limit how much I buy at once, because otherwise it's too much to fit on the conveyor belt, such that I have to wait for items to be scanned so that I can put more things on. Which leads to not being fast though putting things back in the cart (so that I can bag separately later), which pisses everyone off.
I appreciate the low prices, but it also makes buying groceries kind of stressful in a way that was never true in the US.
So there are not enough lanes open then (sounds like poor time and motion work) and just how much stuff are you buying that you cant fit it on the belt?
> So there are not enough lanes open then (sounds like poor time and motion work)
How exactly is having more lanes going to help with the conveyor belt being small?
> just how much stuff are you buying that you cant fit it on the belt?
So the implication here is that it's my fault for buying too much stuff?
I was buying enough for at least a handful of days for a family of 3 that's stuck at home. I was trying to buy more at once during this pandemic so I don't have to visit the stores as often, but the grocery stores don't make it easy.
I can't imagine what it's like if you have 3+ kids. I mean, I guess if you're going to one of the suburban stores that are more like American ones, it might be fine then.
Maybe. But German grocery stores are also quite small.
Like, the setup works fine for the way Germans go grocery shopping: smaller amounts of groceries, two or three times a week. It just sucks for families if you wanna buy more at once.
Lidl in .de forced that fake customer relation smile onto us too, and it didn't crash and burn for it.
My (late) mother liked Walmart for it's watercooler. I have been only one time into a german one, because too impractical location for me, and when i wanted to check it out again (because soooo laaaarge) it was closed down.
That bagging thing... don't know what to make of it, since we don't have it, but let me tell you that this can go the other way too. IMO the ones giving evil stares or making haste otherwise are the morons. Driven slaves under stress. I intentionally slow down and give space when some older or otherwise challenged person takes her time. To the extent of getting a real smile from the cashiers.
Then you are one of the better/nicer people you encounter in supermarkets but in general, fast bagging performance is an a social requirement when shopping at the grocery stores (far more relaxed at other stores).
I noticed one more stark difference: many Germans don't own a car and apparently the large Walmarts often needed to be located at the edge of towns. Germans do more local, atomic grocery shopping around the corner and carry their stuff home by foot, bike, or public transport.
It depends. The one Walmart i knew of was central and easily reachable by public transport, the one my mother went to not so much but she did so nonetheless, because WALMART! WATERCOOLER! :) Anyways, it depends on the location, there are parts of large towns which are underserved, or in structural decline with almost no options, and not everyone lives in the big cities. So when you live out of town, away from the masses it can happen that you have to drive about an hour by car to the next larger "big box cluster" somewhere, serving that larger sparsely populated area, or into some town.
Oh, I was thinking of just overall market shares for stuff that eg Aldi sells.
Amazon would probably mostly compete by delivering that stuff to you, not by having stores.
And I don't see any deep seated German aversion to getting groceries delivered.
I do see Amazon having a decent chance of getting a big chunk of the grocery market, but I don't expect all of Aldi, Lidl, REWE and Edeka to have to close up shop.
(Similarly, Aldi and/or Lidl were winning a decent chunk of the grocery market in UK and Australia when I was living in either country. But they won't take 100%. The incumbents adapt. Some of the might fail, but not all of them.)
> Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US.
In some areas yes, I hear that VW workers are paid well. In other areas, you have 400 Euro jobs and forced labor below minimum wage if the "job center" (formerly social security) decides that you need to be a slave.
I don't understand why people here defend Europe as if it were the 1980s. Those times are long gone, perhaps folks here have a sheltered life and only listen to state propaganda.
Yes, you are absolutely correct here but this is a very complex topic following the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s.
All of this is currently on the political line and there is enormous political will in the population to "fix" Hartz IV. It helped Germany out of its labor misery when Schröder became chancellor in 1998 (5m jobless down to ~1m) but it brought new problems such as 1€/h jobs (tax-free, on top of unemployment payments), weird sanctions and brain-dead mechanisms to put people back into work.
If it weren't for Corona it would likely be one of the major topics in the societal discussion right now as Hartz IV is widely recognized to be insufficient.
Federal minimum wage is also fairly new and already way too little. But Corona is shaking everything up, so who knows what will happen now.
Wal-Mart completely crashed and burned in Germany and it already started at the weird greeting person at the entry. When Germans see this, the business is basically already bust. Keep the fake customer relations smiles, Germans find that creepy and annoying. I would bet it would literally be better to have some person yelling at people to move faster.
And then comes workers rights. Germany won't have any of the degrading bullshit like Wal-Mart or others in the US (good luck, Tesla in Berlin). Running a business profitable in Germany is way different from doing the same in the United States. That's both for legal/bureaucratic reasons and also customer expectations.
People in Germany also bring their own bags and actively don't want some slave to bag their items. It's a real skill not to piss off other Germans in a supermarket when you scramble to bag your stuff and take longer than a few seconds. In my experience, Aldi cashiers (well-paid btw) are better than any robot you could put there. Their speed is insane (remember to keep up with the bagging or you will get evil stares or comments for being a moron).
The market is completely different.