The Wal-Mart Effect, and how it plays havoc with your digestion
More Walmart boosterism - first time I've seen this in a couple of years. Apparently it will be "to the benefit of European consumers" when they arrive.
I went to a Walmart shop when I was on holiday in America last year. The thing that sticks in my mind is that although the shop itself was about twice the area of Camden Market, the fruit & vegetables section was slightly smaller than that of an average Tesco Metro.
... this was seemingly a Wal-Mart specific factor, as the other local supermarket (I forget what it was called) had a fairly normal sized fruit & veg section.
ReplyDeleteYou know that Asda is owned by Wal-Mart?
ReplyDeleteThink of all the money Europeans will save at Walmart after every family has bought three cars and the landscape has been remade to accomodate all the driving and parking. Hey look, a gallon of milk is $1 cheaper. What a bargain!
ReplyDeleteI live in a metro area of about 100000 people in the middle of nowhere Amurkin' west and I have 2 (!!) large size Walmarts within 5 miles of me.
ReplyDeleteI've been in them about a dozen times in the last ten years and the only thing I have been able to find that suited my needs at the time was a case of shotgun shells (for quail hunting).
They seem to serve everybody else's needs just fine though, given how busy they are, night and day. Surely you want this too.
Oddly enough I found just about everything I needed for cooking for the family in the little "Coop" store near where we were staying in Italy this summer. But you know what? The damn thing was closed in the afternoon. The Walmarts always are open in the afternoon.
As has been pointed out, they're heeere. Actually, some of the ASDAs outside the M25 (but suitably close to a major exurban dual carriageway, obviously) have been rebranded as WalMart Supercentres, but not many. Still looks faintly weird.
ReplyDeleteWhat's doing the work here is a national planning guideline introduced by John Prescott**'s DETR* in 1999 or thereabouts that made it very difficult to build new big-box retail developments on greenfield sites. If I really screw my brain up I might even remember its number, but Charlie Whitaker no doubt knows better. There's a reason why the iconic shoppolagers (Meadowhall, Trafford, Bluewater, Lakeside) were all begun before about 1998 and Westfield and the new Bullring are hyper-urban.
I wonder how soon Dave from PR will get around to doing that one in?
*Remember DETR?
**Remember John Prescott? Damn, I miss Labour, especially the bits before about the 10th of September 2001 and after the middle of July 2007.
Also, on Saislegy's original post, you'd be surprised how heavily German-influenced Amazon.com is.
ReplyDeleteI am wrong! Here is a copy of PPG-6 itself. Turns out John Selwyn Burgers issued it on the way out of the door in '96, and Prezza and Dick Caborn gave it another turn of the screw in 1998-2000.
ReplyDeleteyebbut, ASDA is really not at all like WalMart. Even the big box centres weren't like the Walmart I went to in Florida. And presumably they never will be, for the reasonably good reason that to suddenly try to push a totally foreign retailing model would negatively effect sales.
ReplyDelete"But the other thing is that we’re the world leaders in retail sector organizational innovations"
ReplyDeleteYglesias really has become an embarrassing ignorant hack. The companies who're actually most respected in the retail sector for their organisational, supply-chain skills are Tesco and Inditex (Zara). Wal-Mart's primarily respected for its regulatory capture. And it's more or less failed at everything it's tried to do outside America, except for buying Asda and not changing it too much.
Oh, and IKEA.
ReplyDeleteI did a blog on this: here
ReplyDeleteWhy not to say frankly here?
ReplyDeleteThe ratio of freezer space devoted to frozen vegetables in Wally World to that filled frozen processed foods is equally striking. The local bogstandard supermarket has about as much space devoted to frozen veg as it does to microwave meals; Walmart has about an aisle's worth of frozen pizzas.
ReplyDeleteJudging from my in-laws who use their local Walmart for most of their shopping, there's really no point having an extensive fruit & veg section, because they don't eat the stuff, and their kids definitely won't. They consider it deeply suspect and probably unAmerican.
(And yes, Yglesias is going for the "Chunky Megan McArdle" thing about 30% of the time these days.)
Walmart's ignominious retreat from Germany is all the more telling because most of my time in Germany is spent in its plentiful big-box retail parks (typically Familla outside Leer, which advertises in Dutch in the local free newspaper and where Dutch is the lingua franca of the liquor aisle.)
ReplyDeleteSo it is by no means only Aldi and Lidl who administered the kickings.
From the dim distant past, and possibly on this 'blog, I remember a study done by McKinsey, or Bain, or maybe even Peter Mandelson, which founds the 'productivity gap' with the US was found in financial services and retailing. I think you (D2) pointed out that these are notoriously hard areas in which to measure productivity (and I guess there just isn't the land in retailing), but maybe this is what he is getting at? I suppose I could read MY's original post, but you will notice I haven't.
ReplyDeleteIt might have been about the time Brad De Long declared there were no hypermarkets in France.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, here we go
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2003/08/28/walmart-and-productivity-round-2/
Blimey that's 7 years ago, I do feel old.
*Yglesias really has become an embarrassing ignorant hack.*
ReplyDeleteHe's better now than when he started. I was extremely surprised when he didn't go to the New Republic. In college he was a little jerk.
Where I am Walmart has, by and large, the best selection and prices. It's competing with smaller stores that are not niche stores.
in terms of price per crap, I would rate Walmart slightly ahead of both Carrefour and giant Migros (Swiss). Although clearly the fresh stuff at the European shops was much better.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience to our host, and also noted that the fruit and veg aisle was half the size of the indigestion remedies aisle. Really.
ReplyDeleteAnd this was in California, where good fruit and veg is really, really good and really cheap.