There has been a significant deterioration of quality of products over the last several decades. This occurred mainly in north america, but europe as well to a much smaller extent. This is because manufacturers realized that the people more and more want cheap things with more features or a new style than they want quality. And so the manufacturers/retailers are quite happy to sell you a piece of crap 3 times instead of 1 quality item at a higher price. generally speaking the consumer looses because they end up paying again and again, and more in total. This observation is not absolute. The price of the quality item however can be excessively high relative to the low quality item making the cheaper item a better purchase. I blame the consumers for wanting new/cheap/with lots of useless features. If that is what they want. That is what they will get. You cant fight the masses, just like you cant fight the markets.
Maybe an additional reason for this is the concept of choice. Americans can buy BMW's without much in the way of import taxes, at least as I understand it. If the post about cordless phones from above in this thread is correct, and those types of duties and taxes are still in place, it is almost as effective at keeping out imports as outright restrictions. Germany is dominated by unions and they don't want imports any more than unions in the USA, it's just that they have much more power in Germany. I would suggest you would have to take away the import fees and let the products compete against each other naked of these fees before you could really make a clear statement about what consumers prefer. Not only that, but doesn't it stand to reason that there are import fees precisely because unions know which product will be preferred when there are no fees?
Talking about Germans not liking CRAP: An interesting exercise in all this is to add up all the taxes that those dudes are paying compared to the after tax income in the US. Don't come up with that Europeam boilerplate fable of "Social Security". All the BMW and Mercedes nonsense is OK for people loving to pay 3 or 4 times for a car of what it is really worth. I recall very well dismal performance of BMW and Mercedes cars as compared to "cheap" Fords and Chevrolets under typical North-American/Canadian Winter wheather conditions. Ridiculous. Only VW seemed to be about as reliable as Ford/Chevrolet. Further, many industrial products from Germany were considered as pricey and "over-engineered", no match for reliability of US comparable products. Documentation was often shoddy. Of course, this period has kind of ended now. US machine tools like Gardner Denver and Cincinati Millacron, for which btw never any German match existed, have been long surpassed by Japanese competition.
I for one am happy that Walmart is pulling out of Germany. It is sickening to travel to Europe and see the same names we see here everywhere you go. McDonalds, BK, Starbucks...etc.... and the list continues. The idea of having open markets and competition is good but to the point of not letting one or two brands dominate the whole landscape. Specially places where tourists go like Europe.(me) With that said, German made has always had inherently better quality that US made.
That's true for those who don't know anything but German. ______________________ Deutschland ueber Alles
Don't knock the Germans, they're nice people and it's a great country. Food is good, people are interesting and the beer is lovely. Maybe some of you Americans should go and visit it sometime instead of just going to the Mall
Wal-Mart simply didnât understand the German market. They tried to act like the superdiscounter with the lowest price but they didnât see that other discounters already dominated this place for decades (Aldi, Lidl). These discounters offered cheaper prices and had much more and better located (smaller) stores. They donât offer 30 different cornflakes from 30 different companies, they donât have 20 different Cokes etcâ¦..in fact you donât even have a choice in most cases. But this has one advantage: The (exclusive) suppliers can sell a large quantity to these discounters and therefore everything offered is also cheap for the customers. And quality is not a problem at all as no supplier can afford to be banned by these discounters. Other (higher priced supermarkets) can only survive when they find their own niches. Some sell mainly products the discounters donât have, other started to offer trend products (like bio products), others only focus on rural locations where no other competition exists. Wal-Mart tried to cover it all with no focus. So they havenât been the cheapest nor did they meet the demand with trend products nor did they have the best locations. Finally I cannot say anything bad about Wal Mart but others have been simply better.
mujoh, you are right. Germans buy a lot of cheap stuff, and they do not really care about "slave workers". There is a new saying here "Geiz ist geil" which means "stingy is cool"... I really used to thing, we have the "greens" in germany and statistically the voters of them are the worse then average when it comes to energy consumtion, so they simply do not walk their talk, but are big in critizising institutions or companies. I have been shopping some stuff there, since they had good selection, but the bigger shopping I do at penny or aldi. Still, people at wall mart where very friendly, something that should be learned by aldi and penny! Regards Andreas
here's a hint: The Mall is closer, besides I personally hate traveling. nothing against the germans Maybe i'll visit the euroweenie countries when I'm old and crippled and BORED.