Other Crap

"Believe or not, this is only the opening of a supermarket in Berlin!"

What can you say? Those Germans love their supermarkets! They must have been having a sausage sale. (Actually, that's not really a supermarket. It's a consumer electronics store, but still ... that's a lot of people.)

Austrians loved their supermarkets as well. When I lived in Vienna there was a hypermarket in the south of the metro area that looked like these pictures every Saturday morning at their opening hour. By the time they opened the doors, there were hundreds of shopping carts pressed against the gates, ready to race inside.

There is a logical reason for this, sort of. In the early 90s, most supermarkets in Vienna were open 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. That was an antiquated part of a older culture in which all families had a non-working spouse who could easily shop during those hours, and preferred to. In modern times, with many single people and families with two wage earners, there were only two choices: take time off from work to shop in an old-fashioned supermarket; or drive down to the one and only hypermarket on Saturday.

That explains why the hypermarket was so crowded, but not why people rushed to get there as the doors opened. Of course, there were the usual reasons like the freshest meat and produce, but to me the bigest incentive was that if one got to the check-out first, one could shop in an hour or so, whereas a late arrival could mean spending all day at the hypermarket! Not only was it incredibly jammed, but some people were buying thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. You see, many of the small supermarkets actually did their own shopping on Saturday at the hypermarket! The wholesaling process was not as sophisticated there as in the United States, where all the major vendors bring everything directly to the storefronts of small businesses. It was not uncommon to see people check out with truckloads worth of merchandise! And I mean that they would literally fill up trucks.

Now imagine getting in line at your local Safeway behind someone buying five thousand dollars worth of groceries! Even if nobody else were in front of you, that would be daunting and irritating. Now imagine that there are twenty more people in line behind that customer and ahead of you! Can you see why people wanted to get there early?

Small retailing there was not only inconvenient, it was so specialized that it required one to go to multiple inconvenient locations! On my morning commute to work, I used to have to make four different stops to get a newspaper, a coffee, a pack of cigarettes, and a Diet Coke.

One of our biggest early challenges in developing convenience stores in German-speaking countries was that there was absolutely no concept of "convenience." The word "convenience," as we understand it in the States, can't even be translated into German, and the reason they have no word for it is because words name things, and there was nothing to name! (Just as I assume the Saharan nomads have no word for snow.) The idea that a single business should provide in one nearby location everything its customers want whenever they might want it was so foreign that there was not even a good way to describe it!

As you can imagine, consumers actually responded favorably to convenience stores, even if they didn't know what to call them. They also responded favorably to extended grocery hours, so the situation I described above no longer exists. Turns out that they were really not very attached to the part of their culture that required them to make four stops on the way to work and then use their lunch hour to do the weekly grocery shopping.