Amazon in Germany

Sunday night was a curious event with the Gunther Jauch show.  It's the big political chat show of the week, for most Germans.

This week's topic?  Amazon.

The guests were an odd crowd.  It was mostly a dump-on-Amazon episode.  The aggressive nature was marked as a bad thing.  The management and pay scale of employees was marked as a negative.  And the threat across the spectrum for other German business operations was repeated over and over.

What was pointed out....is that the public is embracing Amazon and the one-button mentality.  The public in Germany wants a service where things are advertised neatly and in a concise fashion.  They want to have the ability to order while on the run.  And they want the item delivered in two or three days.

It got brought up that vegetables and fruit are next on the list for Amazon to develop and sell via the internet in Germany.  No one is sure where this will go and how successful it might be.  The chances that ten percent of the public might be dedicated to buying apples via the internet within five years?  There's no way to predict this.  But I would take a guess that five to ten percent of the German population will drift toward it and use it several times a year.

Amazon in Germany has a public appearance problem.  They are encroaching onto sacred German customer traditions.  There are various companies in Germany who have a fear of what is coming.

Wal-Mart came into Germany back in the 1990s, and found a fairly hostile atmosphere.  Legally, they were challenged over and over, for the practices that made them big money in the US.  Eventually, Wal-Mart felt enough pain, and gave up.  You can't start a Wal-Mart in Germany today....because of the 'fire-wall' that was put by Germans.

Amazon?  They've gone around the Wal-Mart issues, and put up fresh new problems.  The lesser of German companies will sit there and try to bad-mouth the company enough....hoping on the same end-solution as Wal-Mart.....dragging them to failure within Germany.

The problem?  There's just too many Germans using Amazon now.  If the workers got really greedy....Amazon could shut down one of the warehouse operations, and start moving some operations off into France, the Netherlands, Poland, or Czech.  A flick of the switch, and you would have exercised a change that was not possible back in the 1990s.

For this reason, I think Amazon is resolved to stay.  They don't have a plan "B" like Wal-Mart.