The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .
The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.
They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.
Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves.
> They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well.
In here they've also opened a tourism agency that does quite well (or used to do before the virus hit).
I agree though about the big difference between the German and US management. I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German) when addressing herself to her bosses on the company's hallways (said friend used to work for a big US company before moving to Lidl). She was lucky though because not a week after her arrival there was a company-wide email coming from the powers that be instructing the employees to use the less formal singular "you" instead of the more formal plural "you", to which all the employees in the company acquiesced.
Another data point from Lidls homeland regarding the wage of the "shop people" from about 10 years ago. While we had endless political discussions about minimum wage there were numbers of 7,50EUR to 8,50EUR per hour in the air at that time. Don't remember exactly anymore. What i DO remember though is that they had signs in the shops which you couldn't miss when standing at the cashier. They read 10EUR per hour, and later 11 to 12. They don't do that in shop signaling anymore, but nowadays it is around 15EUR i believe, while other retailers/discounters pay significantly less, except ALDI. And we still have that discussion over a mandatory minimum wage in all sectors, and it is ridiculously low.
Lidl and Aldi both expect a lot from their employees. The high productivity justifies the pay.
Not everyone wants such an intense job. So I am not sure it is a good idea to force eg other retailers into the same strategy. They already have Aldi and Lidl to compete with on the labour market, so there's already opportunity for workers to get higher pay, if they want to make that bargain.
I'm not talking about bad treatment. I'm talking about hard work.
But 'what to do?' is easy to answer in principle but hard to implement in practice: lower barriers to entry for new companies, and for companies wanting to expand into other industries or markets. Make it easy for workers to move between jobs. (By, for example, not tying health insurance to your job.)
While i'm not working there, i casually know some people who did at the store level, shelving/cashier. It's not less hard at f.e. Edeka or Rewe either. That's what i meant. And health insurance isn't tied to a job here. And when you are shopping, if you are not absolutely ignorant, you can see and compare the range of tasks a single person has to do where and when. There is not much difference to be seen, and backstage it isn't different either.
edit: I'm unsure what you mean by lower barriers to entry.
I'm all in for barriers if they ensure following safe and healthy practice!
Oh, I'm more comparing to American supermarkets. They have much higher staffing levels than what competition with Lidl and Aldi has forced the German retail landscape down to.
(Btw, 'for example' is spelled e.g. not f.e. in English. And German 'd.h' (das heißt) is i.e. in English. They are curious creatures and have a thing for Latin. Most people still pronounce eg as 'for example' and ie as 'that is'.)
I guess you mean the 2nd person form (du or ihr fir singular or plural) instead of the 3rd person plural (Sie), which is the courtesy form fir singular and plural.
Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”.
> Yes, in German it’s a big deal, roughly the same as saying “Hey dude” instead of “Good morning Mr Smith”.
It's been changing for decades across a lot of languages. I grew up in Norway where these forms were dying out as I was a child (70's/80's) and mostly used to older people, to the point where they're now mostly used sarcastically to imply someone is a pompous ass or to very old people or in very formal situations. But go back another decade or two and it was common.
When I moved to the UK in 2000, even that was a weird shift up for me in formality (being called "sir" in shops, and having people actually use "mister" in front of my last name) compared to Norway.
But by the 90's my French and German teacher had both insisted we learn to use the formal forms but also both told stories about how that would already then sometimes make you seem old and stuffy, and to listen for what others said and if in doubt ask and to roughly assume we could get away with the informal form with our own age group and younger but default to the formal forms for older people just in case.
My own experience has been that most people I've met in Germany on business trips mostly have thought I've been more formal than necessary at first and told me I can use "du", because I've erred on the side of caution, but it's also varied a lot by location and age group and situation. Since I use my German relatively I'd rather start out too formal than misjudge the situation the other direction.
I've lived in both Germany and currently Sweden. I have asked about the formal address here in Sweden, and the only time someone ever said you might use it is when talking to one of the royal family (while trying to suppress a laugh). Most younger people respond by saying that we don't have a formal-informal distinction here, which in practice is pretty true.
I have a good friend who spent half his childhood in Germany and then moved here (fluent in English, Deutsch, and Svenska). I asked about whether he would use formal or informal when visiting back home in Germany, or when talking to another German using German here in Sweden. Without hesitating, he said he always uses formal.
I have another German friend, who has been here only for about a year so far, of whom I asked the same: "Definitely I would use informal with any German here."
When I was in Germany, I could easily get away with using informal with anyone, because as clearly a foreigner with only moderate language skills, one can be forgiven many faux pas.
Interestingly, my spouse who is a fluent German speaker but also not native always falls into using formal address. She is quite often reprimanded for being too formal in situations that do not call for it. But that formal training was really rigorously applied, so she cannot help it. Even with our close friends sometimes.
W.r.t. my German-Swede friend, after we talked about it, he postulated that the reason he always defaults to formal is that he left Germany as a child, and so he never went through the transitory phase where children start to learn to talk to adults as equals.
I think the death of the formal forms in Sweden relatively closely mirrored the changes in Norwegian. In Scandinavia I feel it was in part at least hastened by the post-war political landscape where the strength of the workers movement meant there was a big push towards a more egalitarian society in general, and that was carried over into language reforms.
I think the notion of using the formal forms only when talking to the royal family is close to how it would be in Norwegian too. In written language it retains every so slightly more use, but then too the only times it would be used non-sarcastically would be in something like e.g. an invite to something very formal. E.g. if I received an invite to a black tie event, then maybe it wouldn't be out of place. It'd still feel old fashioned, but then sometimes that is the goal.
> But that formal training was really rigorously applied, so she cannot help it. Even with our close friends sometimes.
I think that's the case for a lot of people who learned these languages some time ago - my teachers knew there was a transition happening, but would rather have us come across as too formal or polite than insult someone, especially as the focus was on learning these languages for business rather than for personal use, and it's really hard to get used to changing those things for languages you don't use every day in particular.
Interesting how currently the formal forms appear to be dying out, but back when English went through the same process it was the informal form ("thee/thou") that died.
Austrian living in Norway here. The Sie/du thing has gotten less strict, but there's still a lot of social situations where starting out with a du would be quite awkward. It's usually fine among colleagues (esp. in university and modern IT companies), but wherever there's a more stratified hierarchy(pretty much all service sector interactions for instance) it's always a good idea to stick with Sie.
> and mostly used to older people, to the point where they're now mostly used sarcastically to imply someone is a pompous ass or to very old people or in very formal situations.
I'd say that sounds pretty similar to how it's used among German speakers, at least those who are 30 or younger.
Parent says Eastern European country, well, I had the bad luck to be born in Hungary (am Canadian now), and I fully understand what happened. It's a generation divide. I am 45 and I am one of the oldest for whom it doesn't matter and looks downright outdated but even to many in my age cohort and especially older it's exceptionally offensive, irrespectful to use the familiar form of "you". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase#Forms_fo... With a huge emphasis on irrespectful -- it's downright disdainful to call someone so without asking for permission to address them so. There is a tradition -- or rather was -- where they used to toast on the occassion of switching from formal address to informal. It's that big of a deal: there was a ritual, simple as it was, on switching the form of address. In the 1920-30s the gendarmerie used to address everyone informally and it was really offensive and a form of asserting dominance -- it was always the superior, the elder who offered the inferior, the younger to switch from formal to informal thus the gendarmerie not even offering just using it declared they are vastly superior to everyone. And the phrase still exists for such offensive behaviour. It really is -- or rather was -- a big deal.
I am saying, it was, because starting the late 90s with the spread of Internet and pseudo-anonimity all this just became outdated -- you had no idea whom you are talking to so observing the old rules were impossible. And those who have grown up with this simply didn't bother learning the rules. For me, when I was 18, it was a Big Deal that at our high school graduation party our class leader teacher allowed everyone to switch from formal to informal. It was basically the only time in my life when something like that happened, then I started using the 'Net shortly after (all this was in '93) and this stuff was just washed away.
In Polish the polite way is not plural you, but Sir/Madam in third person. (Which is an interesting artifact of social history, with lots of petty nobility and other classes partly adapting that style even long ago.) There was also the toast, which is still performed in some conservative circles, I think.
I am in my late 20s and did find it excessive when university students from former Soviet Union (not knowing Polish well) use the polite form "pan"/"pani" for fellow students. I think there was some mis-mapping of forms. But otherwise it should be used in any situation when there is a hint of power imbalance or transactional relation. Informal to people at parties, formal to a store attendant and such. For example, I think that the fact that high school students are addressed by teachers with informal "ty", but are required to address them with "pan" is very demeaning and adds to the soul-warping, prison-like atmosphere of schools. At the university level, removing this felt like fresh air.
Recently there is a push in corporate/"hip" circles to use the informal way everywhere and even many young people don't like it. Many want to be able to hide behind "pan"/"pani" from your sales, marketing or otherwise pushy BS. I think that "ty" has to come with some expectation of sincerity and equality.
On the other hand, I find random French or German websites addressing their users with vous/Sie hilarious for some reason. It makes the relation seem businessy. Which okay, it often is in the modern internet.
Very interesting similarity with Romania. Wondering if that’s because of the cultural link between the two countries or wether it’s something common across east Europe. In romania lords (either romanian or hungarian) demanded serfs to address to them in second person, and thus it became formal speech.
It was somewhat similar in eastern Ukraine when I lived there from 2007-2009, but perhaps not so intense. Russian is not my first language, so at first I would always play it safe and speak formally - to young children, to dogs, to people my age. People thought it was pretty funny.
A lot of the comments below indicate that that the Du/Sie distinction is something old fashioned and young people don't do this anymore. This is arguably false. Even though it might not be at the same level as it was 70 or 80 years ago, this distinction is still very much part of the German language and society.
With people my age I would probably always use the informal Du, but only in informal situations. In case of formal interactions, as part of a business transaction, etc. I would probably always go to the Sie if I didn't know the person and would expect the same in reverse. Anything else would probably be perceived as lacking respect. English doesn't have anything equivalent except maybe first name/last name basis, so it's always hard to explain to Americans.
Of course, as a foreigner things are always less strict and one gets some slack for not speaking the language perfectly.
It's a cultural thing that's subject to change. The Netherlands technically has two forms as well, but the use of the formal one in practice has greatly reduced and people don't put much weight on the distinction anymore. Certainly wouldn't get offended if you used the informal one. Used to be different 50 years ago.
I don't know where you're at but I have never seen this treated as that big of a deal in my 8 years of living in Austria & 7 in Germany unless you're talking to the prime minister (and especially not if you're obviously not a native speaker).
Maybe more comparable to addressing someone by their first name instead of Mr./Ms./Mrs. <last-name>.
That might not be an issue on the countryside (everything outside Vienna ;), but it is definitely very impolite to address another adult person with "du" instead of "Sie" if they have not offered you to call them with the informal pronoun. However, that might be different with younger people.
Most definitely. Being relatively young, I don't think it's any different. In a work environment it's always "Sie", until one is offered "du". First name/family name depends on how companies/individuals handle it.
Apart from that, people handle it differently. "Sie" basically always for people older than you and some use "du" for others around your age (unless it's in a more professional setting). There is no difference between the countryside and cities.
Seems to be true for Vienna. I'm not native speaker and can say that some people weren't pleased to be called "du" (same age or not) and the whole city seems very formal.
Du/Sie and first name/last name are almost without exception divided along the same lines in German. Sie plus first name is how a person with extreme status expectations would address their butler, and just as old-fashioned. "I'm sorry you can never be my peer but I respect you anyways". Last name and Du would be using the last name as a nickname in a decidedly first name situation. Think "bro" but timeless.
I can vouch for the Kassiererinnen-Du being used. My mom runs the butcher in a supermarket. She and and many of her coworkers share a lot about themselves, but they still address each as other as Frau Schmidt and Herr Schulze.
"Sie" and first name was used at a smallish company (~50 employees) I worked at previously. It's just a combination of respect and familiarity. Additionally, several women really liked being called by their first name as it "made them feel less old".
This is very old-fashioned & I guess geographically dependent: we used to live in Vienna where you'd expect to use Sie (formal) with any adult you don't personally know where as we now live in Berlin where everyone uses du (informal).
Either way nobody who isn't an asshole will get a non-native speaker in trouble for mixing these up & even in Austria my experience was that they will just be a bit perplexed but continue speaking as if the "du faux pas" didn't happen.
It was a bit surprising to me to see that in Spain you only use the formal plural with much older people, if then, whereas in Greece you'd use it with any stranger that wasn't about your age AND you had some rapport with.
I guess I expected cultures to be similar in who gets the polite treatment, but they're really not.
This "Du/Sie" thing is a local shit test in Germany in my opinion. Comparable to what I experienced in strictly hierarchical enterprises like Sony US in the early 2010th, where at least one Senior Manager would only talk to an employee directly, instead only to her senior manager (same level BS).
Informal is owning the workforce finally, it is on the rise, and you can use it as a shit detector. People who value hierarchy over merits will refer to these manners. Others not. :)
I always struggled with this in Germany as a foreigner.
Coming from a country in which the so called formal form changed significantly in the last decades and is now reserved to people you don't want to get along with (that's how politicians refer to members of other parties, or how customer support starts to address you after you tell them that you want to quit the contract), I always ended up using the informal form, which translated into many funny stares.
Many people who formally learn German as a second language (as opposed to just picking it up on the spot) seem to default to Sie. I guess that's what they teach in the Goethe institute.
Defaulting to Sie seems like a safe default. At worst you get some funny looks for being overly formal, but you don't insult anyone.
I don’t think it’s just German. When I started learning Russian, 95% of what I was taught was on вы (plural/formal you). When you’re a beginner you really lean on stock phrases and bits you learned in class, so when I moved to Kharkov everything I said was formal for about six months. It took a year before I really stopped speaking to children or pets formally. It makes sense I guess, if you’re not sure formal is probably safer than informal (although speaking to someone formally when you should be speaking informally can also be insulting.)
It’s not just knowing when to use formal/informal - native speakers often forget this but in languages with verbs that conjugate, a beginner learner may not be as good with the Du conjugations as they are with Sie. Again, when you are just starting with the language or you’re not confident you lean on repeating things you’ve learned and if you were taught Sie then that’s what you do.
> It makes sense I guess, if you’re not sure formal is probably safer than informal (although speaking to someone formally when you should be speaking informally can also be insulting.)
You get lots of leeway on the latter as a foreigner.
Very true, however I’ve noticed in pretty much every culture speaking the lingua franca poorly often means you are treated nicely but not very seriously.
It's also easier. When using "Sie" you need to use the infinitive form of the verb ("brauchen Sie etwas?", "werden Sie das so machen?") while when using "Du" you need to use the very special and complicated 2nd person form ("brauchst Du was?", "wirst Du das so machen?").
>I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you"
Sounds reasonable. If someone did the same to me in a professional setting my instinct would be to treat it as an intentional lack of respect. Albeit my language is French (but it functions the same as German in that case).
As someone who is familiar with formal/informal you difference in 3 languages (French, Farsi, and Azerbaijani), I had the same reaction. But I guess things are difference in German.
I'm sure anyone who works for a Japanese company would understand. The class/power dynamics are built into the language itself, and in most situations it is not socially appropriate to respond to your boss in the same "register" as they might address you.
> Just to add another data point, Lidl is also the retailer that pays the best market salaries in the Eastern-European country where I live in (they actually included that in several of their hiring ads), and I'm talking about shop people like cashiers and the people that put things on the shelves.
Just to add another data point: in the small town when I come from (southern italy) the Lidl store was a total failure and a complete mess. They acquired land built the whole building, opened short of staff, operated briefly (always short on staff and with a huge turnover) and then had huge problems with (afaik) the legality of the contracts for employees and allegedly employee mistreating.
That Lidl store didn't last long, to put it nicely, and the building is still on sale many years after that.
> she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German)
Are Germans usually this strict about language in a professional setting? I am from the USA but worked for a company with offices in Germany for a couple years. They were formal in some ways but also made many jokes that could get you fired in the USA. Maybe my experience was the exception.
German here. I absolutely loathe the formal form. It can be compared to using "Sir" with your superiors. While it is super common to address people informally in younger IT companies, in more traditional ones it is mostly informal.
If they talk formal, run. It's most likely a shithole.
This level of formality between people I find very patriarchal and outdated. Also, with people you just met it becomes somewhat awkward to always ask for which formality to use. English is doing very well without it.
When meeting new people, it's actually a pretty good indication of whether the interaction is strictly business, or might include off-topic conversations.
I hear a lot of horror stories about German management working at Cluj Napoca’s tech companies, and beyond. If left unchecked they will continue doing so.
> I agree though about the big difference between the German and US management. I have a close friend that works at the regional Lidl HQ and she got reprimanded just after being hired for having used the singular "you" (less formal) instead of the plural "you" (I'm not sure how it translates into German) when addressing herself to her bosses on the company's hallways
Using "du" instead of "Sie" for adressing people can be a very serious issue. If you do this to a policeman, for example, you can be fined by typically 600 € in Germany (source: https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/beamtenbeleidigung/). To give an analogue in the English language: you wouldn't address your boss with "yo nigga". So I believe the reprimand was rather rightfully.
A rule in the German language is: in doubt, use the more formal language register. The "default language register" in German is typically "one register more formal" than the "default language register" in English.
Using the informal "du" over "Sie" is not anywhere near using the n-word in english. Raising your outstretched hand just above head hight to greet someone would be, though.
Overall, using "du" is acceptable in 90% of social interactions. It's only when talking to people in higher positions or as a courtesy to elderly / unfamiliar people.
> Overall, using "du" is acceptable in 90% of social interactions.
This holds for private life. In professional life (except for IT industry and design industry; both are much more casual in the interaction style), it is rather "Sie" is acceptable in 90% of social interactions.
>Overall, using "du" is acceptable in 90% of social interactions. It's only when talking to people in higher positions or as a courtesy to elderly / unfamiliar people.
I don't think there is a mapping to this in English. I've studied some Spanish and German - You learn about the various verb and pronoun forms based on informal and formal "you". This is a part of the core language, the spec, so to speak.
In English, there is no spec for different levels of formality. There is no universally documented way to being less courteous to bosses and policemen. Saying "sup dude" or "how's it going" is part of the American standard library, not the language.
And to your point directly, "nigga" is incredibly informal and casual, and would never be something anyone (much less a non-native speaker) should ever use unless they know what they are doing. And usually, they should be black, too.
Well it just so happens I am black and I've been using the word most of my life.
Nigga is just "bro" or "dude" but exclusively used among black/minority communities. I realize the word nigga is A Big Deal for white people but really in our community it is used as casually as the word "like" in any given sentence. Interestingly I have even used it with black bosses before in a joking casual way.
You're ignoring the fact that a non-negligible percentage of black people don't want to be called any version of "nigga" by anybody, including other black people.
When I was learning German I read somewhere that English used to have different forms for "you" just like German. Which wouldn't be weird since the languages are closely related.
Yes, in English we fully adopted the formal which is "You" for both formal / informal speech. The familiar / informal was "Thou" - which is a bit weird because now we think of "Thou" as being a bit formal because it is so old-fashioned.
> To give an analogue in the English language: you wouldn't address your boss with "yo n"
Not even close, not even close. Why would you even write this? This must be a dog whistle.
Edit: that link you posted justs lists the €600 as "this happened once and depends on income of offender", also there is no source.
In addition, the intro paragraph says
> Es gibt jedoch bei Beleidigung keinen „Bußgeldkatalog“. Vor Gericht wird der Straftatbestand der Beleidigung verurteilt.
which translates to there is no schedule of penalties but it all depends on the statutory offence.
So my understanding is there was a criminal offence that included an insult (saying "Du") which was mentioned in the report but not the cause for the fine in the first place.
> The "default language register" in German is typically "one register more formal" than the "default language register" in English.
Fun offtopic fact: The default register in English is actually more formal than most people realise. English had "thou" as the informal second person, and "you" as the more formal variant, but "thou" died out, leaving only the formal register. Curiously enough, Brazilian Portuguese underwent the exact same phenomenon, so they use "você" informally, whereas European Portuguese uses it as the formal second person.
In France, there's a soft tendency to use the plural you ("vous") a lot more because of the more rigid French class system. In Quebec it's seen as a snobby thing to do due to the more working ass culture.
That said, in neither country would anyone ever get a monetary fine for using one over the other. That's crazytown
We had both a French exchange student and Quebecois exchange student in high school, he would frequently do a french impersonation of something akin to the Beverly Hillbillies and make the Quebecois girl cry. Being a town of rednecks ourselves everyone thought it was wonderful.
Additionally, this is a clear signalling that Apple targets consumers and not companies. German Apple haters scoff that this informal addressing in Apple's commercials is a clear admission that Apple's products are not suitable for doing serious work.
Such kind of informal addressing in advertizing is a very double-edged sword: Some companies (besides Apple also Ikea) use this kind of advertizing to brand themselves as hip and informal while many Germans consider this as "cheap ingratiation" [billige Anbiederung].
I am sure that this kind of advertizing made it much harder for Apple's sales department to sell to big companies.
Something funny that I noticed is that German PC gaming magazines are now saying "Sie" to their readers. I guess it makes sense - most of them are adults and some of them not even very young adults these days.
Why "now"? I used to read the PC Games a decently long time ago and it was always "Sie". Same with the PC Action and Computer Bild Spiele. No clue about the Gamestar but those were basically the relevant PC gaming magazines.
English has many faults, but I am proud of our limited number of cases and (standard) conjugations.
It must be taught since it's a part of the language, but I almost wish non-native German students could skip the "du" tense entirely, if it's that much of a faux pas to use it in the wrong scenario.
Which is exactly what I did coming out of undergrad University here in the US. I started work and then for fun I went and formally studied German at a local college, taught by a native speaker born in Köln. I was educated to use Sie out of respect and only use du with close friends, children, and only when instructed by co-workers and other associates. In my travels I have had many discussions in German and have not once been repremanded, only on occasion told I am fine to use the informal form.
>> The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at a crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is a large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this.
This is exactly what I have guessed. Many people think that replicating AWS is just the question of money. It is not. Most of the great datacenter people are hired by AWS, MS and Google. These are the guys who can think of cost efficient reliable solutions, quite often inventing new things in the process that the outside world has no idea. I was watching countless videos while working for Amazon about the data center tech. Mind blown, every single time. I seriously doubt that the Schwarz group will be able to attract the talent to replicate this. Many of the AWS guys are life timers, do not care about money. What is a more likely scenario that they will burn through a few billion EUR before realizing that they know nothing about cloud computing and cut their losses.
> Many of the AWS guys are life timers, do not care about money
I've heard, anecdotally, that Amazon/AWS engineers tend to be more money-driven than others in the same tier, or at least they're willing to put up with a lot more headaches because of the money.
I used to work for Google and have friends at Amazon.
Google definitely seems to have the better working conditions. The impact on the world you have is probably similar. So relatively speaking, I'd expect people at Amazon to be into it for the money more.
Google pays better than amazon though and if you really want money, you go to facebook as they are known for top pay and promoting you really fast if you are willing to put in the hours.
Granted, this is assuming you can get into each one and there is some luck in that so a lot of people are just where they could get in.
> Granted, this is assuming you can get into each one and there is some luck in that so a lot of people are just where they could get in.
Yes, though I assume that if you can not only get in but get at least one promotion at one of the big tech companies, the others would take you as well.
I don't know. Maybe in the lower engineering tiers. The senior datacenter people are not as easy to move. The made a fortune when AMZN went from 130 to 2000 in a relatively short time. Not sure though.
I was running a stall at a graduate careers fair and was amazed at the interest both Aldi and Lidl were getting.
Both had amazing starting salaries - I think Aldi was £48k rising to £70k over 3 years if you went on the area manager scheme. Plus a car. The teams there were so enthusiastic and energised and appeared to really really enjoy their jobs.
I am impressed by any company that consistently looks after their staff financially and otherwise.
I don't have firsthand experience but from what I know those salaries come with very high expectations. Things like "you have to drive to some random neighborhood on a Sunday to check that flyers were being delivered correctly'.
Once you're in a managing position, expectations can be high. Depends on the department however. Everything that is core business related (purchasing, logistics, store management) can be insane. Especially IT is a joke, mostly. But that's just my perspective.
So they are largely comparable to SV salaries at Google/Facebook. Which means since Google/Facebook pay more than average, they are above average for SV.
And that's at places like Berlin which are cheaper to live than SV.
GP said that the salaries would make senior engineers in Silicon Valley pale. That implies that they're much higher. Instead, they're actually much lower, as I suspected.
This is true even for the senior engineers, at around half the compensation or so; for the principal engineers and directors, working somewhere like Google or FB gets you 3-5x what's quoted for Lidl.
> So they are largely comparable to SV salaries at Google/Facebook
This is completely wrong. Compensation for senior engineers at Google/FB is around 350k USD: https://www.levels.fyi/#
> And that's at places like Berlin which are cheaper to live than SV.
Agreed. Nevertheless, the salaries aren't going to make any senior engineers in SV "pale", when they're half as much.
Agreed! Let me clarify: high wages, once you're an engineering manager it's probably comparable. However, you're not nearly as relevant, from a value-sdd perspective. FAANG etc. are software companies. Lidl is an offline retailer. So top notch engineering there is not nearly as critical as for a company like facebook. So let me rephrase: way more buck for way less bang!
They don't have any IT skills, but much money and are constantly crying for "digital transformation" what usually only leads them to being conned by big consulting agencies.
Having worked in multiple German Blue Chips, my 5 cents:
- Brain-drain, likely (US vs German salaries is a joke) but also likely offset by brain-gain from other places (in my experience only Scandinavia, Netherlands and Switzerland beat German salaries, lately)
- safety-seeking culture draws the wrong people to the big corps. The more of them there are, the worse productivity and innovation gets.
- because of their appeal to masses of safety-seeking underperformers wages at German blue-chips are usually noticeably lower than at consultancies or Mittelstand, pushing away even those few talented they did recruit
- keeping talented and motivated people long-term is even harder because if enough of the wrong there are, you’ll often have strictly defined career-options, so that e.g. after 10 years you cannot possibly get another raise unless you stop engineering and do Inner-corporate bureaucracy work.
- I’ve seen niches in these companies where people shield their team / unit from that mess, pro-actively outsmarting the corporate machine (e.g. hacking the hiring process, securing backing from CEOs, pushing for technological visions...) Those units have a big draw on inner-company talent, but are limited in how much talent they can take into care. Working there is very pleasant. As maybe highlighted by the fact that these guys are more likely aware that their pay is an insult, but they stay regardless.
Not really. The difference in salary isn't enough incentive for people to leave Western Europe at scale. You'll still live very well as a STEM graduate in France/Benelux/Germany.
It's just a cultural thing. Germany has tons of family-owned businesses with a fairly conservative ethos that manage to do well in spite of complete technological illiteracy.
And on the other side so are the healthcare and public services. I don't think there is a big scale brain drain to the US.
I am doing the job for about 6-7 years and I don't know a single dev that went to the US. But I know many devs that came from other european countries and even the US.
I worked in the Real Estate Dept at Lidl for a (very) short time, awful company. Never have I seen people being treated so badly, especially in stores.
Their IT was an absolute joke back then, we had to use a 20-year-old ERP and most of the work was done on paper. Thinking that these guys could take on AWS sounds ludicrous to me. However, they are cost-killers and hyper-aggressive when it comes to selling, so this might even work...
I received few offers from them and their salaries where in par with what I earn in Italy (around 100k) which is very good for Europe but not as much as SV
I'm a senior developer who works on distributed systems for one of the largest Italian private held financial institutions.
To be completely honest I know almost nothing about finance, I just know how to make reliable software for them.
I've been there for almost 4 years now, I started as a contractor but they offered a substantial yearly bonus to the base salary so I accepted the hiring proposal.
Before that I've been an independent contractor for more than a decade and at the end I was making a bit less but not far from that.
I mainly worked for overseas companies remotely (a few times I went over there for short periods - weeks or a couple of months) or in agencies here in Italy that worked for the fashion industry.
Must say it all changed when I moved to Milan, I could dream this kind of salary in my birth city (Rome)
Are the 100k before or after taxes and social security? That's quite impressive for an employee position in Italy, good for you!
If you can say, how would you judge the competency of the developers working for your company? From time to time I interact as an external contractor with developers from banks/insurances et similar and the average level of their IT has seemed quite lackluster to me.
In general I think sofware development in Italy suffers from a low-balling syndrome. Developers are not held in high esteem and are not paid much, so developer positions do not attract many capable and ambitious people - most either move to management positions as soon as possible, start contracting or move abroad.
I think developers in Europe in general sell themselves short, they feel like outcasts who have to go through suffering for having a better job than the average. I used to be like that, I would accept lower rates to not feel obligated to wear a suit and a tie.
Now I don't care anymore, still don't wear ties at work, I show up late in the morning (not a morning person, sorry!) but charge what I think is the right amount.
Hi, I'm Italian too working in Milan, just wondering if you have any suggestions on how to get these kind of offers, i imagine they don't appear on public places like linkedin.
- you solve problems, sell yourself as that. It's okay to fill a résumé with technical skills, but also add something that tells potential clients/employers what you really do (developer is ok, experienced frontend designer/iOS developer is better) and what they can use you for. Sell your experience(s)
- if you're above junior (you are confident with at least one major technology) start charging at least 200-250 a day. Charge more if the rate is hourly. It is honest to ask at least for that. You usually will work 200-220 days/year so don't multiply your rates for 365 or you will be disappointed at the end of the year.
- remember that if you are doing contract jobs you are in charge of your taxes and retirement savings, so account for that in your rates. It's easy to dismiss a rate as "too high" until you start factoring in the expenses.
- if you find offsite jobs (you are sent to the client's office) add to your rates travel expenses and hotels/relocation if you have to move. Don't take jobs that won't accept it or will try to pay you a little more. You are payed for your job, they should cover any extra. Including lunches/dinners out. They are probably asking at least 2x to the client of what they are paying you.
- hire an accountant, they can save you thousands euros/year. It's worth the cost.
Don't know Italy, but two things stands out above:
Getting in via contracting, and financial services.
Financial services tends to often have salaries significantly above the average for developers, and having gone the same route of contracting first myself it has some definite advantages:
- You establish your value on charging a high day rate that is entirely within the norm as a contractor but usually well above the pay for a permanent employee of similar seniority.
- The company knows you when you negotiate the permanent contract, so you represent a lower hiring risk.
- It's easier to appear as if you have options. E.g. when I went full time permanent, I had been on a part time contract, and I could point out that I had realistic expectations of booking a very significant amount of income over the following year from clients already mostly lined up, so to go permanent I made it clear the offer needed to justify to me why I should give that up.
This route is tougher and more uncertain, and frankly I wouldn't recommend it unless you're happy contracting as there's no guarantee you'll find a contract where they'll want to hire you.
> i imagine they don't appear on public places like linkedin
Can they do that? Just hire through a small network of people in the know? Sounds like a recipe for cronyism.
I'm not sure about Italy but in the UK companies legally have to advertise a job publicly and, if they receive an application that meets the criteria, I think they have to at least consider it, if not conduct an interview. That's not to say there is no nepotism, but there are measures to control it.
There is no legal requirement in the UK to advertise a job publicly in general, and no legal hindrance to explicit nepotism for that matter.
However there is a requirement not to discriminate on the basis of certain characteristics, and the easiest way of protecting against such claims is to advertise publicly.
But a huge number of jobs in the UK are never publicly advertised anyway.
This is pretty accurate and refreshing to see. Contray to everyone elses salaries, UK (excl. London) seems very low.
I am just below the £45k mark with 3 years at my current company and 12ish years overall. So should be bang on your numbers when it comes to 5-10 years at this company.
Don't get disheartened when you read these big salaries online. The average reader isn't bothering to post theirs.
The UK is actually pretty good when it comes to IT salaries. Go to France, for example, and they're much lower. The attitude to devs is quite poor in a lot of places, treating us like we're one rung above car mechanics. We also have a good contract market in the UK; in many other EU countries (even Australia) contractors make peanuts in comparison.
Outsourcing and the low barrier-to-entry have all dampened IT salaries. Immigration has also played a part in the UK over the last 15 years; a lot of devs from Eastern Europe have gone where the money is - i.e. here. I know it's a contentious issue here but I say that with no malice. I'd do it too if I was them, and a lot of them are talented devs, but there's no point pretending it hasn't had an impact.
IME salaries have risen fairly significantly in London over the past 7 years or so, up until about 2 years ago.
I don't think dev immigration has hurt that much if at all. There's a virtuous circle: the more devs there are, the more startups are created and the more FAANGs set up shop. Devs get more experienced on bigger and harder problems, which makes them more valuable.
There's a huge amount of developer immigration to SV, and yet that's where the highest salaries are. Would they really be even higher if FB, Google, Apple etc. couldn't find enough devs to hire, or would those companies have set up shop in other areas and countries instead, to accommodate their needs? Or would those companies have been growth constrained on availability of talent instead?
niwork, i can't reply directly so will reply here.
I am based in the East Midlands, I have been offered up to 50k from other companies in the East Midlands but have either rejected (commute) or withdrawn due to slow references.
I feel like salaries are creeping upwards here but only for in fashion stacks. I am part of a larger organisation here and have the influence I'd like in the team so chasing salary isn't a demand for me anymore, however it does get disheartening at times!
Yes, I'm in Italy. Maybe it's because I live alone in a small and really cheap apartment, I keep the heat off even in winter (I dig cold) and I try to not eat at home (only lunch at work in the cafeteria), but I never had money problems. Things will surely change when I decide to buy a house.
In Germany at the senior (10+ years) scale €70k/year is not unusual & if you work for the better paid companies (like google) you can expect significantly more.
in Munich: starting salaries with a masters are 55-60k€ (before tax!) at average car related companies (even for non-CS-grads doing SWE with a physics/math background), 60-70k€ at the actual car companies. Social sciences/other jobs with masters: 42-50k€, below that with a bachelors/apprenticeship. Independent of the education in IT you should be able to reach 50k after 5 years (excluding grunt work) and 80k with a masters. Some engineers I know have been taken by electronics industry as PMs for 120k€ straight out of grad school. Rents are high (20€/m²), so other parts of Germany might be better overall (subtract 20-30% of salaries).
All this doesn't hold true for a lot of immigrant labor and people working at startups, where you are offered 30-40k€ with a masters (these kindd employ most of the immigrant labor I think - of course there's the odd 100k YC). Imho this (at current rent levels) is exploitation and something which makes working in Munich not particularly attractive for anyone not from Germany or getting a job at a car company.
1. They absolutely can and do, but many sell themselves short.
2. Big caveat: There are absolutely many conservative managers who insist on speaking perfect German / not switching the team language because of the new junior dev, so there will definitely be job openings where immigrants are discriminated against at those big corporates, but IME that doesn't apply to the companies as a whole.
The reverse is obviously also true: If you want to work in a young, international, open culture, you might prefer startups, but most of them offer lower salaries.
they can of course (and are), but there are still a lot of underpaid jobs (compared to cost of lving) out there (and these companies are not going out business strangely, so they seem to find labor). Basically for a german it doesn't make a lot of sense to take a job, where you will be having the life of a barkeeper in Berlin (e.g. hustling through at <50k€) - and frankly, these jobs exist and they find employees, so imho this is mainly people "wanting to live in Germany" (at whatever the social cost)
Why? Go get a remote job and triple the salary, to start with. Of course don't mention your current one. Seriously, go scan HN Who Is Hiring thread for remote jobs - for US or Swiss companies, don't bill below six-figure. For German companies, aim high five-figure. Do it now.
No, probably not. But it's possible that any particular (loosely speaking) underpaid developer can, because not all of them are actively looking for remote work.
I used to like this job. I was looking for a new one but COVID-19 happened.
As for the remote job, I currently work 6:30-17:00 with 45 minutes of commute, and the work environment is exausting. I don't think I could handle another job.
Remote jobs paying 6 figures? Aren't they flooded with Indian applicants? Why can I hire an outsourced Indian or Ukrainian for £10,000 PA then? Sounds weird..
Simple. It's the difference between being able to find good paying work, and relying on others to find it.
You can be located in a cheap country making thousands a day while others make that in a month. Just need to be a good at finding people whose problems you can solve.
India has the most unfortunate timezone I guess, so US companies prefer Europeans, as there is at least some overlap. Plus, maybe there's unconscious racism? I.e. subconsciously associating white skin with higher skills.
Is this gross or net? I earn 50K EUR gross and 30K net on same role. It's close to top market rate in my country (Poland). I know some top engineers getting 80K. Anyway unless working contract taxes are too high to incentivise putting more effort.
I interviewed a lot and it's hard to get more than 70K EUR / GBP at least with my skillset and would need to move. I wonder if places like Amazon/FB/Google pay more in EU?
BTW are US salaries posted gross(pre-tax)? I wonder if it's worth applying for me.
That's roughly the salary you'd get in Poland, but with a lower cost of living.
Not saying you should relocate or anything - I'm just amazed at the state of the Italian IT job market.
I spent a few years in Italy and have a friend who lived and worked in Poland. Hated the experience, but by his account it was the most stable and well paid job he had ever.
Depending on where you live and on the company you can get paid more, though not much more.
In 2013 I was paid 27k€ as a junior developer (2 years experience) in Florence, before taxes and employee-paid social security (I think if you count company-paid social security it adds up to around 33k€), but I think I was a bit lucky. I think software engineers making more than 60k€ as employees of an Italian company are exceedingly rare.
You can make twice that as an independent contractor, as long as you charge by project (if you want to be paid hourly you get killed by the sticker price comparison). Being a contractor demands a different skill set though, as the programming is only half of it; how much you make will depend for the most part on how you can deal with the customer.
> The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
Sounds very similar to Dyson. The biggest problem is that nobody wants to make decisions because what's the point when James Dyson is just going to come along and casually overruled it? Especially frustrating if it's something he isn't interested in.
This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020?
Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).
So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.
This article is a textbook example of "news stacking" from the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday [1]. Step 1, post some outlandish stories to random blog posts. These blog posts are usually niche, and are run by some "experts" with a core audience. They are trusted to be right.
Then that gets picked up by intermediary news sites like this *.co.uk domain. Then it gets floated to social media, where it gets popular and noticed by the big guns (NYT, Business Insider, Tech Crunch, etc) and then they just post the same stuff. Then suddenly what was once a rumor becomes true.
NYT, Businesses Insoder, Tech Crunch, etc. can simply all report that there is a rumor, and if they just do that often enough, society will treat it like a fact.
>Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).
it's not copy pasting. BI is also a publishing platform.
Same reason why you see Bloomberg articles in full being posting on Yahoo Finance.
Hey, I like comments and commentary as much as the next person. But when I waste 10 minutes of my morning perusing threads, I really hope they are about something real :)
To be fair, you're probably right. The commentary is the most interesting part, even if the content is just a rumor, or hypothetical or whatever. There is still some value to be had from the threads. I saw a lot of experiences or personal info shared here about Schwarz Group, so some of that was interesting.
Fair point. I'll reconsider where I said 'stop talking about it'. Even bad stories can spawn good conversation! Some interesting inside experiences/ opinions about Schwarz Group were shared. Sometimes I need to keep my angry morning rant to myself! I'll try to keep this in mind in the future.
> This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020?
- Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there.
- For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.
- Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.
- A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.
A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.
We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a few instance types available, with RAM maxing out at 32 GB and no GPU servers available.
Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing.
The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.
Kube removes some of the infrastructure burden of running your own solution but not all of it and that's not the only burden.
For example, I can deploy Kafka on k8s. I still need to know enough about Kafka to be able to deploy it correctly (zookeeper, etc.). I need to know enough about k8s to know how Kafka can run on i and to fix issues. I then need to know enough about Kafka itself to tune it, fix issues, manage it, etc. Then there's interaction events such as upgrades which require coordinating between k8s and Kafka. And in the end I'd still be a novice at all of it.
I would guess that we could just give an external company control over a kube master and have them run their operator, which in turn will spin up all the necessary pods and stuff.
You give a SSH certificate and you get back an IP address in your on-premises / cheap host with Kafka running along with monitors.
Me and the parent commenter are talking about the Hetzner cloud offering, where the largest instances have 32 GB of RAM (https://www.hetzner.de/cloud). Sure you can get a dedicated server there with much more RAM and you can host your own hardware in their colocation facilities, but that has nothing to do with cloud computing in the common understanding of the term.
Looking at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud, the top of the line dedicated option seems to be CCX51, which only has 32GB (edit: 128GB, I must have misread). Do you have some sort of special deal with them?
Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money.
Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.
Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.
I seem to remember them from spending time in Mexico 20 years ago. It was just a large supermarket from what I remember. Nothing especially unusual that I can remember.
Oh, and Germans don't like greeters nor people to bag their groceries for them. When they see them, they suspect they could have saved 10 cents going to shop that doesn't have them instead.
(And baggers also violate the German sense of social equality, I guess?)
I am still confused. We have Aldi and Lidl here, they have an unusual selection, but good value for money. I am still missing from what happens at Wallmart that is unusual. I don't remember greeters in the ones I went to in Mexico.
I'm also interested. Apart from not unboxing on shelves, Lidl/Aldi are pretty typical European grocers. I wonder what is different in the US. Clumsy paper bags and greeters, what else?
Shopping carts require 50 cents or 1 euro to be used, customers return them themselves so nobody has to push those around.
Also, Aldi makes great efforts to not change store layout. I think in the past 5 years I shopped at Aldi, the core part of their layout (ie, minus the seasonal offerings and the special offerings) it has only changed once and they changed back to what they had before within a week.
If you need a specific thing from Aldi, you can go in and straight to where you need to go, grab it and checkout.
> Also, Aldi makes great efforts to not change store layout.
Actually I really appreciated that with Lidl moving from Austria to the UK, I knew where things were. (Supermakets shifting their stock around does my head in). The stock seems to be more regionalized over the years so not sure how similar it will be these days.
> Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.
Everyone operating in the EU is under EU law, including Amazon, so it's certainly not a competitive pitch vs. Amazon, however much it might be on a checklist of things customers are looking for.
From the perspective of a customer who cares about these things, though, there is a difference between a non-EU company bound by EU law and an EU head quartered company.
I'm not saying it's enough to build an AWS-sized business or that Lidl is in a position to do it but there are cloud hosts who sell themselves specifically on that, such Exoscale.com
I can understand this. I would never prefer a German company if there was an equivalent American company providing the same service. In some ways it must feel like a loss of sovereignty to be so heavily reliant on American companies for necessary services. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.
You know the game and the meta game better in your own country. Plus, there is nationalism, solidarity, proximity, proudness, language barrier, favoritism, etc. that all enter in consideration.
Though if you actually want to support America, I'd suggest you buy from the foreigner that's most likely to hoard and never spend your USD: that would mean America would get to consume some goods and services in return for ink and paper (or these days, 0s and 1s.)
The Fed targets inflation. A dollar hoarded might as well be burned. So they'll just replace it with a fresh new dollar.
(And if the foreigners eventually spend the dollar and it comes back to the economy you know and love, that's not much different than if you had spend the dollar directly in America in the first place. America just got an interest free loan of some goods and services while the dollar was abroad.
If enough dollars flow back to impact inflation, the Fed will shrink their balance sheet to accommodate. Ie they'll sell government bonds from their inventory to soak up excess dollars.)
The situation is slightly different, if you eg want to support your very local economy, eg your brother-in-law's company, or your city, your county or your state. Because the Fed target inflation in the whole country, not in one specific location.
When I worked with a European cloud host, customers in Germany demanded German data centres and EU ownership. I've seen enough people/companies ask for that to convince me there's at least some demand.
What's your reason for saying it's not a good differentiator?
What legal implications? AWS customers can choose to keep user data wholly within the EU regions, or they can transfer data freely between EU and US regions thanks to Amazon's certification under the EU-US Privacy Shield framework.
One of the great strengths of AWS is their phenomenal compliance department - whatever regulations you're subject to, AWS offer tools, guidance and support to help you maintain compliance. That's one of many, many reasons why AWS is simply incomparable with cheaper cloud offerings from smaller providers.
Nobody would or should trust Amazon, an American company, to actually stand by those promises.
It will syphon off any trade secrets and other infos, especially if the NSA asks. It has literally happened.
I think after Snowden we should have gotten wise on how much official treaties and promises are worth.
Before, this was the thinking of conspiracy nuts. Now it is prudent consideration.
Germans would now, the US literally wiretapped their head of government, and also ran operations to extract trade secrets. Without reprise to this day, by the way.
At end of the day, the new name of the game is America first.
Having a EU company handle your data is really an advantage.
This is a weak argument, because that prudence should be extended to Lindl as well. Do you think Lindl would resist if Germany intelligence service (BND) asks, no matter how crazy that may sound now? What is implication for a client, says, in France or Poland?
As a European I'd much rather my data be visible to Germany than the US. We have ties that go beyond commercial agreements, honesty is still something I can believe in concerning Germany, and if all goes bad Germany has far less power over me.
I do agree with you though on the larger point: if caution should be exercised (and it should), then it's safe to assume every byte that goes on a server is to be considered visible to the government that hosts the content _and_ to the government under which the company operates
US plays "Big" on surveillance intelligence online. BND and other European agencies could be as invasive when they get free hands, but the difference is the level of patriotism and privacy conciseness of the people running the business.
Here I rather choose that my data stays on this side of the pound.
Edit: what I mean is that I expect more willful cooperation from American companies just by the level of available evidence.
This is big. And it can only grow with future legislation. This could tie in to security measures and standards in the future. We will see what happens, but it is a strategic advantage as for now.
> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.
This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance.
It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.
> It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.
Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers.
LightSail doesn't have a $70/mo instance, the closest is $80/mo for a 16GB RAM, 4-core, 320GB SSD instance with 6TB of transfer quota. The least expensive is $3.50/mo, and $10/mo gets you 2GB RAM, 1 core, 60GB SSD, and 3TB transfer.
> Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS.
What is the fundamental difference that you speak of?
At least to me, the only major difference is that while AWS markets their VMs as EC2 because they were designed for elasticity (i.e variable compute workloads), which explains the elastic in the name EC2; VPS providers OTOH market their VMs as a cheaper alternative to dedicated servers (i.e. fixed compute workloads).
The difference in pricing largely follows from the difference in design since the cloud shines when your resource needs are elastic. VPSes shine when your resource needs are largely inelastic.
80$ a month for 16GB RAM, 4 cores, is a very bad price. If you could buy the machine outright for less than the cost of 6 months, you should not buy it.
Also, 6TB/month is a bit over a day of download at 400Mbps. It's barely even worth mentioning.
> While I agree, I am not sure that most businesses need elastic scaling.
Sure, lots don't. Which is why, even if AWS is the right vendor, EC2 isn't the right service for lots of uses. That's why LightSail is a thing. Comparing VPS pricing to EC2 pricing to say AWS is too expensive is the wrong comparison, because of AWS services, EC2 isn't the one that any application that can be acceptable served by a traditional VPS ought to use. It's not an apples to apples comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's something like apples to pork roast.
> A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.
Not really. AWS is largely independent service products with a few shared core services. K8s is just the core services.
Each AWS service is effectively its own product. Regardless of what tech you have in the background, you would have to make a complete product to compete with AWS's version. You would still have to build an entire customer interface and documentation and do product support.
Or you could build one giant monolith product that isn't decomposeable into services, and at that point you're no longer an AWS competitor, you're just another weird PaaS that enterprise won't touch. Enterprise is a whale, and you need whales.
Looking at k8s like it's a business solution is like looking at a wheel+tire and thinking it's a car.
Also, for online retailers to put their eggs in Amazon's basket means they put their destiny in the hands of a competitor. Going for example with Azure is safer from this perspective.
That said, Lidl is closer to Amazon than Microsoft, from that point of view.
Hetzner Cloud exists and some efforts to automate Kubernetes deployments exist as well. It is of course not as polished as similar k8s AWS solutions, but as you said yourself it is much cheaper.
>> For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.
The prime factor driving negotiations is volume. It is going to be hard to beat AWS on this front.
>> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive.
This is simply not true. Taking into account everything you get with EC2 it is in par with other providers.
Factors:
- multiple (redundant) tier1 networking routes
- DDOS protection
- firewall
- redundant power (this almost never the case)
- access management that can easily be tuned to meet with corporate security standards
- network-attached storage that is very flexible with IOPS and size configurations
- multiple different hardware offerings that can match your workload
- elastic scalability (turn on when need more, turn off when no need)
- control over resource allocation down to AZ and shared/non-shared level
I am not saying that everybody needs these, but for those companies which do you won't be able to compete with a cheaper less powerful solution. These are the guys who can calculate what they are paying for and also know what they get, in detail.
There are so many moving parts in a datacenter that you can get wrong (and companies regularly do) that hiring the best dc engineers is going to be the first challenge when building an AWS competitor unless you have a James Hamilton clone stashed somewhere.
Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features, and it's far from unusual to have downtime in an EC2 reigion to the point where the standard advice is to spread across multiple reigions to avoid being caught out. EC2 does not have DDOS protection as standard its an additional cost service (AWS Shield). They will just charge you an insane ammount for the DDOS bandwidth as standard.
Linode, DO etc all have these features at a fraction of the price.
>> Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features
Multiple tier1 networking routes? I seriously doubt that. Those vendors won't deal with small players. AWS used to have 160Gbps in NA 10 years ago. EC2 has DDOS protection, for one simple reason, if somebody DDOSing it it will impact many customers. And you can also use Shield. The point here is that you have options. What sort of DDOS protection Linode or DO have? How much bandwidth did they get? How many tier1 routes? There are the sort of questions you need to ask for a fair comparison, which absolutely not happing on HN. Many people think that building a data center is like creating a hello world application. I have seen this repeadetly, several times.
Multiple tier1 networking "routes" are really, really easy to do these days. It's within the reach of pretty much anyone with a semi-sizable engineering budget. This includes carriers like CenturyLink/GTT/NTT and most of the global tier ones. The carriers are hungrier than ever for business, you can do this at a fraction of what AWS egress costs per GB.
So yes, really. Nothing on your list is unattainable at much, much lower cost if you're willing to put in the work at maintaining it yourself (no cloudformation at most traditional providers of this stuff, and while you can somewhat roll your own with k8s for /some/ stuff, the offering traditionally is nowhere near as cohesive.)
The non-open source but complementary services (think Dynamo/EventBridge etc) are imo AWS' real strength. If you need to be able to just throw cash at the problem and never worry about capacity management yourself, AWS (and GCP, and Azure, and <insert PaaS provider here>) is usually an excellent fit.
I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows.
They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it.
They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business. Their core business is keeping people in the store for as long as possible so they buy more stuff.
On the logistics side, they have been the first large-scale retailer to digitize the EUR-pallets (they have RFID-based plastic pallets) which allows for some pretty fancy stuff.
They roll out their pallet processing tech at the suppliers' plant and have logistics data in their systems even before it is loaded on the suppliers' trucks.
>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business
That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies.
In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete.
Whereas in US tech companies innovation is the primary focus regardless if someone's division ends up obsolete and needs to be let go. Famous examples being how Netflix pivoted from DVD rentals or Tony Fadell, creator of the iPod who was tasked on delivering an iPhone prototype back in the day and failed as his team's design was basically an iPod based phone which lost in favor of the current iOS iPhone we all know today. During the live iPhone launch demo, Steve Jobs deletes his contact from the favorites list basically saying "you're fired" and the rest is history.
You won't see something like this in a German company where age and experience in the company is more valued than being a visionary for future market trends. That's why you'll never see the big German car manufacturers pull off a Tesla even though they have more resources. Can't pivot and cannibalize the current products and have to shit-can some famous higher ups that were successful in the past.
That seems overly stereotyped. North American companies that fail to innovate do so at their own peril. They languish, and eventually become irrelevant. Kodak, Sears, RIM (Blackberry) come to mind. So do the non-Tesla US car companies. General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
> Famous examples being how Netflix pivoted from DVD rentals
Not to nitpick your overall post, but let me explain the context better.
Netflix is named "Net flix" because the original plan was to offer a streaming product ASAP, but investors and end-users weren't ready at the time.
So mailing DVDs was done initially, and because of a loophole in USPS pricing rules, was a genius move when looking at cost. (Netflix historically has employed a former Postmaster General to stay on top of that.)
Source: worked there, read a bunch of stuff on this.
1) First class mail (cheaper than media mail packages for bare DVDs) with likely letter-carrier presorting, volume and whatever other postal discounts (hence hiring former Postmaster Generals) were available, plus an agreement with the Post Ofice to manually sort DVDs to avoid machine damage using their light-weight mailer:
"Bulk Discounts. First-Class Mail commercial pricing is available for presorted letters, flats, and packages with a minimum quantity of 500 mailpieces. Automation discounts may also apply."
Also, if you get a tour of a main post office or sorting facility, you will see bins labelled "Netflix", so DVDs get special handling and slightly faster return delivery.
2) Because Netflix was the first adopter of #1 for DVD's, they won a ruling that they could continue to use First Class pricing. (The Post Office tried to move them to media mail which allows better packaging (at much higher cost) for automated handling, but that was viewed as anti-competitive by the court.)
For HN readers, I believe this is the first detailed analysis of both their postage pricing strategy and first-sale doctrine in one article, likely because few people know about both bulk mail and IP.
It's the typical innovators problem you describe and that is pretty international. I do think you have a point about culture and in Europe in general software engineering is not seen as such a value adding activity as in the US. Salaries are less than $100k even in senior positions and
I think because of this more talent has moved to the cutting edge technology companies in the US than Europe wants to admit.
This is much bigger than your comment makes it out to be. There used to be a real IT industry in Ger. We had Siemens-Nixdorf as a very decent global player. We had Commodore producing their PCs in Braunschweig. Now all that's left is the relative newcomer SAP.
The tech industry you are referring to(SiemensNixdorf/Commodore) was mostly consumer hardware and has along with the likes of Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson long moved to Asia or disappeared all together as margins are thin in that business and cost of labor is too high in Germany.
Consumer focused software is where the big money is now an that is unfortunately a huge vacuum in the German tech sector.
> The tech industry you are referring to(SiemensNixdorf/Commodore) was mostly consumer hardware
Both Siemens and Nixdorf build mainframes. Later Siemens had it's own version of DOS. Most Commodore PCs were used in office environments. I am not referring to 8bit machines nor Amigas.
Yes I know, Siemens sold their whole dutch software divisions to TomTom and thus basically pulled the plug themself. And SAP could be seen as the Oracle of Europe. For customers and consultants it's an implementation nightmare.
Lidl launching an AWS competitor is probably done on advice of their accountant. The big four are known to overpromised on the capabilities of their outsourced software division in India. When Google and Microsoft struggle to catch up to AWS with 10s of 1000s of the best engineers it is completely unrealistic Lidl is going to achieve anything.
This is a discount brand for crying out loud clearly on misinformed money waisting spending spree bender. The Germans will have a hangover like nothing else they have experience before.
There is a notable exception to this role: Germany's e-commerce giant Otto [1] has transitioned from order by catalogue to webstore pretty well and they are doing some nice things techwise.
Maybe exception to the rule but definitely an example of not being stuck in the past and it's a LARGE corporation.
The other big difference is that German companies prefer stability over pure profit, because it creates a better working environment and a happier society overall, where your job doesn't depend from sheer luck, especially the lower income ones.
They pulled out more Tesla's than Tesla will ever do, and they still rank on top of the carmaking industry.
Tesla, on the other hand, the first thing has done when they bought Grohmann Engineering was to stop the production for competitors, that led the founder to leave.
That's never a good sign for an established business.
That's the price you pay for having a "humanly deficient man" as a CEO.
Diesel gate has nothing to do with pure profit, it has to do with Germany keeping its market shares and the occupational figures (the stability I was talking about)
Only 2% of the cars were sold in US
Of course the fact that US was leading the production of luxury electric cars has to do with the revelation being made public in 2013 while politicians and regulators have known for years
They were (illegally) accumulating money to invest in electric car manufacturing without having to "disrupt" the industry which has political consequences in Europe, where job places are highly unionised
I'm not saying they were right I'm saying that they were keeping the stability at any cost, they just sacrificed some upper manager after the scandal, and in fact 6 years later the numbers say that in the electric car market
"Volkswagen leads all carmakers with over 1.4 million sales. Renault-Nissan and China's Geely have also overtaken Tesla."
Btw, even though I'm a huge Ferrari fan, the research being made at Daimler AG (Mercedes) is astonishing, not only in Formula 1, their self driving trucks are an incredible piece of technology
I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.
In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it.
Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
Look at the evidence. Lidl (and ALDI) are exapnding all over the world. Meanwhile Walmart decided to pull out of Germany because the competition was to tough.
ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices.
It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL.
I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.
> In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed.
It was quite seriously discussed and some were used during the 2005 election. You don't see any discussions about it today because the constitutional court put a stop to it.
I don't think so. If you have open source voting machines that can be and are audited, that's probably more than good enough for fair and open elections.
Lowering the complexity and thus barrier to understanding just builds an extra buffer of transparency into the system. It's a very-nice-to-have.
In a technical sense, yes. But there is definitely social value in having a system that is in principle auditable by (almost) everyone. An open source voting machine would still be only auditable by the small minority of people who can read code.
You don't want to just have free and fair elections, you want to also convey the clear and unfakeable impression that your elections are free and fair.
Pen and paper gives you both a safety margin (or transparency margin). And it allows you to signal in a hard to fake way that your elections are free and fair and hard to temper with.
(Fair as far as the voting system goes. Eg first-past-the-post on paper will still be a less fair voting system than Germany's weird proportional hybrid or my favourite, range voting. Or this fascinating gem: https://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html)
> If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
I doubt that since I think that Amazon's vision is very different from what many German customers want. Here is a (German) text of a German blogger who went to Amazon Books in the Empire State Building. His experience was not positive:
To sum up: intransparent pricing that depends on your Prime customer status and may change after looking at an item, so you may end up paying more than expected.
That wouldn't even be legal in Germany (and I guess the EU), pricing has to be clearly labelled, and additionally has to have a price per common unit if the package has a different size (e.g. a 3.5l bottle of detergent would show €/litre).
I wonder why they don't just use e-ink price labels? These are common around here for a decade or so.
Ever been to any Rewe or Penny at Saturdays? They usually have the bright yellow "action price/Sonderangebot" signs on the shelves which are valid only from the following Monday. It's a real nuisance.
It used to be even worse in Britain before the invasion of Aldi and Lidl really had an impact.
They had lots of 'buy 5, pay 3' and similar nonsense deals. Often, the software in the register would "mysteriously" not have the deal, and you pay more.
And, of course, a 50% reduction usually meant that they just doubled the price in the week before.
Things got much better in the last ten years or so. That's roughly when Lidl and Aldi really started eating Tescos lunch.
That is really something which rubs me the wrong way. There is no (to my knowledge) comprehensive public place/site where one could see this price devolopment over time, visualize it, show the regional differences, by vendor, product, package size/amount/volume/weight/per piece, and so on. No transparency at all. IMO this should exist. But it doesn't.
In german i'd say: Fortwährende Vortäuschung falscher Tatsachen! which translates roughly to 'sustained simulation of staged facts'.
The thing is that British grocers got regularly fined (and talked to sternly) for these kinds of practiced. But they kept finding ways around the regulations or just ignoring them.
What really helped in the end to rein the practice in was new competition from abroad.
British retail banking is similarly customer unfriendly. For example a few years ago (no clue whether that's still the case), you could NOT not have an overdraft. They called it an 'unarranged overdraft'. Instead of just letting you tell the bank to refuse to let you got even a penny below zero, they still gave you the money (to an extent) but with a hefty fee.
They also ordered your outgoing bills or standing orders for the day in decreasing size: that's the order that maximizes that number of items that hit your account when its below zero.
They regularly got dinged by their regulators. Nothing much changed.
This time the new competition didn't come from overseas, but from upstarts like Monzo.
I don't know whether the incumbent British retail banks have gotten their act together yet. But last time I checked they were at least afraid and scrambling.
That’s not how prices work at Whole Foods, and that wasn’t my personal experience at the same store in January this year. Most items had e-ink price displays next to them so they could update but they were slow to update and so price updates were generally limited to once a day. In Whole Foods, they still use the usual printed price tags everywhere, though maybe locations vary. In Ontario, where I am, there’s a Retailer Code of Conduct that most grocery stores have signed up for which says if the price in the aisle is cheaper than the price at the register, you get the item for free if it’s under $10, or thereabouts.
Also as a clarification, the in store demo Amazon Echo devices are set to a variety of names including Alexa and Amazon, which one to say where is printed on the product description tag I saw. They’re not spaced far enough apart though, occasionally “the wrong one” would answer me.
I had a much nicer time shopping at an Amazon Go Store, though selection was limited and I had to edit my receipt later as it thought I’d bought a pop when I had only browsed for flavours.
I don't want that though, and the majority of Europeans don't either. Delivery robots work in the US as a crutch for the bad infrastructure, whereas here in Europe, I can walk or cycle to the store. I don't need to do big, weekly shopping like Americans tend to do (I've lived in the US also!) because the stores are nowhere near as giant. We already have cashier-less systems in the form of self-checkout tills and handheld self-scanning. We don't need Instacart because the chains themselves handle the delivery.
Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon?
I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).
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.
In the UK, discounted or damaged items have a special sticker meaning "discounted to £0.70". That sticker has a barcode on, and is what is scanned at the checkout.
That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to.
Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went out the door, you don't know what needs to be restocked.
They scan the item before putting the new sticker on, then usually put the item in a known, high traffic area so it’s gone by the end of the day. Maybe they just consider it out the door at that scan then bin whatever reduced items didn’t sell.
I don't have any insider information, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that those discount stickers aren't in fact the same. At the very least they have the actual discounted price encoded them, it wouldn't be a big leap for the label printer to register a new SKU for "Semi-skimmed Milk, discounted to £0.30" so they can still track that item's stock.
I have just checked the barcodes, and all stickers are identical. Same barcode. Same text. Same everything. They are preprinted, not printed by a machine in the shop too.
Does it need it's own SKU? It is scanned when discounted.
The important information is "We did too much of this cheese sandwich today" and correlate that with stuff like store location, the weather, public holidays, travel, etc. That's the valuable data. Then when double-discounted there's a further scan "We really did too many cheese sandwiches today".
I'm not sure where the value-add in projecting future demand is with a mass of low-value-add information. Not giving it a unique SKU seems like a saving to me. If anything, doing random sampling might be worth it, but in measuring flow of what comes in and what goes out, it's going out on discount or trash in the end. The goal is to not overproduce, not waste time tracking overproduced/allocated stuff.
Shrinkage in the form of shop-lifting also has an effect.
Having said that, if the items being reduced were scanned as part of the process of being assigned a discount sticker, then the stock-taking process should be able to capture this.
(Reduced items are usually sold, or failing that, discarded or returned).
> In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually
Do other stores not do this?
I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records.
As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.
Grocery is a high-volume business with multiple supply chains of various levels of integration. Keeping actual inventories rectified with sales data depends on accurate billing/receiving through the back door of any specific outlet. Expected inventory vs actual inventory can easily get out of sync due to uncapturable or hard-to-capture behavior at the store level (theft and damaged products aka shrink) or product being left at the warehouse but present on an invoice (which is transmitted electronically) or even product misplaced somewhere in the backroom that cannot effectively be sold. There is constant drift between what should be at a store versus what is actually at a store and augmented ordering is usually used in lieu of automated ordering, where managers have shelf-level visibility on what is on its way, what is currently present, and what is projected to sell based on historical data using something like a Motorola Symbol Barcode Scanner running Windows CE.
This is true of most food retailers in the US, as well. Most forays into automated ordering have ended poorly due to cascading issues with the electronic inventory getting out of sync with reality. Whole contracting companies exist to reconcile physical and electronic inventories, and this is mostly done for accounting purposes rather than to aid automation.
Ironically SAP is also a German company. I have no idea why anybody thinks that using SAP will help any company. One size fits all approach with hilarious failure stories. Still, some managers think it is great.
Amazon could not enter the German market that easily, people really like to shop in Aldi / Lidl and the online retail business is not as strong as in the US.
When thinking about SAP, it helps to imagine how bad it has been at many companies before they introduced SAP. It has many flaws, but at least people are finally using a database to store their information :o)
On a side note, Amazon is unable to penetrate ALDI & LIDL's market share because they offer better prices. It's as easy as that, and it is not about whether German people love waiting in queues or driving to some shop. The savings by shopping at discounters are very real.
Once you factor delivery costs into the equation, many German food retailers only offer the more expensive brand foods for delivery, and not the cheap stuff - exactly as Amazon does.
SAP makes a ton of sense if you have a large, complex operation that spans multiple countries.
SAP is terrible yes, but do you know any other way on how to get complex processes from multiple sectors together in a single system?
SAP is basically admitting your logistics and operations became so complex and large that there is no other way to do this more efficiently.
One example is a company which produces ship engines and various other parts. They source all resources from different sub-companies across the globe. From the raw material to final assembly.
All this information needed to be tracked in an ERP system and to be honest, SAP works well in this regard because it has a standardized process (which is terrible i must admit) but atleast it's a standardized process.
That's the thing I tried to point out in my original comment: They don't embrace automation because it will 100% lower prices in the whole industry.
In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating?
Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation needed for main-stream adaption, they can get way higher margins in other categories (e.g. non-food).
IMHO the perfect supermarket of the future is not food delivery, but a drive-in/pick-up model where you can go 24/7 and where your order is packed 100% by robots. Until we reach this point in terms of technology, the traditional supermarkets will not change due to the above-mentioned oligopoly.
Of course automation lowers prices, but only for the customers, for LIDL it will first of all decrease revenues.
Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate.
It took me a long time to understand this relationship, but while discussing this with a machine learning expert hired by LIDL it suddenly clicked: this is basically why they don't innovate further in terms of offline retail experience.
I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate.
There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work with select other companies.
EDIT: I was able to load the original source just now and it claims that following an acquisition they were now offering/planning to offer this service to other retailers. I cannot find other sources (particular German ones) supporting this claim. The blog of the allegedly acquired company speaks of a "strategic partnership" and "investment" only [2].
EDIT 2: This [3] is the German source that the link on this post refers to. Unfortunately it's paywalled. The abstract claims that the acquisition is a "building block in building out their Cloud business".
It’s German, but here is the Heilbronner Stimme [0] article the Handlesblatt references. It says Schwarz Gruppe bought 90% of Camico IT, but they’ll keep the name and 50% of their work will be what they did before.
Not saying Schwarz (the parent company) won't try and run their own cloud provider, but I doubt the acquisition has much to do with that at all.
Also, the german link above doesn't even mention the acquisition and the german source for the english article (from "Lebensmittel Zeitung") doesn't talk about "cloud specialists" either.
CAMAO IDC is a software development company (who knows how to use the cloud), they're not "cloud specialists" in the sense that they know how to run a cloud provider.
> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can?
Probably they want to repeat the success of AWS and apply the same pattern. Their retail businesses will provide base load for the cloud. Their own services can be developed in such a way that they can sell them to other retailers as cloud services. Or they develop a market place and switch to platform business.
Develop their own tools and get people locked in? Yeah, I don't see that happening, unless maybe they lobby for further EU-wide Internet regulations aimed at keeping US/foreign companies out.
> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can?
Hetzner has a completely different business model and so far it has been working very well for them. They are good at optimization of all their available resources via flexible pricing. As their loyal customer for almost 10 years I love one their aspect that I hate with AWS: with Hetzner, I'm 100% sure how much I'm going to pay at the end of the billing period. Actually, for several of my customers I turned on yearly billing as the amounts are so ridiculously small.
Hetzner runs hosting, which ultimately is an administration feat. AWS is above that an engineering feat. Different operations and you would have to hire entirely new people, and I think Hetzner's model still has its appeal.
I doubt the headline properly captures their intent, the article itself is very light on details, but this quote might shine some light at it:
"Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers."
My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could possibly include having their own data centers for the service part.
I would think so, too.
Considering that Lidl is the biggest discounter with around 11,000 branches worldwide, it might make sense for them to ditch AWS and set up their own, independent infrastructure.
While the concerns over Schwarz Group's (because it is the parent group, not 'Lidl') lack of experience in the sector is valid, I do think some of the dismissive reactions here underline a major risk to future competitiveness in infrastructure providers.
Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors.
Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.
I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could.
I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project...
American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.
Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.
Let's not kid ourselves : European ad-tech companies are not substantially more ethical than their American counterparts.
GDPR (even with its current clumsy implementation) is a much needed piece of legislation since the data processing market have no economic interest in "behaving" ethically.
They cancelled their SAP integration after dropping 500 million euros...
It might be a sign they're moving in the right direction, but it also tells me they are transitioning from a board and executive team that felt that was the right path quite recently.
They tried to integrate the business into SAP for seven years. Which still is fairly recently in non-startup terms, but I agree it's still a great sign they decided to cut the losses instead of falling for the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.
Europe, especially Germany, has this general consensus that EU needs it's inhouse large cloud providers. So think about state subsidies, preferring european partners and stuff like that.
With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.
And Lidl/Schwarz especially has a strict No-Amazon-Policy. They see Amazon as a competitor, so if you want to work with them on a corporate level, you must not use AWS to process or store anything relating to their business. They do make exceptions, but you better be prepared to make a hell of a case for your product for them to reach up to upper management and ask for an exception to buy your services.
And it makes sense, of course. If you rely on US-companies, you're dependent on the US. Any political or economical conflict will result in Washington pressuring US-companies and you'll be in a bad place. Given that most European governments (and Germany's especially) are very unhappy with the current US administration, it's obvious that they'd want to reduce dependencies.
I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop.
Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned gTLD with US-owned software. Generic cloud resources seem like the smallest issue to me in that chain.
Amazon said (to Congress, no less) that it does not let it's own team responsible to deciding on which products to buy & sell access confidential sales reports of third party sellers that use their platform. And then it was revealed that they regularly do get access to these information.
There's no reasonable expectation that Amazon will not use any data it can easily access to make decisions.
I don't find that your argument regarding "using US created computers" and "US-owned gTLD" holds water. It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information, and the same goes for secretly using a domain. Additionally, the cost of doing so is astronomically high: the total loss of trust in US chip makers and internet companies. They may very well do that during major wars, but not to steal some company secrets.
On the other hand, it's easy for Amazon to siphon off data from AWS and even just using meta data (e.g. looking at how and when a customer scales to what size) gives you valuable insight into their business. And if they get caught? A few politicians will be annoyed, a few media articles (but hey, they may overshadow reports on unionization, so it's not all bad) and potentially a few companies leaving their platform, while others will undoubtedly say "I have nothing to hide from Amazon, so what?"
In other words the threat model is dramatically different.
Sounds like a lot of conspiracy that isn't going be limited to Amazon so it still doesn't make sense to single out their computing company. If you encrypt your data on your public cloud (like you should), then no, the AWS retail company cannot 'get' your data from the AWS Web Services company.
Sure, Google or Microsoft might look at your stuff aswell - but why would they? Neither of them are in retail so they aren't competitors. If you're developing a new search engine that rivals Google, yeah, I wouldn't host that on Google's infrastructure. Have a serious contender for Microsoft's money cows? Maybe not put your code and issue tracking on GitHub.
Both are definitely in to retail. The are not market places like so that is a difference. (they both have physical and virtual stores where they sell both physical and virtual products and both own-brand as well as third party)
If companies are afraid of other companies looking at their stuff they are essentially going to have to reinvent everything themselves. What about transactions, imagine someone checking what they pay their supplier and what the customer is paying, that'd be scary. So now you can't use off-the-shelf cash registers, banking services, ERP systems etc.
The only difference people are trying to see is that AWS and Amazon Marketplace both have Amazon in the name. They don't have the same people, the same building or the same anything, except the same Bezos at the top.
>It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information
Wasn't IME a thing for years but people still don't have a great understanding of how it works?
Yes, but it's not hidden, people are aware that it's a threat. And these things do get checked at least, people fuzzing opcodes to expose hidden functionality. It's still generally a terrible idea, but it's not yet "backdoor in a box" like the (so far unfounded as I undestand) allegations against Huawei. Still, if I'm Cisco, I don't run my Wifi off of Huawei access points.
If you're Cisco you might not run a 1:1 competitor's products, but they do use Huawei hardware, i.e. LTE equipment.
Same goes for things like mobile phone manufacturers, they are competing with Samsung, but they will still buy Samsung LCDs for their own phones.
Samsung is a SoC manufacturer, but they will happily buy a SoC from Qualcomm. Same with DRAM, they make that too, but having Micron DRAM doesn't scare them either.
And the circle back to Cisco: they happily use Broadcom switch chips in their Cisco switches.
They will probably not attempt to compete against AWS on everything but focus on the core cloud technologies using off the shelf software and hardware. An alternative of EC2, S3, and ELB is already interesting and many companies provide that with fewer employees.
No need to waste resources on products such as AWS Greengrass, or AWS Lumberyard, or even AWS EKS.
I am betting they will provide only:
- Block + Object storage (can be done with off-the-shelf hardware).
- Compute instances
- VPC networking.
- Kubernetes (o k8s-managed services).
- An open-source database. Probably postgress.
Some cloud providers have a lot fewer employees and are doing well. They don't have as many features compared to EC2 and VPC but it's not a major problem for them.
Several of the larger AWS services are at multi-hundred person engineering org headcounts.
EC2 has thousands of engineers by my estimation. Source: I worked thete.
There are 200+ AWS services now. So just 8 engineers (2 pizza team) for each service would be 1600 engineers. Let alone marketing, enterprise sales etc.
If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem.
The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development.
Its not so crazy if you think of every AWS product as its own med-large startup... That being said, that is a rather large number in terms of absolute company size.
I guess this is the result of their epic failed migration to SAP. They blowed 500 Million and 7+ years in an attempt to unify their IT on SAP, until they realized it's just not working. I guess they then started building their own solution, and bring now others into the round, which is kinda similar to how AWS started. Amazon too started offering their extra resources to others, until it grow into a business of their own.
I have my doubt, but I really hope this becomes something good. Good european competition in that sector is quite neccessary. We have seen how european laws influenced the world, and especially USA in the last years, hopefully business can reach similar effects.
Sometimes I play a game with myself where I read the HN comments first, then read the piece. It's like watching a game of telephone.
To my reading
a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se
b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform
Amazon is heavy in the food business.
Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring, then goes and eats competitor business.
Lidl will not use AWS, wants its supply chain to not use AWS, and would prefer to have adjacent businesses use primitives (like distribution logistics) it makes available so it can observe and eat them when time is right.
It's not really a mismatch of the comments and article though. The title of the article is "Lidl owner launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services". And the body says things like "While Schwarz IT intends to use Europe’s enhanced data protection laws as a key differentiator to Amazon’s dominant service".
So perhaps you're right about the true purpose, but the article is claiming otherwise.
Yes- I didn't make the point well, but that's the point.
The game of telephone goes like-
* there's what I would guess to be reality
* the things the article says, that distort from (what I would guess to be) reality
* the things the headline says that distort from what the article says
* the things most HN commenters who only read the headline say that distort yet further from the article and from reality
By reading some of the top HN comments, and then the article, I get to play this game backwards. This was a particularly good example.
I don't doubt that Lidl is building some platform for retailers and its supply chain to use. That's just good business.
And no doubt data protection plays some role in the strategy, though data protection is a right generally afforded individuals, and Lidl's focus will be commercial.
But these two paragraphs are particularly out of proportion:
Schwarz Group, which owns both Lidl and Kaufland, is launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) following the recent acquisition of software specialist Camao IDC
and
The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group representing key “resources in an important area of digitalisation”.
AWS probably hired 70 people in a couple of hours yesterday, dwarfed by Amazon as a whole, which probably hired 5,000.
For some time now I think why Hetzner is that weak? We've used them in my last Startup and their cloud offering was fine (price, quality), but to use them one would need loadbalancers and managed Postgres and some caching
We managed that on our own but it felt unnecessary. AWS has a lot of bells and whistles not every one needs, but there is a set of tools you need to operate a website. I currently use DO who are very slow but get there I think.
Not everyone needs to compete in the same market. There are some EU providers moving in that direction (e.g. OVH now offers managed Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, etc), but Hetzner is very useful if you don't need that stuff.
This seems sufficiently unlikely that I wonder if something has been lost in translation.
My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.
It's Lidl's parent company that's launching the service, after buying a cloud provider. The headline is just stupid. It's equivalent to an article titled "Whole Foods runs AWS".
No. Whole Foods is one of many Amazon ventures, but not the most significant. Supermarkets (Lidl and Kaufland chains, mostly) are the main business of Schwarz Group.
It's more like saying "Google will do X" when it's technically Alphabet that spawns X.
Someone else mentioned 'hubris' here. We had a Lidl open up near us 2 years ago (in the US) - generally good store with good prices. Nice size. We were looking forward to more. We saw where they'd opened some of their stores, and couldn't figure out the justification - some locations just seemed odd. Read a few months later that they were 'scaling back' US development, and new build stores would be about half the size of the one we got (which... isn't huge). They couldn't hire regional people to help them find better locations?
Their inventory system seems out of whack - the stuff we buy regularly will just ... vanish, never to come back. We've been shopping and heard others complain of the same thing - sometimes the same items we were looking for (and had used to buy).
Their in store bakery was initially great - for about a week, then scaled back and rarely has anything fresh - regardless of time of day. You can tell if/when there's been some regional VP to visit that day because the bakery is hot/fresh/piping that day, then... offline. Now... many US folks in grocery stores may not be used to 'good bakeries', and perhaps it was a money loser for them, but... they didn't really give ours a chance to develop with the local shoppers in the first place. Give people more than 2 choices of bread - do it for a month or two, to give people time to try out options, get a rhythm, etc. Buying something, liking it, then coming back 3 days later for more and the bakery is effectively 'closed'... doesn't make you want to come back.
I wish they'd focus more on better in store inventory/stocking before moving to be an AWS-killer....
Yea, the german link above doesn't even mention the acquisition and the german source for the english article ("Lebensmittel Zeitung") doesn't talk about "cloud specialists" either. CAMAO IDC are software developers (who know how to use the cloud), not "cloud specialists" in the sense that they know how to run a cloud provider.
70 people is not much for, except for a vertical solution.
If they can sell/co-host big warehouse management like Manhattan at a fraction of AWS, they could succeed.
Well it's only the journalist who is talking about a "AWS rival". What if Lidl could come up with a cloud architecture specifically tailored for the challenges that any brick and mortar retailer has? I'm talking about pre-built solutions for real time stockage, logistics, integration with common ERPs, etc.
As a novice engineer , i would like to ask the larger community few view point questions just out of curiosity.
If you were the CTO/CIO and were tasked in building up a cloud that competes with behemoths , how would you do it. Of course it would be an "A Team" to do it , but what would be your priorities (e.g pick up cloud foundry and build things on top , take low hanging IaaS services) , there are so many aspects to it , how would you track progress and decide when to go out to market ? How would different teams (right from procurement , network , premises , to developers and ops personnel) be managed and seamlessly work ? What would be reasonable milestones and $$ spends ? :)
Note this is purely out of curiosity..any links/blogs would be fine too :)
I am sceptical but I applaud their effort. If Google has trouble competing, it wont be easy for Lidl either. Yet having a true European option with enough low prices and reliable engineering could work. From my experience retailers dont often have the engineering expertise to pull these kind of things off, but with a culture that empowers developers instead of keeping them as puppets of the managers, they might manage to find and keep good talent.
I hope they at least embrace open-source options and easy billing management, to counter-act the greediness of AWS-way of doing things. Competition in this area is definitely a good thing for all the customers.
Ignorant American here who has never heard of Lidl/Schwarz Group before. Is there anything in their history that would show that they know how to do compute? Is their infrastructure right now really solid/better than AWS?
They are a very popular discount (I guess a bit like Walmart, but this is not a 1:1 analogy). The article mentions cloud for the retailers and 70 cloud specialists. It think this is far from AWS scale and judging by the article I’d expect they (will) offer services for European retailers rather than general purpose global cloud.
They are good in their core business, and I’m sure this means logistics, marketing, etc. but does it translate to potential operational efficiency in cloud infra I honestly don’t know. It may, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
European (BE) here, no. They are just know for being cheap stores and have time to time crazy promo on an limited article. You can't even rly do all of your groceries there. Unless you only eat frozen chickens, chips, soda and vegetable cans.
Their website is slow af btw (4s to display a detail page).
So if they want to do an AWS like. They'll need to invest. Its not like Amazon : hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them?
In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients.
"You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff"
I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.
Suspiciously cheap? I love to shop at Lidl because they're great value for money. Quite often the quality is better than more expensive supermarkets but at a much lower price. Also by and large they're very consistent.
They fulfill the adage that "you don't need a lot of choices, just one good choice."
Agree. I am Swedish and have shopped at Lidl (not exclusively) for perhaps 10 years. In the beginning it was mostly poor people I could see and the parking lots half-empty. Now I see much more varied clientele and more cars outside. I have a distinct feeling that many that avoided Lidl before do not now.
I come from an agricultural background and all of the farmers I know always get less than 50% of the price of what you pay in the supermarket. Change that 50% to >80% and you get Lidl and Aldi for the exact same produce.
I am not sure why it works like that. These days you get direct to supermarket more often (taking out Fresh Produce Markets) but again—it's not direct to consumer. Personally, I think it's more because of the retailers being cutthroats than any other reason.
> Personally, I think it's more because of the retailers being cutthroats than any other reason.
It's rare that supermarket chains have direct contracts with farmers. Usually there are one to three middle men in the chain that all want their cut - on the farmer side a cooperative or other association (e.g. with milk it's common that a milk processor buys the milk from the farmers and then sells the processed milk on), then wholesale markets, and finally cooperatives on the supermarket chain themselves - for example, the supermarket chain "Edeka" actually not only runs their own stores, but also is a cooperative of independent store owners, as their name "Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler" reflects.
- Fresh Produce Market (for most around 8% agent fee + 8% market fee = 16%; for potatoes it is 5% + 8% for historical reasons)
- Supermarket (40%–60% fee)
So in our case the middle men are not that significant compared to the supermarkets. I know the situation is different for cooperatives, but they are either export orientated or in separate markets like wine or grain, both not considered fresh produce.
Cutting out the FPM actually tends to increase the end cost to the consumer as they tend to be higher value products to start out with. Typically it's berries, naartjies or apples and not staples like potatoes. But like I mentioned above, this is something that changes a bit every year.
Another interesting thing is that in rural areas you can cut out the supermarket instead, as many people like buying directly from the market or buying from people who resell it with small bakkies (pick-ups) to street sellers:
Farmer -> Market -> Pick-up truck reseller -> Street reseller
In the case of resellers on the street, I think they charge anywhere from 10%–70% commission, but it's difficult to say as these are all informal cash transactions.
> ”being suspiciously cheap ... I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.”
Just like in the supermarket industry, there is plenty of demand in the market for quality products at cheaper prices.
I remember the early days of AWS where they would surprise us with price cuts every 6-12 months. That hasn’t happened for a long time, which suggests to me that AWS is, over time, taking advantage of their dominant position and getting more greedy with pricing. Just like Amazon itself!
I wonder if the self-deprecation might be a corporate branding thing? In Portugal a couple of years back there was a "marketing war" where one retailer's message went something like: "smart people buy with us" while Lidl's ads expressed something like "you don't have to be smart to buy at Lidl".
Lidl is also my first choice in Sweden when it comes to supermarket. It does not make sense for me to pay 30-50% more of my money to a relatively same product from COOP or ICA.
Imo, they're already good at the supermarket business. I am wondering, instead of doing something out of their expertise, why they do not try to focus and beat other players in their core business. I think there are plenty of areas that can be improved. Having only 70 army and try to be on par with AWS is preposterous!
Amazon was mostly still a book-seller when they first launched AWS, stranger things have happened. For what it’s worth Lidl has a respected IT presence in the Eastern-European capital city where I currently live, I know that they invested quite heavily in that area for a few years already.
Lidl is world class and cheap. It's a solid operation, and has a long history of successfully undercutting "premium" brands.
But more interestingly the move suggests Amazon is in danger of real competition in commoditised cloud infrastructure, as well as retail marketing and logistics.
To an outsider, AWS is an incomprehensible mess of confusing service offerings which is nearly impossible to cost and only slightly easier to set up.
It's not hard to imagine a B2B offering which simplifies and commodifies the technology on offer and the way it's paid for.
And a B2C offering which copies Amazon Marketplace but with more consistent product quality.
I have never been in a Lidl Store I would consider "first class". It's not bad products but they have a few factors that severely limit the impressions.
They mostly only carry their own brand with extremely limited options. If you want orange marmalade they have one style from one brand (their own). If you want some other style, find a different store. (This is the case with most of their items besides a small additional selection of eg certain candy, but still very sparse compared to other stores.)
Most items are set up in bulk on the cargo carriers it comes on. Although this is probably also a lot for show to give a "price consious" appeal.
They tend to have a significant part of the store dedicated to whatever random garbage they got a good deal on. Sometimes it's a boardgame, sometimes it's a stuffed animal, sometimes it's a power tool. Usually decent quality, but rarely the best.
For me I put Lidl in the class of store where you have to make multiple trips to different stores. If I'm cooking I can rarely go only to Lidl. You usually go there to buy some of the stuff you need but then get the rest at some other store with more items.
I don't think it is "random garbage they got a good deal on." I think it is a very conscious and deliberate strategy, and it is custom brands in many cases, indicating a deliberate ordering process rather than random surplus. It is often excellent stuff, for the price.
This has been my experience with all discounters in Germany. Maybe it’s because 100% of my meals are cooked from scratch, but none of the discounters can get me what I want/need as well as REWE can.
Seems like your country's Lidl lags behind mine's. They solved all these drawbacks in the last few years here in Czechia, including really nice reconstructions of the shopping spaces.
Lidl and Kaufland stop delivering flyers and leaflets to my place in Poland. First - this is not Germany and we don't waste papper left and right for any formal and informal, solicited and unsolicited communication. Second - I don't want your papper spam, I don't want any spam in any form really.
I welcome more non-American owned or hosted companies in this space but going from practically zero to take on AWS is a heck of a long way to go,and would require enormous amounts of capital.
Hopefully, they can stat out with offerings that are especially attractive for European retailers or something like that.
Didn't Lidl abandon a 500 million SAP integration recently? I mean perhaps this kind of failure is part of their motivation, but it certainly seems like a leap.
I'm certainly hoping a major European player emerges in cloud but it would be an impressive diversification in this case.
I think the article intends to convey that Lidl is launching some cloud products to compete with a smaller segment of AWS. I would not think it's possible to challenge AWS or Azure (may be even GCP) for the next 5 years.
There's definitely more of an opportunity in EU cloud services than you might think.
I work for a pretty big EU university (~50000 users) and there is very little AWS/Azure/Google we can actually legally use. And this isn't a case of "bureaucracy gone mad" either, there are some real concerns with the big cloud providers that the rest of the world doesnt seem to have the time or the energy to tackle.
Another thing is that AWS/Azure/Google are getting _super_ complex. The idea of a back to basics cloud provider that fully complies with GDPR might actually be a compelling offering.
That said- whether this kind of tech can come from a budget supermarket chain in Germany is another thing all together. Despite the hype, not much exportable tech actually comes out of Berlin, and its not clear that they have the breadth and depth of expertise in "open source at scale" to make this actually happen. But on the other hand- who knows? Will be interesting to see.
I dont think this is about AWS. The company they mention that was acquired was a web/marketing agency, providing solutions based on 3rd party CMS platforms - not a datacenter/ops specialist.
This may work and may be much cheaper than the overpriced Amazon AWS, since Germany does not pay her people well. Most salaries are are a fraction of US salaries. This is the main reason for the exorbitant and quite bad trade surplus of Germany, who exports both, goods AND capital.
I work in Germany currently. Big German companies have a lot of bad reflexes in common when it comes to doing big IT projects and it's a reason for a lot of companies failing repeatedly in this space because they have the wrong focus and assumptions.
One of those reflexes basically boils down to combination of ineptness and not invented here (i.e. in Germany) syndrome. Another part of this is that the locals have an understandable historical aversion against anything invading privacy; as this has been abused by both nazi's and communists to hurt people in the past.
Unfortunately the net result is an industry that is still dependent on shoveling around a lot of paper via post and fax (!!), and a misguided trust in the security of what is basically a patch work of small companies, corporate departments, and government agencies working with very outdated, home grown stuff that can only be assumed at this point to be quite insecure and hopelessly compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies at so many levels that you might as well print the stuff in a newspaper.
Most customers you talk to almost right away start assuming they can't use AWS, Google cloud, or Azure for legal reasons. Of course, all of these run data centers in Germany where they comply with applicable law to keep their quite many German customers across basically all industries happy. This is a complete non issue from a technical and legal point of view. Also, the likes of IBM, SAP, and Oracle are happy to take your money for running this for you (at great expense).
Yet, I've had this discussion with several naive startup founders where they are going to build X and of course from day 1 are going to do their own infrastructure as well because it's obviously the right thing to do (for them). Most of these startups die young. Most bigger German companies get burned repeatedly by this stuff as well.
I know at least one billion dollar construction materials company insisting on running their own cloud that are sinking obscene amounts of cash into running things in a convoluted way. There's no shortage of local suppliers preying on this type of behavior. I declined working on their pile of steaming manure.
LIDL just burned 0.5 billion with a local IT supplier (SAP) that milked them for the fools they are on a project that they should have pulled the plug on years ago. That's all you need to know about their level of competency in this area. Saying this is doomed to fail is just stating the obvious.
And regularly stipulates SaaS providers that it contracts with to not use any AWS resources. Stipulating that they use their service in future is likely the next logical step.
My pardon, I assumed that this was common knowledge; though it would appear that their branding is so terrible that this is assumed to be a joke.
How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
According to Wikipedia, Schwarz group had revenue of €104 billion in 2018/2019, while Amazon had revenue of $280 billion in 2019. The employee count of Schwarz group is 429k while for Amazon it's 840k.
So Amazon is double in size overall. It's not an impossible thing for them. That being said, I think their current ambitions are more limited by just running their own infrastructure.
The Schwarz-Group (which operates the LIDL brand among a few others) is huge. They do about 100 billion in revenue annually and have half a million employees or so.
However, I've never heard of them venturing into tech, although I guess it's possible. Walmart is pretty solid when it comes to tech, and there's certainly enough talent across Germany and Europe.
Take a look at their Wikipedia page. They're the sixth-largest retailer in the world by revenue.
And they have 100B euros in revenue, so not as big as Amazon (280B) but still huge.
I don't get how they plan to compete, do they have chip designers? or deals with SOC manufacturers because AWS/Google/Microsoft are fast because of custom chips that link NVMe directly to the NIC and skip the CPU and some of the network stack
This is clickbait. That's why it says Lidl instead of Schwarz Group. Everyone in Europe knows Lidl and find it amusing that they would run a cloud service. Which means they'll click the link.
In reality it's a major german business group who plans to get into IT services with a recent acquisition. They have none of the experience that AWS or GCP have acquired in the last 6-10 years.
They'll do their best and I honestly hope it works out because I want to see more European cloud providers compete with american ones.
If you want a database tracking how many potatoes are in which trucks and when they'll arrive, they'll sell it to you. If you want a Kubernetes cluster, that isn't their business.
The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .
The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.
The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.
They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.
Interesting times though :)