They are not mom&pop stores, but that does not mean that they are they same.
If they would scale similarly as Walmart, why is it easily possible for those companies to move to the US but not for Walmart to move to Europe?
Walmart is nearly an order of magnitude higher in employee count than that with 2,300,000 employees.
Aldi further has the Nord/Süd divisions where one brother runs each decision and has it’s own hierarchy under them which makes for a different structure. Both Aldi and Lidl are privately held and not stock companies like Walmart.
Aldi has five layers of management while Walmart has nine layers of management. That’s a difference in terms of bureaucracy.
If you are interested in how organizations are actually organized, being conscious of how they differ and how there different structures lead to different behavior is important.
In general having shopping malls that have their own branding and include dozens of stores, where Aldi and Lidl might be individual stores, is quite different than having all shopping malls owned by a large chain and run all the businesses in the shopping mall.
Of course they are not literally the same, but in the context of the particular article we are commenting on, both Aldi, Lidl and Walmart are large bureaucratic organizations (specialized in retail). They all benefit vastly from economics of scale and to increase output they have to create new stores and hire more people to run them (and increase the throughput of their supply chain).
I think the cruxes here are whether Aldi forced out small retailers like Walmart did; and how significant the difference between Walmart and Aldi is, compared to the difference between Aldi and large, successful retail orgs in wentworthland or christiankiland.
(my experience in German shopping is that most grocery stores are one of a half-dozen chains, most hardware stores are Bauhaus or OBI, but there isn’t a dominant “everything” store like Walmart; Müller might be closest but its market dominance and scale is more like K-mart in the 90′s than Walmart today.)
According to wikipedia, Aldi has ~ 273 000, Lidl has ~376 000 employees.
These are not local mom & pop stores, and scale similarly as Walmart, even if not concentrating on broadness of selection.
They are not mom&pop stores, but that does not mean that they are they same.
If they would scale similarly as Walmart, why is it easily possible for those companies to move to the US but not for Walmart to move to Europe?
Walmart is nearly an order of magnitude higher in employee count than that with 2,300,000 employees.
Aldi further has the Nord/Süd divisions where one brother runs each decision and has it’s own hierarchy under them which makes for a different structure. Both Aldi and Lidl are privately held and not stock companies like Walmart.
Aldi has five layers of management while Walmart has nine layers of management. That’s a difference in terms of bureaucracy.
If you are interested in how organizations are actually organized, being conscious of how they differ and how there different structures lead to different behavior is important.
In general having shopping malls that have their own branding and include dozens of stores, where Aldi and Lidl might be individual stores, is quite different than having all shopping malls owned by a large chain and run all the businesses in the shopping mall.
Of course they are not literally the same, but in the context of the particular article we are commenting on, both Aldi, Lidl and Walmart are large bureaucratic organizations (specialized in retail). They all benefit vastly from economics of scale and to increase output they have to create new stores and hire more people to run them (and increase the throughput of their supply chain).
I think the cruxes here are whether Aldi forced out small retailers like Walmart did; and how significant the difference between Walmart and Aldi is, compared to the difference between Aldi and large, successful retail orgs in wentworthland or christiankiland.
(my experience in German shopping is that most grocery stores are one of a half-dozen chains, most hardware stores are Bauhaus or OBI, but there isn’t a dominant “everything” store like Walmart; Müller might be closest but its market dominance and scale is more like K-mart in the 90′s than Walmart today.)