In America, people shopped at Walmart instead of local mom & pop stores because it had lower prices and more selection, so Walmart and other chain stores grew and spread while lots of mom & pop stores shut down. Why didn’t that happen in Wentworld?
This comment caused it to occur to me that working in software development might produce a distorted view of this situation. In most types of companies, if you want to scale, you have to hire a lot more people to build more things and sell to more people. So scaling large is a much more natural thing to do. And cultural norms around that might then just spread to corporations where that’s less relevant.
It’s worth noting that there’s no Walmart in Germany. German shopping malls usually have a variety of different shops. While it’s still true that a lot of those shops are chains, it’s a different model than the Walmart model.
A company focusing on lower prices and more selection is not what won economically in Germany. Aldi and Lidl manage to focus on low prices but not high selection.
Aldi manages to expand to the United States but Walmart doesn’t seem to be able to expand to Germany or for that matter Europe at all.
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.)
It did happen in Wentworld, the resulting corporate structure just doesn’t look suspiciously hierarchical, and the corporate culture doesn’t look suspiciously heavy on dominance/submission.
Hard to know the full story of what it would look like instead, but I’d guess the nominal duties of Earth!management would be replaced with a lot more reliance on people specialized in horizontal coordination/communication rather hierarchical command & control, plus a lot more paying for results rather than flat salary (though that introduces its own set of problems, which Wentworlders would see as one of the usual main challenges of scaling a company).
I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble. A lot people are hard to convince to even show up to work consistently, let alone do things no one is telling them to do. And then even if they are self-motivated, you run into problems with whether their ideas are good or not.
Individual companies can solve this by heavily filtering applicants (and paying enough to attract good ones), but you probably don’t want to filter and pay your shelf-stockers like software engineers. Plus if you did it at across all of society, you’d leave a lot of your workers permanently unemployed.
That probably applies to at least half of all the sociological/governance stuff posted on LW… Plus no existing literature search beyond the first page of google scholar, or sometimes even at all.
Well if the question is “If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?” the answer is “That question assumes some false things”
Yeah, that’s part of the problem with the hypothetical, but even in a world where the premises of Wentworld/ “What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” were true, I’d still contest the idea that bureaucracy would be unnecessary, primarily due to both coordination reasons and the fact that verification would still be massively easier than generation for a lot of natural problems, so I still don’t buy the logical implication.
There would probably be less bureaucracy, but not none in his world.
But that premise falls apart as soon as a large fraction of those (currently) highly motivated (relatively) smart tech workers can only get jobs in retail or middle management.
In America, people shopped at Walmart instead of local mom & pop stores because it had lower prices and more selection, so Walmart and other chain stores grew and spread while lots of mom & pop stores shut down. Why didn’t that happen in Wentworld?
This comment caused it to occur to me that working in software development might produce a distorted view of this situation. In most types of companies, if you want to scale, you have to hire a lot more people to build more things and sell to more people. So scaling large is a much more natural thing to do. And cultural norms around that might then just spread to corporations where that’s less relevant.
It’s worth noting that there’s no Walmart in Germany. German shopping malls usually have a variety of different shops. While it’s still true that a lot of those shops are chains, it’s a different model than the Walmart model.
A company focusing on lower prices and more selection is not what won economically in Germany. Aldi and Lidl manage to focus on low prices but not high selection.
Aldi manages to expand to the United States but Walmart doesn’t seem to be able to expand to Germany or for that matter Europe at all.
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.)
Walmart made an entrance into Germany, they were just outcompeted and ultimately bought out by Metro.
https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=72656#:~:text=Managers were not familiar with,which is illegal in Germany.
It did happen in Wentworld, the resulting corporate structure just doesn’t look suspiciously hierarchical, and the corporate culture doesn’t look suspiciously heavy on dominance/submission.
Hard to know the full story of what it would look like instead, but I’d guess the nominal duties of Earth!management would be replaced with a lot more reliance on people specialized in horizontal coordination/communication rather hierarchical command & control, plus a lot more paying for results rather than flat salary (though that introduces its own set of problems, which Wentworlders would see as one of the usual main challenges of scaling a company).
I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble. A lot people are hard to convince to even show up to work consistently, let alone do things no one is telling them to do. And then even if they are self-motivated, you run into problems with whether their ideas are good or not.
Individual companies can solve this by heavily filtering applicants (and paying enough to attract good ones), but you probably don’t want to filter and pay your shelf-stockers like software engineers. Plus if you did it at across all of society, you’d leave a lot of your workers permanently unemployed.
“What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” is the entire premise here.
That probably applies to at least half of all the sociological/governance stuff posted on LW… Plus no existing literature search beyond the first page of google scholar, or sometimes even at all.
Well if the question is “If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?” the answer is “That question assumes some false things”
Yeah, that’s part of the problem with the hypothetical, but even in a world where the premises of Wentworld/ “What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?” were true, I’d still contest the idea that bureaucracy would be unnecessary, primarily due to both coordination reasons and the fact that verification would still be massively easier than generation for a lot of natural problems, so I still don’t buy the logical implication.
There would probably be less bureaucracy, but not none in his world.
But that premise falls apart as soon as a large fraction of those (currently) highly motivated (relatively) smart tech workers can only get jobs in retail or middle management.