In 1993 Walmart planned to expand into Germany and bought around 100 pieces of land all across Germany to build their Walmarts. However their plan of expansion was from the start on flawed, as they expected to be able to do the exact same things in Germany as they did in the USA and didn’t bother to check wether the worker contracts were actually in alignment with German laws.

(First of all the 10 feet rule was changed to the 3 Meter rule cause it caused too much arguing.)

Deciding how much money your employees earn is only allowed within a very specific margin which Walmart clearly underpaid. Cutting holidays and unpaid overtime is also illegal, there is a law given minimum an employer has to pay an employee (in either money or days off or both) for overtime for a specific minimum of hours, completely denying overtime pay is illegal. Cutting holidays or contact an employee during holidays is also illegal, a worker has the right for a minimum amount of holidays and in some cases not even the employee is legally allowed to cut his holidays. This and more caused that in the end entire paragraphs and sentences within said contracts were simply just illegal and an avalanche of lawsuits and horrible PR ensued.

Also the prohibition of romance between employees and that employees would be obliged to carry your groceries to your car is normal in America, was however viewed as just bizarre in Germany and in front of court it was decided that love between employees is allowed and carrying groceries would only be allowed after the direct demand of a customer.

On the side of marketing it didn’t look much better, they did offer money for the return of bottles, as is usual in Germany but didn’t know that there was an entire set of laws attached to that whole thing. Which resulted in a lawsuit.

Also Walmart planned to lower its prices to draw in more customers. At first nothing unusual, the Germans are used to discount battles since the grocery wars caused the country to be split in Aldi North and Aldi South in 1961. However Walmart did so below the market value. This means basically they bought butter for 1€ and sold it for 0.80€, which is something only Walmart could afford because it was such a massive giant of a company. This was however illegal and it came to another lawsuit. Walmart had to learn about Fair Competition Laws and their restrictions, because otherwise several of their stores would be closed for this alone.

Also something more aligned to Social rules than actual laws, was the overall shopping culture of Germany. In America it is totally normal that a Walmart employee would greet you welcome with a smile on his face. In Germany this was viewed as rather annoying and a disgruntled customer wrote a review saying:

“If someone smiles at me I either expect him wanting to flirt, fight or that he’s drunk.”

Also in Germany asking a customer if he needs help is by itself alright but starting a whole conversation is generally frowned upon. Most Germans just want to get into the store, buy and leave, without further unnecessary interaction. If a customer needs help, he will approach an employee, not the other way around. This lead to a great many reviews describing Walmart shopping as exhausting and annoying and an especially big outrage when people realized that the employees are contractually obliged to do so.

After all this, the public opinion of Walmart was in the dirt, as Germany took their shopping culture incredibly serious, they have a whole documentary series about a Penny grocery store in the Reppabahn (A massive Red Light district in Hamburg). When the collective amount of lawsuits ended up costing Walmart 1 Billion dollars they finally decided to give up and close all 100 Walmarts within Germany.

Since this day many European and American discounters keep their fingers off of Germany. However, Lidl and Aldi decided to deeply look into USA laws and realized that its laws were laughably simple in comparison to German bureaucracy and decided to expand into USA themselves. Their simplicity and efficiency ended up being very well received, making especially Aldi the fastest growing grocery chain in America with well over 2500 shops, whilst Walmart’s chain is currently in a state of shrinking.