Sherry Chandler » How Wal-Mart Lost Germany

How Wal-Mart Lost Germany

From the NYTimes:

Wal-Mart is also trying to integrate acquisitions with more sensitivity — a process that involves issues like deciding whether to consolidate multiple foreign headquarters and how aggressively to impose Wal-Mart’s corporate culture on non-American employees.

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union, which represents 5,000 Wal-Mart employees here.

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