Showing posts from category: Retailing history
The Rise and Fall of the Greek-Australian Milk Bar: American Dreams with an Hellenic Touch
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Anyone who grew up in the golden age of milk bars in Australia, from the 1940s to the 1960s, will have a memory of or an association with these erstwhile hubs of suburban and small town social life…for many of that vintage it’d be hanging out inside with friends, indulging in their favourite flavoured milkshake, ice cream or other sweet tooth delight. My own fond recollection is of salivating over chocolate malt sundaes with nuts and taking turns at playing (or tilting) the pinball machine in the back corner of the shop. This treat was an exhilarating antidote to the aftertaste of having spent the preceding six hours toiling away in school confinement.
B&W 4d Milk Bar with mechanical cow & Red Cross-like symbol
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They were such an integral institution during my salad days that I was under the assumption that milk bars had been around forever. In fact they only surfaced in Australia for the first time in the early years of the Depression. The first bonifidé milk bar is generally considered to be the Black and White 4d. Milk Bar which opened its doors at 24 Martin Place, Sydney, in 1932𝕒, it’s conception was the idea of a Greek migrant to the Antipodes, Joachim Tavlaridis, who had Anglicised his name to Mick Adams. Mick had visited the US and had drew on the American diner/soda parlour concept that was flourishing in the US for his inspiration (including American menus, ice creams and chocolate). The distinguishing feature of the Black and White Milk Bar was its singular purpose, it exclusively sold just sodas and milkshakes (in the iconic silver-coloured metal milkshake cups with actual fruit in the shake). Mick was an early entrepreneur in the field, later adding Wollongong, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane shops to his milk bar “empire”. (‘1932: Australia’s first milk bar’, Australian Food Timeline, www.australianfoodtimeline.com). Mick Adams and other Greek-Australian small businessmen like him were the pioneers of the milk bar trade in Australia…typically the shops operating as open-all-hours family businesses, cf. postwar migrant Italians in the vanguard of delicatessen culture in Australia𝕓.
Golden Star Milk Bar, Perth (Photo source: M. Coufos)⊹
Greek cafes with a large dollop of Hollywood glitz The Greek owner-operators in Australia added glamour to their milk bars by infusing the decor with an vibrant American feel…gleaming chrome, neon illumination, plush leather chairs, mirrors, curvilinear Art Deco interiors, soda fountain pumps, snazzy uniforms, American jukeboxes. These early Greek milk bars (and cafés)𝕔 were purveyors of American dreams along with confectionery and sugary flavoured chilled beverages. Macquarie University history academic Leonard Janiszewski describes the agency of the early milk bars as “a kind of Trojan horse for the Americanisation of Australian culture” (‘The story of Australia’s Greek cafes and milk bars’, ABC Radio, Conversations (broadcast 02 May 2016). The milk bar caught on like wildfire—by 1937 there were around 4,000 in Australia, with names like “Olympia”, “The Orion” and “The Paragon”—as they did across the Tasman in New Zealand where the milk bar is known as “the Dairy”.
Milk bars passé By the 1970s the heyday of the Australian milk bar was well and truly past its use-by-date. Faced with an inability to compete with supermarket chains and multinational-owned petrol stations plus high rents, milk bar closures (together with that of the community corner store) became an increasingly common sight. 7-Eleven-style convenience stores started to pop up everywhere across suburbia to fill the void (‘Remembering the Milk Bar, Australia’s Vanishing Neighbourhood Staple’, Matthew Sedacca, Saveur, 18 January 2018, www.saveur.com).
Olympia, tea and milkshakes (Source: Daily Mail Australia)⊹
One Greek milk bar that did manage to defy extinction for much longer than most was the Olympia Milk Bar in the inner-Sydney suburb of Stanmore. Taken over by the Fotiou brothers in 1959, the Olympia under surviving brother Nick achieved a kind of local iconic status in recent years for its anachronistic novelty…open late, and always dimly lit, ancient chocolate bar wrappers plastered all over, a yesteryear-looking shop locked in a time warp. The Olympia somehow survived to 2018, until the Council decided to close down the dilapidated milk bar.
Postscript: Green plaque fiasco Attempts since 2017 to commemorate the Black and White Milk Bar as “the world’s first modern milk bar” with a green plaque have met with a roadblock. The plan had been to place the plaque on the original site of the proto-milk bar in Martin Place, Sydney, now the ANZ Tower. The spanner in the works has been the overseas corporate owner of the building who has steadfastly refused to allow the plaque to be mounted on the structure. The matter remains deadlocked with the City of Sydney Council unable to find an alternate, close-by location acceptable to Mr Adams’ relatives (“‘Disrespect’: Frustration grows over plaque for world’s first modern milk bar in Sydney”, Adriana Simos, Greek Herald, 05-Oct-22, www.greekherald.com.au).
Green plaque in limbo!۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵
𝕒 a staggering 5,000 customers fronted up on the opening day! 𝕓 Mick’s concept of a modern milk bar was later replicated overseas in various places within the Commonwealth and Europe 𝕔 the nouns “café” and “milk bar” seem to be interchangeable in describing these Greek-Australian run establishments
Brickfield Hill: From ‘Brickopolis‘ to Centre of a Sydney Retailing Dynasty
Sydney is chock full of locality names—names like Taverners Hill, Clifton Gardens, Pearces Corner, Tom Ugly’s Point, Russell Lea, Camp Cove, Tumble Down Dick, Bushrangers Hill, Brush Farm, Strawberry Hills, Charing Cross, etc—places on or off the map not big enough or important enough to warrant the status of ‘suburb’ in their own right.
‘Plan de la Ville de Sydney’ (Lesueur’s Map, 1802) (Source: State Library, NSW)
One of the earliest in the Sydney colony with an interesting back story is Brickfield Hill. Located on indigenous Gadigal country at the south end of the CBD, Brickfield Hill is a loosely-demarcated area❋ with a small hill, the place where the early colony’s clay was sourced for the making of bricks and tiles…bricks plus a hill, hence the name “Brickfield Hill”. This endeavour started virtually from year one of the European takeover of the Great South Land…the First Fleet in 1788 included convicts with brick-making experience – James Bloodworth, the most significant of them was to prove invaluable to the embryonic settlement’s progress. With only makeshift accommodation in the form of canvas tents, the construction of more secure and permanent housing was of the highest priority. Bloodworth was immediately appointed master brick-maker for the Port Jackson colony by Governor Phillip, assigned labourers and tasked with the job of manufacturing 30,000 tiles per month [Ringer, Ron, Bricks, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionary of Sydney.org/entry/bricks, viewed 19 Nov 2020 ; ‘Brickfield Hill’, www.kathyprokhovik.com), 06-May-2018].
The public brickfield on the ‘Hill’ became such a hub of activity that in 1799 it was described as “a suburb of the town of Sydney … within a few yards of the main road” (George Street) [‘Bricks and Nails: Building Materials as Criteria for Dating in Sydney and Environs from 1788’, Robert Victor Johannes Varman, (Unpublished PhD thesis from the University of Sydney, Sept. 1993), www.ses.library.usyd.edu.au].
Brickfield Hill, George Street (Photo: JR Clarke / State Library, NSW)
By 1804 there were 72 houses within the village of Brickfield Hill, but it wasn’t the most salubrious part of Sydney to live…that part of George Street was “infamous for its steep, dangerous and dusty road” (Varman). The “exceedingly unpleasant” place, “covered by a filthy brown haze and choking dust storms of windy days” the southerlies that swept along the street were given the name the ‘Brickfielder’ [“Brickaholic’s tales behind the history of Sydney’s ‘golden mile’”, (John Huxley), Sydney Morning Herald, 26-Sep-2008, www.smh.com.au]. By 1840 the public brickfields had become a blot on the landscape…the dusty brick pits and polluting kilns were not conducive to the increasing residential composition of the village. Its dingy, seedy taverns were dens of crime and rampant practices of bestial cruelty. In 1841 the government ended the brick industry in the locality. In it’s place small brick-making concerns in private hands fanned out in directions south and west to suburbs such as Newtown, Camperdown, Pyrmont, Glebe and to St Peters which eventually emerged as the premier site for brick-making in Sydney. Merchant stores, warehouses and more housing (leading to slum conditions) helped fill the void in Brickfield Hill (Varman).
(Source: SL – NSW)
Gradient was a sizeable issue in Brickfield Hill in the early period … the steeply sloping terrain along that section of George Street impeded the transport of heavily-laden carts. During the 1830s the authorities finally addressed this. A colonial earth-moving project succeeded in reducing the gradient between Bathurst and Liverpool Streets to a more gradual and manageable slope [‘Brickfield Hill (1) – The Hill’, Sydney Eye, www.sydneyeye.blogspot.com/].
At the beginning of the 20th century Brickfield Hill achieved the kudos of an altogether different association as the new home of one of Sydney’s early retail giants. In 1905 Anthony Hordern and Sons opened its “Palace Emporium” on the site, their mega-department store rose up on the ‘Hill’ – six stories high and comprising 21 hectares of retail space. At its zenith Hordern’s Brickfield Hill emporium was reputedly the largest department store in the world. [‘Brickfield Hill’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
In its post-department store life the Hordern building’s vast “rabbit-warren” network of rooms and corridors was home to the Business School of the NSW Institute of Technology until the 1980s. Acquired by Malaysian property developer Ipoh Garden Development in 1985, it was demolished the following year amid considerable controversy to make way for the World Square complex⍉ [‘Anthony Hordern & Sons’, www.wikiwand.com].
With the leveling of Hordern’s Palace Emporium building and the earlier closure of the Brickfield Hill post office, Brickfield Hill’s long existence as an identifiable locality in Sydney’s CBD was consigned to the past.
PostScript: The Hordern story From humble beginnings as a King Street (Sydney) drapery shop in 1823, Hordern and Sons built up an Australian retail empire. After a stint in Melbourne retailing, Anthony Hordern (Senior) built his first Sydney emporium in Chinatown (Haymarket). The AH showcase, opened in 1905 to replace the fire-destroyed Haymarket emporium, was the new Palace Emporium (AKA the “Senior Store”). The Brickfield Hill retail ”super-store“—with a main entrance of imported Italian marble—later diversified its commercial activities to include a branch of the Commonwealth Bank, tea rooms, a post and parcel office, rest rooms, public phone booths and a Thomas Cook travel agency. Expansion of the business occurred from the Fifties with new Hordern & Sons stores opening in Canberra, Wollongong, West Ryde and Mid-City Pitt Street. By the late 1960s Anthony Hordern & Sons was massively losing business to suburban malls and to city competitors…it’s retail empire crumbling, the Brickfield Hill flagship was acquired by Waltons Ltd. In early 1973 the doors of the iconic retailer, once lauded as a “colossal business premises”, closed for good. (Wikiwand entry).
🔽 (Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Sydney Living Museums. [TC 658.871 HOR/54]) 
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❋ roughly covering the area from Sydney Town Hall (Bathurst Street) to Central Station, skirting the present-day locales and suburbs of Haymarket and Surry Hills
⍉ which then stayed as a gigantic hole In the ground for 18 years until World Square was completed in 2004
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Hugo Boss, Gentlemen’s Outfitters to the German Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei
Hugo Boss … luxury watches, fragrances, men’s suits and fashion wear and accessories, Nazi uniforms. Wait! Run that last one past me again? Yes, it’s true. Hugo Boss AG＊, that doyen of international fashion houses with annual revenue exceeding €2.7 billion (2018) and over 1,100 stores worldwide, provided the German Nazi Party, with their uniforms during (and prior to) the Third Reich. Although you wouldn’t know so from a perusal of the Hugo Boss website which keeps a firm lid on the company’s unsavoury past❂.
The clothing company was started in Metzingen (southern Germany) in 1924 by the eponymous Hugo (Ferdinand) Boss…it commenced supplying the NSDAP (National-Socialist Workers Party) with their brown military uniforms, according to the company’s own claim, in 1924 (the year in which Hugo Boss was founded)∅. Initially Boss designed and provided the standard Nazi brown-shirted outfits including Stürmabteilung (SA) uniforms, Nazi workwear, and Hitler Youth uniforms. In the Depression Boss’s company was like many, many businesses severely hit and Boss was forced into bankruptcy in 1931. That year was momentous for another reason, HF Boss joined the Nazi Party, an event that was to turn his fortunes round dramatically. At the same time the failed businessman also joined the SS (Schutzstaffel) as a “sponsoring member”.
By appointment to the Führer Membership of the party meant more contracts for Hugo Boss as a favoured supplier of Hitler. Under the Nazi dictatorship Boss’ sales grew from 38,260 RM in 1932 to 3,300,000 RM in 1941 (Timm). Boss’ motives for joining have been attributed to “economic opportunism” and its clear that he saw the business advantages of tying his colours to the Nazi flagship, but there’s equal little doubt that his commitment to the Nazi cause was heartfelt (a photo of him with the Führer was said to to be one of the tailor’s most prized possessions)❊ [‘Hugo Boss’ Secret Nazi History’, (Fashion and War), M2M, (video, YouTube)].
🔻A Boss ad placed in the SS newspaper
Nazi fashionistas From 1937 on, the relationship acquired an exclusivity, Hugo Boss made clothing only for the Nazis, including the black uniforms worn by the elite Nazi force, the SS (Boss didn’t design the uniforms worn by Himmler’s SS Corps, two party members unconnected to the company designed them). Boss continued to heavily advertise his fashions in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, and fashionably chic the uniforms were! One of the pillars of the Nazis’ ideology was the pseudo-scientific belief in Aryan superiority, this involved showing the world what the “new man” looks like. There was no finer exemplar of this than the Wehrmacht military man, and this is where Boss provided the finishing touches. The firm’s stylish, sharply cut uniforms conveyed the desired outer appearance, the SS corporate identity that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to project to the world (Fashion and War).
HB as slave-labour drivers From 1940 Boss used slave labour at it’s Metzingen textile factory, predominantly comprising women and later supplemented by the infusion of Polish and French POWs. The company (sans it’s founder), after decades of dodging accusations, finally came clean about it’s shameful Nazi collaboration, after being pressured into issuing a mea culpa in 1997 for the gross mistreatment of the workers. Later the corporation commissioned a book on it’s dark past association❏ [‘“Hitler’s Tailor” Hugo Boss apologises for using slave labour to make Nazi uniforms’, (Lauren Paxman), Daily Mail, 24-Sep-2011, www.dailymail.co.uk].
(Source: www.militaryuniforms.net/Pinterest)
A discounted form of justice After the war Boss was tried along with other German collaborators by a regional Denazification tribunal. The man known as “Hitler’s Tailor” claimed in his defence that he only joined the Nazi Party to save his firm. The court found Boss to have been a “beneficiary of the system” and fined him 100,000 RM, made him sever all connexions with his own firm and stripped him of the right to vote, join a political party or professional organisation. However, on appeal, the fine was reduced by 75%, the other restrictions were lightened and his culpability was downgraded to ‘follower’ of the regime. Before the findings could be ratified by the French Military Government and the punishments imposed, Boss died in 1948 (Timm).
(Photo: Hutton-Deutsh Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)
Endnote: Supping with the 卐 devil Hugo Boss AG was far from the only company to profitably cohabitate with Hitler and the NSDAP. The list of big corporations doing mutually advantageous business was extensive, both within Germany and outside – including Volkswagen, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Kodak, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Siemens, Chase National Bank and Associated Press [‘Companies with Ties to Nazi Germany’, (Debra Kelly), Grunge, (Upd.17-Dec-2019), www.grunge.com].
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＊ Aktiengesellschaft (German limited company)
❂ either that or trying to conceal or gloss over the inconvenient truth of the corporation’s history, eg, “in the 1930s it produced uniforms for various(sic) parties around the time of the world war”, www.bangandstrike.com
∅ the firm’s advertising in the 1930s stated that it was a “supplier of National Socialist uniforms since 1924”, however research suggest that this overstates by four years the length of Boss’ association with Hitler and the Nazis [Elisabeth Timm, ‘Hugo Ferdinand Boss (1885-1948) und die Firma Hugo Boss: Eine Dokumentation’, (Metzingen Zwangsarbeit – Forced Labour), MA Thesis, 1999]
❊ it was a ‘reunion’ of the two humble German corporals from World War I
❏ author Roman Koester wrote: “it’s clear that (Boss) did not just join the party out of economic calculation…he was a convinced Nazi” (Hugo Boss, 1924-1945. A Clothing Factory During the Weimar Republic and Third Reich)
Aldiland – from a Small-Town German Corner Store to World-wide Supermarket Discount Kings (Part II)
A few months ago Channel Five screened a documentary on the German supermarket giant (‘Inside Aldi: Britain’s Biggest Budget Supermarket’). The doco was laced liberally with interviews of Aldi senior managers, all waxing lyrical about their ‘enlightened’ employer and the company’s “win-win” virtues for everybody, which made the program feel uncomfortably like a commercial promotional video at times. Nonetheless, the doco did unearth an interesting back story, that of the supermarket emporium’s evolution and it’s founder-brothers who emerged out of the ruins of war-time Germany to steer their fledgling company to it’s eventual lofty perch as an much envied international discount supermarket chain.
🔺 an early Albrecht store displaying Karl’s name with plenty of Spirituosen (alcohol) and Lebensmittel (food) in the display windows (Photo: www.news.com.au)
The seed of Aldi as we know it today has it’s roots in Essen, Western Germany, in 1913. Anna Albrecht, the wife of a miner, started a small grocery store in the suburb of Schonnebeck as a sideline. After serving in the German Wehrmacht in WWII, Karl and Theo Albrecht, Anna’s sons, took over their mother’s business, which they initially named Albrecht KG. During the formative first years, Karl for a time operated some stores solo (under the name “Karl Albrecht Lebensmittel”).
The Albrecht brothers concentrated on the Ruhr area of Germany at first, and then expanded rapidly across West Germany over the next 15 years. By 1960 Albrecht KG had amassed 300 shops in the Bundesrepublik and had a yearly cash flow of DM90 million. A factor contributing to the Albrecht stores’ early popularity and success was it’s novel approach to tax rebates from purchases. Instead of following the business norm of making customers collect stamps before they qualified for the 3% rebate, the brothers subtracted the tax from the price before sale, a radical idea and an ingeniously simple one which undercut their rivals’ bottom price. Aldi, as it was soon to be known, was on it’s way to revolutionising the low-cost grocery trade.
🔻 Theo (L), Karl (R)
(Source: www.broadview.tv)
Sibling rivalry: Splitting of the ‘atom’ in two 1960 was a momentous year in the history of Aldi. The two brothers fell out, apparently over whether or not to sell cigarettes in Albrecht Discounts, and decided to divide the company into two separate entities➊. With a new, shorter, snappy name, ‘Aldi’, derived from the first two letters of their family name and the ‘Di’ from Diskont (Discounts), the company split into two – Aldi Nord (North) and Aldi Süd (South). At this time, as Aldi was an intra-West Germany operation only, the division was between the north (Theo’s domain) and the south (Karl’s domain) of the country. The geographical border separating Aldi Nord and Süd is known as the Aldi-Aquator (‘equator’). Aldi, after the schism, continued to grow, the brothers’ insistence on stocking only popular items, cut down inefficiencies and proved profitable.
🔺 Aldi’s first German store (in the “North sector”)
A store displaying both names, Albrecht and Aldi 🔻 (Photo: Getty)
By 1967 the first international growth steps were taken with the acquisition of Austrian grocer Hofer by Aldi South. As Aldi expanded elsewhere the arrangement between the brothers divied up the world thus (with a few later variations): Aldi South’s jurisdiction would entail Austria and the English-speaking countries, whereas Aldi North would operate in Germany and the rest of Europe. Netherlands followed in 1973, and in 1976 Aldi South made its first incursions into the US. The US became the only market penetrated by both arms of the Aldi empire when Aldi North acquired the US Trader Joe’s chain. Britain came into the Aldi South fold in 1990. Aldi South has been particularly aggressive in it’s drive for store expansion in both the US and Britain. The retailer has upward of 2,000 stores in 36 states across the US and in 2017 announced plans to add 900 more by 2022➋.
🔻 Trader Joe’s, Amherst, NY
Aldi found the highly-competitive (and crowded) UK grocery field initially hard to penetrate, coming up against well-established market leaders Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. By the 2010s however it was making exponential inroads into the Brits’ grocery market…by October 2013 it had 300 stores and doubled that by 2016, with new stores opening at the rate of one a week! Aldi South’s stated goal is to reach the 1,000 mark by 2022. At this rate it is looming as a genuine threat to the above “Big Four” Supermarket chains.
🔻 Aldi Long Eaton store (int) in Derbyshire (Photo: www.nottinghampost.com) 
Aldi global expansion intensified after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc system in 1989 and has experienced rapid growth in the 21st century. Since the 1990s Aldi has moved into Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland. In 2019 it made another market quantum leap, opening two pilot stores in Shanghai, China➌.
🔺 The Albrecht brothers‘ carve-up of the world map (Theo plays black, Karl orange)
Counting the combined Aldi stores operating in Germany by both Nord and Süd (about 4,100 stores), there are over 8,000 stores in Europe as a whole (more counting the Hofer chain). All up, the reach of the Aldi retail tentacle worldwide accounts for 10,000 to 12,000 stores, with revenue (2010) of €53 billion. An international supermarket success story with nary a blot on it’s copybook – with one exception. In 2008 Aldi South invested an estimated €800 million in Greece but after only two years operating, it had to pull the plug on it’s 38 stores in the ancient land of the Olympiad. Nothing substantial divulged as to motive (par for the course for Aldi), but apparently the Aldi board of management was frightened off by the “informal business practices” prevalent in Greece (transparently code for government/business corruption)➍.
🔺 Theo in 1971, following his misadventure (Photo: Getty)
Endnote: The saga of the reclusive co-founders (“the brothers frugal”) Theo and big brother Karl were never your stereotypical, über-rich CEOs, bobbing up everywhere, constantly in the media spotlight, being snapped for glossy mags gratuitously showing off their latest flashy, expensive car or girlfriend. That was not the brothers’ ‘bag’ – for in business and in personal lifestyles their thriftiness was legendary. But after 1971 the Albrechts’ customary muted behaviour reached a whole new level. That year, the brothers’ extraordinary wealth came back to haunt them➎. Theo was kidnapped at gunpoint and held hostage for seventeen days. The younger brother was released on the payment of a ransom – after Theo had haggled with his captors over the amount demanded! Theo later tried to claim the nearly US$3 million Aldi North had to fork out for his release as a tax deduction business expense! Theo’s ordeal profoundly affected both brothers, they became even more reclusive and secretive in their personal lives and movements (no interviews or public statements, hardly any photos of them together or separately after 1971 exist). Eternally vigilant thereafter, both brothers reportedly would drive home from work, separately, by different routes each day. The brothers Albrecht, having profoundly changed “German food culture and consumption mentality” forever, semi-retired to a remote island in the North Sea in their eighties to pursue the hobbies of golf, orchid-growing and collecting old typewriters (very old school typical of them).
🔺 Island of Föhr off the Holstein Coast, where the supermarket entrepreneur brothers beavered away on their personal hobbies during much of their twilight years (Photo: www.tourism.de)
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➊ although the separation wasn’t legally finalised until 1966
➋ German supermarket retail discounter Lidl—a copycat competitor to Aldi utilising the Aldi business model as a lodestar to chart it’s own course to retail riches —followed its path into the US market in 2017
➌ with concessions made for Chinese consumer buying-preferences based on online testing via Alibaba’s Tmall
➍ no doubt to Aldi’s chagrin, Lidl stores in Greece by comparison are apparently thriving
➎ they were reputed to be the richest men in Germany
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Articles and sites referred to:
‘The History of Aldi: The Tale of Two Corporations with the Same Name’, (Team S4RB), 13-Jun-2017, www.blog.s4rb.com
‘Inside ALDI’s first two pilot stores in China’, (10-Jun-2019), Shanghai’s.ist
‘Aldi founder became recluse after family kidnapping’, Albrecht obituary,
‘Aldi’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org
‘Aldi quits Greece’, German Retail Blog, 23-Jul-2010, www.german-retail-blog.com
‘Grocery chain Aldi to open another 900 stores in U.S.’, (Zlati Meyer), USA Today, 13-Jun-2017, www.usatoday.com
‘The Aldi Story – Karl and Theo Albrecht’, (2014 documentary), www.broadview.tv
‘Secrets of store success: Why Aldi is winning the retail battle’, (Alison Kirker), Sunday Post, 19-Feb-2018, www.sundaypost.com
Aldiland – from a Small-Town German Corner Store to World-wide Supermarket Discount Kings (Part I)
Anyone who’s ever walked into an Aldi supermarket would notice the difference from your established, big-name chain supermarket. For a start, in your mega-‘market you would expect to see palettes lying out the back in the loading dock, NOT on the aisle floors in the middle of the store. Perched on the Aldi palettes are groceries and other goods in their original cardboard boxes. Aldi has a small shop-fit budget, it doesn’t spend money on installing fancy shelving, it’s stores typify the “no frills store format”, which simply offers, as it’s advertising spiel announces, “Everyday low prices”. Minimalism is one of the standard Aldi store’s by-words. The checkout area tells a similar story. Shoppers line up their purchases on a long counter which gets shunted down to the cashier. The area of the till itself is small, minute even, the whole thing is streamlined for speed and ease of transacting. And you won’t find a cornucopia of either choice or types of products in Aldi’s.
The key to retail success Sticking to the basis is a large part of the Aldi formula. The supermarket stocks less than 2,000 items…compare this to your average Coles or Woolies supermarket which typically stocks upward of 40,000 items! Looking for some Foie de gras or that special Russian black caviar, no, you won’t find these here. Aldi’s product base resides on what they call Private brand items➀. Smaller concentration of staple products + purchase in high quantities = lower prices for the customers. Although that said, Aldi also offers up to the trolly-pushing punters what it calls “Weekly Special Offers”. Located in the middle aisles—what Aldi cutely calls its “Treasure Aisle” (get it?)—are a diverse range of merchandise, some of which might be in the luxury category, Alpine snow suits and hiking tents, tools for the house handy-person, electronics, European chocolates, right through to the more peculiarly exotic pet pampering products like dog sofas and cat caves➁. All of which are seriously cheap.
🔺 from “The Book of Aldi”
Aldi eschews the “nice shopping experience”, customer service is not great➂. The store’s mission, once the shoppers have made their selections, is to shuffle them through as rapidly as possible, hence the streamlined checkout. Shoppers are ‘encouraged‘ (by the scarcity of space) and the requirement to self-pack to quickly move their goods to the back bench to pack them. Aldi doesn’t have self-serve checkouts or ‘fast’ minimum-item lanes, so inevitably there are queues because of popularity…as a consequence sometimes patience and timing are supreme virtues.
When the last item has been taken from a carton on the palette, a shop assistant will simply replace it with a new carton. This is time-efficient, saving the store staff from having to constantly restock the shelves. And when it comes to personnel on the ground, Aldi certainly have leaner staffing structures than the “Coles-worths” and Tesco’s of this world. This has prompted claims that the German employer puts unrealistic time-pressures on the reduced number of store staff to move the palettes into their point-of-sale position and complete other store-related tasks. When the stores close at 8pm or whatever the local time applicable, the shop attendants and cashiers turn into cleaners and spend the next hour getting the store spotless. There have been allegations (denied by Aldi) that it makes staff in some regions arrive 15 minutes before start-time to check the stock level without being paid. And of course it’s widely known that Aldi have consistently been notoriously anti-union in its staffing management practices➃.
Aldi stores don’t include the extraneous auxiliary facilities regularly found in other larger mainstream supermarkets and hypermarkets—no in-store banking/ATM machines, cafes, photo booths, pharmacies, children’s rides, toilets, etc—Aldi’s view is these add to the store’s end-cost. Instead they concentrate on the singular task of delivering groceries and other household essentials.
Aldi’s control of it’s “own brand”—which makes up a whopping 90 to 95% of what it sells—is interesting. First there’s the design, it deliberately makes the packaging on its food items look much the same as the leading manufacturers’ equivalent brands. Next, it tries to replicate the taste of these popular brands. Then Aldi invents a brand name for the product which often sounds vaguely like the well-known brand. And it apparently works – even on luxury items. To take a UK example: Many British consumers who once shopped at the upmarket Sainsbury’s and Waitrose supermarkets have been enticed by Aldi’s “Specially-Selected” luxury items – and the reason is twofold, obviously price (much cheaper than Sainsbury’s), but also because they now feel they are getting a similar-quality product (retail expert Julie McColl, Glasgow Caledonian University). As well as a recent product expansion to include luxury treats for it’s shoppers, Aldi’s move into ‘fresh’, the fruit and veg lines, has broadened it’s appeal.
Another key to Aldi being so spectacularly successfully in the supermarket game is it’s relationship to suppliers. Because of their runaway retail success they have many primary producers and manufacturers lining up to do business with them, but Aldi is well-known for driving a hard bargain with suppliers (sort of a case of “my way or the highway”). They are also clever at judging what will be efficacious – by sourcing local suppliers and advertising in the UK they have softened the German outsider element and fostered an impression among British shoppers of the big discount ‘invader’ being home-based.
Dr McColl has also drawn attention to Aldi’s recently strategy of positioning some of its new stores in towns next door to the prestigious Marks and Spencer outlets. The appeal of this being that shoppers can easily flit between the two – and avail themselves to the best of both worlds, getting their luxury items at M&S and their basics at Aldi.
The above factors, outlined, are apparently the ‘secrets’ to Aldi’s stellar success and it’s ability to offer and maintain retail prices at rock bottom in markets across the world. In part II I will tell the story of Aldi’s rise from a single grocer’s store in provincial Germany to international retail empire, and of the two publicity-shy and increasingly reclusive brothers who spearheaded the company’s seemingly unstoppable growth and expansion.
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➀ called Exclusive brands in US AldiLand
➁ pet furniture seems to be one of Aldi’s specialities
➂ or maybe I mean non-existent – staff are hard to catch, as they are usually flat out haring round the store trying to meet management’s daily schedules
➃ 200 Aldi store managers in the US filed charges against unfair labour practices (University of Huddersfield). Aldi operations in other countries have similarly been criticised for incidences where the store has adopted an authoritarian or heavy-handed line towards it’s staff
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Articles, papers and sites referred to:
‘Aldi – “The No Frills Retailer”, (Peter Emsell, with contributions by Leigh Morland), Unpublished case study, University of Huddersfield (2011), www.eprints.hud.ac.uk
‘Secrets of store success: Why Aldi is winning the retail battle’, (Alison Kirker), The Sunday Post, 19-Feb-2018, www.sundaypost.com
‘Aldi’s secret for selling cheaper groceries than Wal-Mart or Trader Joe’, Business Insider, (Ashley Lutz), 09-Apr-2015, www.businessinsider.com
‘Aldi rebukes Dispatches Investigation, says it contains “selective information”‘, (Natalie Mortimer), The Drum, 10-Nov-2015, www.thedrum.com
Fortnum and Mason’s Retail Longevity: Once the Favourite Grocers of HRM and Other Assorted Royals
That fashionable mag Harper’s Bazaar recently compiled a list (the sort of thing they do) of 10 of the favourite places in London that good Queen Elizabeth likes to shop at. They are, in no particular order, Smythson❅ (luxury leather goods and stationery for the Royal quill); Hunter (Wellington boots that QEII likes to drag on for traversing her Scottish estates); Launer London (the Royal handbag – apparently she has 200 of them); Barbour (her coats – there’s just one particular type of coat that Liz has been faithful to for the entire duration of a Diamond Jubilee and then some!); Anello and Davide of Kensington (shoes); Fulton (umbrellas); John Lewis (haberdashery and household goods); Rigby and Peller (suppliers of the Queen’s lingerie for 59 years); Corgi Hosiery (no, not stockings for HRM’s favourite “pampered pooches”, but socks for the Royal feet); Dubonnet (Liz stocks up on gin and Dubonnet⊞ for her favourite cocktails).
A household name in British retail trading since the time of Queen Anne
But there is another London retailer whose royal connexion for sheer staying power puts all of these businesses in the shade. Fortnum and Mason have long held sway as the Royals’ grocer of choice, starting with the family matriarch Queen Victoria in the 1860s, through to (until recently) the present ‘shopaholic‘ monarch.
F&M, 1957 [Source: Getty image]
The company’s history goes back even further—to the year 1707. In that year tenant (and latent entrepreneur) William Fortnum and his landlord Hugh Mason formed what was to become a momentous business partnership. At that time Mason was already operating a small store in St James Market for two years. The new store at 181 Piccadilly was the start of a retail innings that has now stretched 312 years and counting. Over that epoch of time Fortnum and Mason or F&M can (and has listed) a commendable catalogue of achievements, including:
🔸 introduced the Scotch egg in 1738— proving to be a highly portable snack/meal, just right for long distance journeys—as were F&M’s famous hampers
🔸 functioned as an official post office as well as a retail store – from 1794 up to 1839 when Britain established the General Post Office (GPO)
🔸 Queen Victoria chose F&M as her exclusive purveyor to despatch supplies of food to Florence Nightingale’s soldier patients in her field hospitals in the Crimean War (1856)
🔸 in a deal with the American HJ Heinz company, F&M in its role as stockists of tinned goods, introduced the humble baked bean to the British Isles (1886)
🔸 helped to bring variety to the British tea palate by introducing a range of south Asian teas (Indian and Ceylonese) to Britain for the first time including a new “Royal Blend” in honour of Edward VII (1902)
🔸 sent food hampers to imprisoned suffragettes (who had smashed the windows of the Fortnum store in protest, demonstrating apparently that F&M could turn the other cheek) (1911)
🔸 more predictably, they also sent hampers to soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders during WWI (1914)
🔸 one of the things F&M is most proud about is its role as a supplier of expeditions, it supplied George Mallory’s failed attempt to climb Mt Everest in 1924, as well as other expeditions in Africa. To extend the alpine theme, F&M in 1930 added a mini sky slope for promotional value to the Third floor of the Piccadilly store
21st century Fortnum, an era of belated expansion
In 2007 F&M celebrated its tercentenary with a long-overdue refurbishment of its flagship store – a makeover costing £24 million ☉.
[Photo: www.londontown.com]
Finally, during this decade F&M made the move toward a multi-store structure. In 2013 and 2014 branch stores were opened in St Pancreas International Station and Heathrow Terminal 5 respectively. This was followed by an international presence. Dubai opened an F&M store in 2014 and just this year the company made its biggest venture on the world stage yet, opening F&M Hong Kong.
The Foie gras controversy
As a grocer F&M has pursued a market strategy of providing quality (definitely not inexpensive) groceries (“posh nosh”) and luxury (and sometimes exotic) niche food items (eg, ready-to-eat luxury meals such as fresh poultry or game in aspic jelly). This has occasionally led the retailer to become embroiled in controversy. In 2010 F&M earned the opprobrium of animal rights group PETA UK who (enlisting the support of some celebrity Britons) demonstrated against F&M‘s Foie gras product. The protestors were unhappy that the retailer did not alert consumers to the cruel method of force-feeding geese and ducks to produce the product. F&M, despite the pressure exerted on it, doggedly refused to discontinue the line.
The company has been the subject of other controversies of recent. F&M has been tangled up with the brouhaha of allegations of tax avoidance by its parent company’s subsidiaries. This resulted in a mass sit-in in F&Ms Piccadilly store by UK Uncut (a lobby group protesting public service cuts and tax avoidance).
Severing of ties with the Windsors and more bad publicity
In 2018 Buckingham Palace stopped providing meat from its Royal Farms at Windsor Park to F&M…it was unhappy with F&M’s practice of bullying its suppliers to squeeze prices down. However F&M did not pass this on to consumers, continuing to assert that its bacon, pork and lamb (at double the supermarket price!) was sourced from HM’s Windsor Farms. The company had to grovel apologetically to Buck Palace, and with regal ill-will compounded, thus its 150-year tenure as the Royal family’s grocer was finito.
PostScript: A British institution but not a British-owned one
Despite its Royal association and status as a “national institution“, a part of the retailing firmament in the UK, F&M has long been foreign owned. In 1951 it was acquired by a Canadian businessman, W Garfield Weston. Today F&M is still in Canadian hands, privately owned by Wittington Investments Ltd which also owns the discount clothing store Primark.
181 Piccadilly, St James’s, W1A 1ER
Reference material:
“Fortnum & Mason: The First 312 Years”, www.fortnumandmason.com
“10 places the Queen does her shopping”, Harper’s Bazaar, 15-May-2018, www.harpersbazaar.com
“After 150 years as the royal grocery, Fortnum and Mason is ditched by the Queen and forced to apologise over Windsor meat scandal”, Sebastian Shakespeare, Daily Mail, 29-Sep-2014, www.dailymail.co.uk
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❅ Smythson’s are especially blessed by the British Crown, being the recipients of no less than four Royal warrants
⊞ a French red wine
☉ the following year F&M installed bee hives in the rooftop of the store!