If they are as cheap as their transport management system (which required Silverlight), nothing good can come out of this.
Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
151–160 of 516 posts
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing I tried to point out in my original comment: They don't embrace automation because it will 100% lower prices in the whole industry. In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating? Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation neede…
How does this make sense? Automation lowers prices, not margins. The prices go down because you don’t have to pay people. If it costs the same, you don’t lower prices just because you’re using automation.
Of course automation lowers prices, but only for the customers, for LIDL it will first of all decrease revenues.
Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate.
It took me a long time to understand this relationship, but while discussing this with a machine learning expert hired by LIDL it suddenly clicked: this is basically why they don't innovate further in terms of offline retail experience.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#153Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statem…
> Salaries are off the charts Are they? I received few offers from them and their salaries where in par with what I earn in Italy (around 100k) which is very good for Europe but not as much as SV
Just out of curiosity what do you do that earns you 100k in Italy if I may ask?
Most Italians I met working in Austria and Germany left Italy because of low salaries and they're not making anything close to 100k here either.
I've even met Italians who moved to Eastern Europe for higher tech salaries than back home so something doesn't add up.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) woul…
Ironically SAP is also a German company. I have no idea why anybody thinks that using SAP will help any company. One size fits all approach with hilarious failure stories. Still, some managers think it is great. Amazon could not enter the German market that easily, people really like to shop in Aldi / Lidl and the online retail business is not as strong as in the US.
When thinking about SAP, it helps to imagine how bad it has been at many companies before they introduced SAP. It has many flaws, but at least people are finally using a database to store their information :o)
On a side note, Amazon is unable to penetrate ALDI & LIDL's market share because they offer better prices. It's as easy as that, and it is not about whether German people love waiting in queues or driving to some shop. The savings by shopping at discounters are very real.
Once you factor delivery costs into the equation, many German food retailers only offer the more expensive brand foods for delivery, and not the cheap stuff - exactly as Amazon does.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Salaries are off the charts Are they? I received few offers from them and their salaries where in par with what I earn in Italy (around 100k) which is very good for Europe but not as much as SV
Just out of curiosity what do you do that earns you 100k in Italy if I may ask? Most Italians I met working in Austria and Germany left Italy because of low salaries and they're not making anything close to 100k here either. I've even met Italians who moved to Eastern Europe for higher tech salaries than back home so something doesn't add up.
Can confirm. As senior software developer I made 25K EUR in 2019.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies. In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete. Whereas in US…
It's the typical innovators problem you describe and that is pretty international. I do think you have a point about culture and in Europe in general software engineering is not seen as such a value adding activity as in the US. Salaries are less than $100k even in senior positions and I think because of this more talent has moved to the cutting edge technology companies in the US than Europe wants to admit.
This is much bigger than your comment makes it out to be. There used to be a real IT industry in Ger. We had Siemens-Nixdorf as a very decent global player. We had Commodore producing their PCs in Braunschweig. Now all that's left is the relative newcomer SAP.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#157I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows. They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refus…
>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies. In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete. Whereas in US…
There is a notable exception to this role: Germany's e-commerce giant Otto [1] has transitioned from order by catalogue to webstore pretty well and they are doing some nice things techwise.
Maybe exception to the rule but definitely an example of not being stuck in the past and it's a LARGE corporation.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies. In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete. Whereas in US…
The other big difference is that German companies prefer stability over pure profit, because it creates a better working environment and a happier society overall, where your job doesn't depend from sheer luck, especially the lower income ones. They pulled out more Tesla's than Tesla will ever do, and they still rank on top of the carmaking industry. Tesla, on the other hand, the first thing has done when they bought…
>German companies prefer stability over pure profit
Sorry, but Dieselgate would like to respectfully disagree with you.
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a f…
> RAM maxing out at 32 GB This part is just not accurate. I'm running their dedicated server with 256 GiB RAM right now.
Looking at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud, the top of the line dedicated option seems to be CCX51, which only has 32GB (edit: 128GB, I must have misread). Do you have some sort of special deal with them?
Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) woul…
In the UK, discounted or damaged items have a special sticker meaning "discounted to £0.70". That sticker has a barcode on, and is what is scanned at the checkout. That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to. Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went ou…
They scan the item before putting the new sticker on, then usually put the item in a known, high traffic area so it’s gone by the end of the day. Maybe they just consider it out the door at that scan then bin whatever reduced items didn’t sell.