retail Archives - Page 6 of 11 - understand-culture

Theft of Advice

Germans have a word for taking a specialist’s advice in a shop and then buying somewhere else. It is Beratungsklau, theft of advice. In August 2025 the polling firm YouGov asked 2,009 people about it for the German Press Agency. About one in three said they had taken advice in a shop and then bought the product online after comparing prices. Almost half rejected the practice. Fourteen percent approved of it, and 34 percent were undecided.

The advice is valued enough that using it without paying has its own name. For many buyers, the price still decides.

Two Years to Sell in a Shop

The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training lists 324 recognized training occupations. One of them is selling in a shop. Under the training ordinance of 13 March 2017, training as a Verkäufer, a salesperson, takes two years. Training as a Kaufmann im Einzelhandel, a retail merchant, takes three years. Both end with an exam.

The Invisible Founder of Aldi

Karl Albrecht, co-founder of the discount chain Aldi, withdrew completely from public life in the mid-1950s. He was considered shy of the media. He hid his identity and refused every kind of interview. The German press knew only three old photographs of him. He died in Essen, the city where he was born, on 16 July 2014, at the age of 94.

Nutrition Facts

Federal regulation requires a panel on packaged food giving serving size, calories, and specified nutrients, in a set order and a set format. Every manufacturer must publish the same categories, including the unflattering ones, on the package itself.

Home improvement

Home Depot and Lowe’s are among the largest retailers in the United States, and both are built on the premise that homeowners will do the work themselves — electrical, plumbing, structural. American building codes generally permit a homeowner to do work on their own dwelling that would require a licensed trade elsewhere.

The price is right

The German title of the television show known in English as The Price Is Right, in which contestants guess the retail price of consumer goods. The premise only works if prices are knowable — if there is a right answer to guess. The show is built on the assumption that every item has one correct price.

Greed is great

Greed is great — an advertising slogan run by the electronics chain Saturn from 2002, shortly after the discount laws were repealed. It became one of the most argued-about slogans in German advertising history, blamed in public debate for a coarsening of commercial culture. The company eventually dropped it.

A campaign celebrating the pursuit of low prices caused a national argument about what the country had become.