What cultural problems did Walmart face in some of the international markets it entered?

Germany

In Germany Walmart suffered from cross cultural integration problems; the idea of one solution fits all was critically flawed. The problems faced can be classified in three folds.

Firstly, the issue of management; Walmart employed a non-German manager that didn’t understand the consumer habits and expectations of the German people; this was similar with the case of Silvio Napoli in the Schindler in India case study.

The American management made very critical decisions that didn’t reflect the cultural context of the German people in terms of consumer habits and expectations; the Germans are known to be efficient when it comes to shopping practices. The management implementation of bagging for the customers: the bagging for customers made shopping longer and the Germans didn’t like the facts that strangers did their bagging (they preferred spending shorter times at the shop). Similarly, the idea of smiling at the customers also didn’t fit well with the German people; German staffs not being used to the smiling culture, came out insincere coupled with the facts that the German shoppers took the gesture as being intrusive (in Germany it is considered not normal to smile at total strangers.).

Secondly, Walmart failed to account for Germany’s cultural attitudes; the union being very important to workers welfare, whereas in the US, Walmart staffs were known to not belong to any union (German companies have close ties with their unions). By taking an anti-union stance Walmart created a poor employee relationship that led to the loss of critical quality staffs in Germany; worse than the damage done to its employee relations was the spread of this negative image through the media to the German society and thus to German consumers.

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...ice in the United States; in Japan it created a negative image perception for Walmart; Japanese culture harbours the idea of laying-off staffs and hence wasn’t taken well with the Japanese society and consumers. Similarly, with Japanese consumers being health conscious and the need for Walmart to improve profit margins by cutting down the middlemen between producers and retailers; the idea of pre-packaged food (with reference to meat practices) didn’t fit well with the expectations of Japanese consumers who preferred that their meat supply was freshly produced.

Lastly, Walmart operated in large store formats (concept of retail stores format) which was new in the Japanese context; Japanese shoppers were used to the idea of small speciality shopping formats. This clash in expectations created a barrier to most Japanese shoppers actually patronizing Walmart stores.