Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SuperHero]

read it here

[desultude]

The newest Carrefour in Daegu has nothing- a poor selection of wine, not much in the way of cheeses, and higher prices than the competition, Homeplus, down the road from it.

Besides, every weeek Homeplus and EMart have new stuff, and their wine selections are really decent.

[mindmetoo]

Carrefour has great ground coffee. I'd be screwed if they left. I have noticed the Carrefour in Nowon has gotten a bit sucky in the last year. They rearranged the aisle in this bizarre illogical fashion.

[tzechuk]

But.. but... the Carrefour here in Daejeon Yusong is GREAT. Like the best supermarket in the area.

They can't go!!!

[coffeeman]

[Tiberious aka Sparkles]

I was at the one near Ori station (Bundang) a few weeks ago. Place was a graveyard.

Sparkles*_*

[just because]

It will happen very very soon, carrefour will be gone in 6 months..

Actually it will probably be taken over by Hyundae who are 2nd in department store sales but have no prescence in the discount store competition and are keen for some of the action Shinsegae(EMart), Lotte(Lotte Mart) and Samsung(Homeplus) are getting...

Hyundae are having an IPO/share offering in London and New York right now with the purpose of this being to buy out the carrefour stores in Korea...so stock up on your goodies, the are predicting at the moment a May/June takeover, I'll see if I can find the article for you

Edit: i can't find the article of the Hyundai takeover but here is another one talking about how all 4 parties are interested in buying out Carrefour
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060303/4/2grs2.html

[Troll_Bait]

[Lizara]

My pesto.... *cries*

[eamo]

I'd like to see a more realistic pricing system for imported goods.

I don't think this has anything to do with Carrefour closing but it's close enough to have a rant about!!

As said before, average coffee is not a luxury item. Neither is mass-produced cheese like Bega chedder. That stuff is 7000 won in Korean supermarkets. It should be around 4000. Forget about western salami, pepperoni, hams etc. You need to have more money than sense to buy that stuff in K-supermarkets. Whiskey, wine...the list goes on. Nothing imported is sold at a reasonable price here.

I don't believe that shipping costs add so much to the price of these common foods.

Is it just simple greed on the part of the Korean importers, distrubuters and retailers? Maybe. Probably.

One possible theory is that there is still a 'hermit kingdom' perception in effect here. Foreign foods are 'expected' to be expensive so therefore they can be. It's not in the interest of the food industry to demote 'luxury' foods to the status of 'common' foods by selling them at reasonable prices.

Adversly, this means the imported foods will never achieve mass appeal so they won't shift much of it.

In UK supermarkets I can buy foods from all over the world. Spanish oranges, French apples, Brazilian coffee, NZ lamb, Italian pepperoni, Indian tea, Canadian bacon, Dutch cheese, Indonesion pineapples......And it's all cheap!!! The British are used to paying the same (or less!) for imported foods as home produced foods. Why is Korea so different in this respect?

[coffeeman]

My guess is that they're might be only a few players importing and distributing foreign foods into Korea so they're ripping everybody off.

Countries such as the UK have a long history of immigration and therefore have massive markets for the foods. In addition to native British people, the immigrants there are players in the food importing business.

I think it is the amount of pleayers in the food importing biz that determines how high the prices go.

It also could be that Koreans are conservative about food. For most of them, foreign food for them goes no further than T.G.I Fridays and Pizza Hut. Except for Itaewon in Seoul, you'll have a hard time finding any authentic foreign food in Korea.

There's not much interest here in good coffee either. When I go to a Korean supermarket, I always see Koreans buying big packages of that coffee mix rubbish. I can see them drinking it at the office because time is money, but can't they take a few minutes at home to make a decent cup of coffee? Koreans have ingrained buying habits. They always buy the same thing, Kimchi, Rice, Coffee mix, soju, chili sauce...

[chotaerang]

The usual suspects - overregulation and oligopoly - are much to blame for this gauging. For example, if you want to start importing wine, you need a particularely difficult to acquire permit, thus the number of wholesalers is small. Then the wholesalers can't be bothered to deal with small enterprises, so the small businesses have to go through middle men who are marking up a lot. The big buyers, like the supermarkets, then are pretty much free to charge what they want as small retailers can never undercut them because we pay 50% more for the same bottle.

As for coffee, try gabeeyang.co.kr

[JongnoGuru]

The Carrefour at the World Cup Stadium was never morgue-like, but always struck me as about twice the size it needed to be for the number of customers.

[desultude]

[eamo]