Tomorrow we will drive 40 miles to the next city to do some offline shopping. Who cares? I know, nobody. But these little chores give you an interesting glimpse on the state of things. In Germany shops can’t just be open when they like to be. As crazy as it sounds there is a Ladenschlusszeiten gesetz where more than 3000 words define when stores can be open or closed in Germany. It used to be simple that stores would close at 6:30 pm. Which was real helpful when I was young: It got me out of bed to return some empty beer bottles and get new ones. Sometimes I missed it. That was a long time ago, and there was a revision of the law. Of course it is still regulated, but not really simple when stores are open and when they are not. After all this is Germany: if you want to consume then you have to obey some rules. There need to be rules. Germans love their rules.
Back to the shopping trip: The biggest department store in Germany is called Karstadt. Think Sears blended with Macy’s. They usually occupy a big chunk of the inner city. My wife googles
karstadt bremen oeffnungszeiten
Which should do the trick: karstadt is a very very rare name, only being used for the store. Bremen happens to be the city that the store is in. And oeffnungszeiten is german for “shop hours”. The results are complete spam. 100%.
Not one page in the right direction.
Karstadt has a website. But they seem to prefer to pay google money to be listed in the search results. Not a single result is from their own site.
The only question that remaings: Who is more broken, ‘google.de’ or ‘Karstadt’ .
Probably both.
google.de is as messed up as Apple Germany. They always have been a total pain to deal with.
I think they manage to tell their US motherships that it’s Germany’s fault that they have no success. Easier than actually getting something done here.
What might be the next google at the ‘big daddy data center’ does show the same amount of spam and junk.
Different junk, but the actual website of Germany’s biggest department store is equally missing.