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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

1. McDonald's everywhere. These were non-existent in 1970.

2. I recently was in a shopping mall in Stuttgart. The design, parking garage, mall exterior, interior, looked exactly like an American mall. The displays and signs inside were nearly all in English. You could not tell you were in Germany.

3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

4. English everywhere.

5. More American style clothing. Less Lederhosen (in fact, I can't recall seeing any Lederhosen after 1970).

6. American brand names everywhere.

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>3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

I'm not sure how long ago you were in the US, but it was ubiquitous here a couple generations ago, and the shift away from smoking seems to be a global trend associated with wealth - in Mainland china, I see much less of the younger generation smoking nowadays.

I was in Berlin recently and can attest to the English signage anecdote though, even if your experience seems to be an exaggerated version of mine.

As a Brit who went to Amsterdam a couple of years ago, I was really surprised at the number of smokers on the streets. It's definitely regional.

Germans smoked heavily everywhere in the 1980s. This all vanished by the 2000s.

Smoking largely ended in the US by the mid 70s. Not completely, but in the 1960s I recall every office building stunk of stale smoke. This disappeared by the mid 70s.

Just to address your first point - You can't visit a major American city with out finding an IKEA or even two. The world globalized, it didn't americanize.

Step into any IKEA in America, and there's no hint it's a European company. Step into a McDonald's in Germany, and it's like you stepped into America.

Besides, McDonald's are everywhere in Germany. I even ate at one at Checkpoint Charlie. An obvious triumph over communism :-)

I'm sure there is an IKEA around here somewhere, but I don't know where. I know where all the McD's within 10 miles are!

Shouldn't the BLAHAJ and GODIS SKUM signs in Ikea be a hint? The cafe likes to sell its Swedishness too.

> 3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

Eh? How is stopping smoking a "US thing"? Surely it's a result of public health campaigns and regulations slowly introduced over decades?

And these laws were passed in some European countries before the USA introduced them

The US was about 20 years ahead in pushing smoking to the margins.

Just to play the devils advocate.

USA has double the smoking rate (per capita) than in my country (2017).

Germany was very,very early with anti-tobacco campaigns: “in 1929 (presumably too late to be included in the handbook) the German physician, Fritz Lickint published a paper in which he showed that lung cancer patients were particularly likely to be smokers. He then went on a crusade against smoking, and antitobacco activism actually became widespread in Germany.”

Hollywood was one of the main proponents of marketing cigarettes.

See also the newish American trend of vaping.

America is the forth largest producer of cigarettes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigaret...

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-smoking-rate-what-wor...

The fact remains, in the 1980s in Germany if you walked into any business office there was a choking blue haze like in 1960s America. It was inescapable.

It was starkly obvious if you traveled back and forth between the US and Germany in the 1980s. In the 80s US businesses had done a good job of pushing the smokers out on the porch.

I never thought that would work, but it did, and smoking became generally recognized as the filthy habit that it was.

My '72 Dodge hasn't seen a cigarette since the 1980s and still smells like smoke :-)

There are Chinese restaurants everywhere in the US. So obviously the US is becoming Chinese then? Using your arguments? Or perhaps the US is becoming English since everybody is using mobile phones with an arm designed CPU? Or perhaps Mexican because of all the Mexican restaurants in the US? Or Italian? The US sure loves eating pizza? Using your arguments I could make all of those claims.

You can argue whatever you like. I lived in Germany in the late 60s for 3 years, and visited occasionally in the decades since. For someone living there the whole time, the change might be gradual enough to not be noticeable, but I notice it as discontinuous jumps.

Re 2 & 4: All signs here (pop 200k city) are in German. Only some very rare exceptions are in English (and other languages as well), like Corona behavior signs. The only English I normally see is the atrocious Denglisch (Portmanteau of Deutsch (German) and English) like "Back Factory" (Baking factory…) or single words like "sale".

The Lederhosen are the American equivalent of the hick bib in the South.

Those are just form Bavaria and nowhere else.

You woudn't see a cowboy dress in NYC.

I lived in Wiesbaden in the late 1960s. It was commonplace to see boys and men in Lederhosen on the street, and not just as a costume during Fasching. They wore them like jeans (not with the suspenders).

So did we the Basques with the fisherman/peasant custome but nowadays that dress it's just used for holydays as a folkloric tradition.

> You woudn't see a cowboy dress in NYC.

Well, there's the Naked Cowboy. But I guess he's missing the "dress" part of it (aside of "keeping the hat (and boots) on").

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