Google listed my restaurant's number as its British HQ

Let's see... there's one in Frisco, Texas ("Dallas"); one in Long Island ("New York City"); one in Houston; and one in Los Angeles.

That's almost 1.5% of the number of Apple Stores in the US. The difference is that Apple uses their stores to sell things.

This is obviously not a method by which you'd be expected to buy a Samsung product. Or, in most cases, a method by which doing so would be possible at all.

I'd apologize for the oversight, but my sweeping generalization is more accurate than the detail that Samsung Stores technically exist.

I remember seeing one in Liverpool (though pre-Covid)

It's an order of magnitude less hard than actually setting up a store front, signing up for utilities, hiring staff directly, managing stock/inventory, dealing with returns etc. Not to mention that no-one will likely notice when you quietly take down the 'Google section' overnight.

It the equivalent of setting up a 'store' on Amazon vs. creating your own web presence + fulfilment warehouse.

I noticed this with the Olympics Chinese adverts on buses. I’m guessing the hallowed wealthy people who travel to the Olympic are very niche market.

I’m guessing this circus is running rings around Paris as I type.

And what about competition, are there department stores and electronic stores in Poland? If I look in my country, those brands haven even less shops here, but I can find 20-30 stores just in my city who are selling the brands. So there is just very little to earn for dedicated brand stores here.

How much of this comes from electronic devices? Probably not that much. Big Business prefers for every division to pay their own bills, and to not depend on subsidizes from other divisions.

> The reason Alphabet and Microsoft do not maintain their own retail stores is because they are betting their customers are not willing to pay a sufficient price premium

They don't need to bet, they have the numbers. They had stores and they know how much they get through all their distribution-channels. Local shops just don't make enough anymore these days.