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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

I was recently traveling in London and wanted to buy a Google Pixel phone (it is unavailable in my home country.) I thought it would simple enough as walking into the Google Store and picking the colour I like along with any accessories.

Well, turns out that since COVID there is no such thing as "Google Store" in London. In fact, Google does not have any physical consumer presence whatsoever in the whole of UK. Even the "YouTube creator space" at King's Cross has been shuttered. Their only presence in the city are the offices for their employees.

Google's commitment to removing any ways from consumers to actually interact with the company is truly extreme. And probably results in people turning to desperate measures when they run into troubles with Google products.

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> Google's commitment to removing any ways from consumers to actually interact with the company is truly extreme.

If anyone here can help me with stopping the 'Find My Device is now on' email that I get every single day (with no call to action, no unsubscribe link, it's just a transactional information thing I am receiving repeatedly in error, since the beginning of June) I would appreciate it...

I'd suggest a filter to forward it to a Google support e-mail address, but for that to make a difference you'd need to find a Google address that leads to a human.

If I had such a thing I'd hope I could just write an email and get some support without being petty! I did try Twitter, no response there.

the worry that one has in such a situation is - what if breaking the device doesn't stop the email!

I think they are just large enough to fail upwards at everything. Nothing consumer facing needs a solution because consumers are the product and a cost centre while large businesses are the clients. Not that I'm still bitter at having my Google for your domain purchases locked to a crippled account or anything.

Even better if you live in New Zealand. Google Store doesn't list any phones (only shows Fitbit and Nest products) and no official importer or partner in the country.

So you have to get it via an importer who offers very minimal support if it breaks.

Google has only about 3% of the UK phone market. Apple has 44%. You are comparing apples with oranges (yes pun intended). Google is mostly a services company.

Hardware is not necessarily relevant. How much of the UK surveillance adtech market do they have?

Not sure they need a storefront for that.

I think this is fairly normal in most countries, is it not?

Apple are the outlier, it doesn't make much financial sense for other phone companies to rent expensive brick and mortar stores.

To be fair, the common way to buy brands is to go to a big store which is selling multiple different brands, with a wide range of products. Single Brand-Stores are rare, especially for technology, usually for reasons of cost. Only premium-brands like Apple can afford to maintain a huge chain of their own shops.

> Only premium-brands like Apple can afford to maintain a huge chain of their own shops.

Alphabet annual net income is in the $70B range.

Many, many, many multiples of what other retail businesses earn. Best Buy’s revenue is half of Alphabet’s profit.

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 to make it worth the trouble of dealing with all that extra liability/staffing/etc.

Microsoft even had them in the 2010s, basically copying Apple, but determined the ROI wasn’t worth it.

> Alphabet annual net income is in the $70B range.

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.

In Poland there are at least stores (first party or authorized resellers) for Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Sony.

I don't know the situation in Poland, but looking on google maps, there are not that many shops from each. Looks like 5-10, and it's not clear if they all just sell smartphones. Samsung, Xiaomi and Sony have a very wide range of products, it would make sense for them to all sell everything else in those shops.

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.

Google recently opened a store in Boston, and will open a store near Chicago later this year:

https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/google-store-boston-n...

https://store.google.com/magazine/locations?hl=en-US

Other locations are in New York City and in their Mountain View headquarter.

Last I checked Boston, Chicago, NYC and Mountain View are not in the UK so I'm not sure how that is relevant.

This is as relevant as the sentence "Google's commitment to removing any ways from consumers to actually interact with the company is truly extreme. And probably results in people turning to desperate measures when they run into troubles with Google products." in the parent comment.

> Well, turns out that since COVID there is no such thing as "Google Store" in London.

Was there ever a Google Store anywhere in the world? News to me. That's not something you'd expect to find in Google's home country. They're not a retailer.

> Google's commitment to removing any ways from consumers to actually interact with the company is truly extreme.

You can't "remove" what was never there. But, in this case... most manufacturers and brands don't have stores. You don't go to the M&Ms Store either. You go to the grocery store. There's no Samsung Store, no HTC Store, no LG store, no Foxconn Store, no Xiaomi Store, no Nokia Store, no Motorola Store, and no OnePlus Store. Why would there be a Google Store?

> Was there ever a Google Store anywhere in the world?

Yes, London had one embedded in the Currys on TCR. Even made the news.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/google-opens-its-first-ever-...

Popular enough to make it to 4sq.

https://foursquare.com/googlesh8058175

Also crops up in an answer on Google's support site.

https://support.google.com/store/answer/10840716?hl=en

Also one in NYC based off this archive.org snapshot of their locations page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210614171636/https://store.goo...

etc.etc.

(Also London had a Nokia store back in 2008 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/textlad/2278591733 )

I guess this _might_ count, but the whole 'store within a store' tends to be a bit of publicity stunt. You can just bung the store owners a few quid, make some stands with your company name on it and send out a press release that you now have a 'store'.

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.

A 'store within a store' is a fairly normal thing in a department store, especially the luxury ones.

It's also not unusual for electronics. I think the large electronics shop near me has a Sony section (or is it Samsung?) and a Sonos section.

Does a full store count then?

https://blog.google/products/devices-services/google-store-n...

> There's no Samsung Store

Except there are... There was one in Bournemouth where I live, and there are others [1]

[1] - https://www.samsung.com/uk/samsung-experience-store/location...

There's actually an M&Ms store in London too. https://www.mms.com/en-gb/explore/mms-stores/london

Yup, they exist in several places, in several countries

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

Wow, others.

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.

The poster was mentioning London - there are 4 Samsung stores in London. That's more than "technically existing", no?

Google, M&Ms, Samsung, they all have stores I know about. Samsung even had one in my City. But it's true that they are rare. M&Ms for example has only 7 world-wide, and 4 seems to be in the USA. Usually, those brands are more likely to cooperate with other shops (online & offline) to sell their goods.

Isn’t it more advertising?

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.

Samsung, HTC, LG and Xiaomi all have physical shops

Foxconn isn’t B2C

Nokia used to

Funnily enough, there is an M&Ms store in London

https://www.mms.com/en-gb/explore/mms-stores/london

This is such a weird comment. Why are you so confident that there’s rhyme or reason to which ‘brands’ have a physical retail presence and which ones don’t? You haven’t presented any justification, and your examples include plenty of orgs / brands that actually do have a retail presence. There’s even an M&Ms store in London as another commenter has pointed out. Chill out.

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