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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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> 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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