Wal-Mart's Shoppers Running Out of Cash.

[Big Orange]

Well it is interesting that the victors of WWII, Britain, America and Russia, seemed to have ended up squandering the peace in recent decades by ruining themselves economically with free market crapitalism. I heard that Wal-Mart's attempt to enter the German market failed miserably.

[D.Turtle]

I heard that Wal-Mart's attempt to enter the German market failed miserably.

Well, that was mostly because of a huge amount of overconfidence and arrogance. They thought they could simply jump into the German market with their normal operation and win that way.

Here (pdf) is a study done in 2003 on "Why did Wal-Mart fail
in Germany?" Note that Walmart did not exit Germany (and some other countries listed in the study until a few years later.

Clearly dominating the US retail market, Wal-Mart expanded into Germany (and Europe)
in late 1997. Wal-Mart’s attempt to apply the company’s proven US success formula
in an unmodified manner to the German market, however, turned out to be nothing
short of a fiasco. Upon closer inspection, the circumstances of the company’s failure to
establish itself in Germany give reason to believe that it pursued a fundamentally
flawed internationalization strategy due to an incredible degree of ignorance of the
specific features of the extremely competitive German retail market. Moreover, instead
of attracting consumers with an innovative approach to retailing, as it has done in the
USA, in Germany the company does not seem to be able to offer customers any compelling
value proposition in comparison with its local competitors. Wal-Mart Germany’s
future looks bleak indeed.

But even better than the abstract is this one sentence in the introduction:

As we will argue in this paper, it even offers a textbook case how not to enter a foreign market. (emphasis in the original)