Word: neckermann
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...outraged Butchers' Guild of North Rhine-Westphalia in West Germany last week rallied under the slogan, "What's all this about the Neckermann pig?" Josef Neckermann, 54, the country's mail-order wizard, once again upset retailers, this time by offering through the mail half a pig for deepfreezing at half the price the pork would normally cost in the neighborhood butcher shop...
...butchers didn't like it, other Germans did, and Neckermann is shipping out pig-halves at the rate of 600 a day from his Frankfurt headquarters...
This ferocious undercutting of competitors-"fighting the parasites who put prices up," Neckermann calls it-has been the key to the firm's extraordinary progress, from his first twelve-page catalogue to the slick 619-page book now circulating. In a country where retailers regularly mark up their goods 35% to 40% and sometimes even 100% , Neckermann makes do with a profit margin of 1% or 2%. His gross sales last year were $275 million...
...making companies more enlightened. Construc-ta washing machines, one of the earlier victims of a "less recommendable" decree, sagged from a 38% share of the German automatic washer market to 20% ; Constructa sued and lost but subsequently introduced new machines that won a higher rating. Mail-Order Magnate Joseph Neckermann rushed to Stuttgart to complain about DM's criticism of a spin drier sold by his firm; in DM's test lab Neckermann watched the machine fail again, and canceled his contract with the manufacturer. Says one businessman: "DM's greatest merit is that it has created...
...investment of its own businessmen comes from the capital market. The Dutch and the Swiss both clamp ceilings on what they will lend. Most German interest rates are so high-and bankers demand so much control over companies that they lend to-that earlier this year the prosperous Neckermann mail-order house sought almost all of a $10 million loan outside Germany ($1.2 million in the U.S.) to keep out of the bankers' clutches...