Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

• Share

(5 of 10)

European consumer. Paris' Galeries Lafayette, biggest department store in France, in 1957 imported only 1% of its goods. Today its counters sag with Italian clothes, furniture and glassware, German linen, leather goods and housewares, Dutch clothing and pottery—and some 8% of its sales are imported goods. Thanks to reduced tariffs, Dutch blouses that in 1958 sold for $10 now sell for $2.50, are one of the bestselling items in the store. A 1958 French refrigerator sold for $187. Today the same French company, under pressure from German competition, sells a larger and better refrigerator for only $120. "Before 1958, no French firm would dream of putting out a cheap, well-designed, ready-to-wear range of women's clothes," says Galeries Lafayette Chief Buyer Jean d'Allens. "Now several are selling women's skirts for as little as $10, and selling them all over the Common Market."

A Bonn wineshop now sells Hennessy cognac at $3.75 a bottle while the best German Weinbrand at the same price gathers dust.* From tiny Fiats to elegant Ferraris, some 400,000 imported cars have been sold in West Germany. In a posh Dusseldorf shoe salon last week, a matron, eyeing the latest square-toed model, snapped: "Is It Italian?" Replied the salesgirl: "Madam, we sell only Italian shoes." German sausage and French pate are pouring into Belgium at twice the pre-1958 rate. One of Brussels' largest stores laid on a Common Market exhibi tion earlier this year called "Europe on Your Plate." Supplies were cleaned out.

"I don't know what to do about this

European craze," complains a West German adman. "Once, all you had to do to sell a product was to say, 'Made in Germany.' Now take cigarettes, for example: to make our German brands competitive, we have to imply that people are smoking them all over Europe. It's the same with everything from soup to schnapps—you have to show people using it in Paris, in Brussels, in Rome."

Merger Bender. European industry has not only learned to cut costs and compete, but to cooperate. Some 250 private trade and merchandising associations have mushroomed, ranging from the huge Common Market Association of Chemical Industries to the European Bed Union, from the Common Market Association of Beer Wholesalers to the European Brush Man ufacturers. Acronyms abound: Euromalt (malt makers), Euromaisers (corn producers), Unecolait (dairymen) and Uni-pede (the European Committee for the Producers and Distributors of Electrical Energy).

Common Market businesses have gone on a merger bender. Germany's Messerschmitt and France's Fouga are jointly making aircraft. Italy's Innocenti and Germany's Hans Glas are making cars together, Luxembourg's Dostert and Germany's Wilhelm Seibel truck trailers. Agfa and France's Vedette are collaborating on cameras. Eurista is a new FrenchGerman coalition making electrical resistors. Gasoline is now distributed in France and Germany by Desmarais. The Société Française PIC and Krupp recently signed an agreement to build a petroleum plant. "Within a few more years," says a West German industrialist wonderingly, "no government will be able to pull out of the Community. The businessmen won't let them." This is precisely what Jean Monnet is counting