July 21, 2009

After a nice evening of sleep, we headed to Ahold Corporation’s headquarters in Amsterdam. They are a grocery chain operator with presence in Europe and the US. They own both Giants, the one in the DC area and the one up by Harrisburg along with Stop and Shop. It was an okay presentation, a lot of their focus was on their accounting scandal of a few years back. They went from sales of around 65 billion euros in 2006 to 24.5 in 2008 – just to give you guys an idea of how big the scandal was and how they have come out of the problems a much smaller, yet more successful business. The funny thing was that after their presentation on corporate responsibility an assitant walks in with a good hundred or so pages of all of the presentations we had had ready to hand out. About half of the Amazon was used. But it was nice to have the presentations to be able to look at afterwards. After our visit, we stopped at one of Ahold’s new concepts, Albert Heijn XL a store designed to compete with Wal-Mart-type stores. I thought we were going to get a tour by an employee, but all we did was get 15 minutes to walk around.. not like our tour of the mall IKEA runs – that was interesting! So some of us shopped for lunch, the rest looked around a bit and then we stopped for lunch in a quaint little town situated on one of the dykes. It is so odd to see houses below sea level and then a big mound running for miles blocking off huge lakes and rivers. Sounds like New Orleans… We had a tour of North Holland for the rest of the day, stopping at a wooden shoe factory and other places, pretty uneventful. Honestly, I am ready to leave Holland and see more of Europe. It also doesn’t help that from here we are going to two of the most famous cities in the world – Paris and London. That night we hung out in the hotel, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It ended up that two meals for three of us cost 2 euros each, so even if I do go hungry, which I won’t, I will feel good knowing how much money I saved. Tonight I have to pack, because tomorrow we leave for France and Paris!