One main reason: market consolidation in Europe is a real need. Only companies with a lot of scale can compete adequately in terms of product featureset and innovation. European alternatives usually lack scale to to compete.

In simple terms, if you’re competing in an R&D heavy industry (like consumer technology, software, f.e.) having 2 or 3 big companies is always going to lead to more competitive products when compared to a market with 20 or 30 small ones. The problem with Europe is that that we don’t even have 20 or 30 small ones.

Take Nothing for example, I think their idea is to compete with Apple, Google and the Chinese brands in the phone market. But they are many, many times smaller than those. So they’re going to be forced to use components and technology that’s already established, they’re not going to innovate outside of design and simple things like UI simply because they lack the funding to do anything else.

The situation is not ideal, but unless we create our own behemoths, we won’t be able to compete in the short term.

Not only that but a lot of products (food especially, except meat) are really bad (both in Portugal and in Spain).

Oh, and Normal (which I think is scandi) is really good to buy name brands.

Auchan is one of the shadiest there is. Still operating in Russia with no intention of leaving.

In Portugal I usually stick to Continente or Pingo Doce (both Portuguese capital owned, I think), and sometimes Lidl for some products that are only sold there.

Let’s be honest, all frozen pizza suck. The ones that are sold pre-made, even the white label brand ones (still european) are way better.

The real problem here is that the “alternative” is a lot country specific alternatives that have no leverage to command worldwide adoption.

This could only be addressed ultimately by EU federalization. Let’s see how much time until people and governments take to realize this.

I love these! Don’t even know what Reese’s is, tbh, but I know these are delicious

The design is good, but I don’t really like the form factor (it’s too big). The case is a non negotiable item for me, so curiously it would all depends on the availability of clear cases. I’m waiting to see how is this handled in Phone 3