W.H. Lung Supermarket
Photo essay and interview with Karl Lam, manager
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"30 years ago, this company started from very humble beginnings, it was originally a small corner shop in China Town. It grew out of that to were we are today. To built it - I cannot imagine how hard it was to them. Because it was a family orientated business and it still works through a family structure. We are slowly trying to change and to move away from that so that we become more corporate, more business." © Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
"There is so much competition, if you didn"t conceptualise, you find it difficult to survive, you have to try to find your niche on the market. We tried to evolve, we moved away from what was traditionally a whole-sell to retail business." © Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
"We target certain customer groups because we are locally convenient for university students, especially Chinese and Oriental. As soon as they arrive they are coming here to buy all there needs before the course starts. We have done that quite successfully and now try to accommodate a wider market. What we don"t want to do is being another ASDA"s or Sainsbury"s, that"s the only way to survive, I think. They are trying to eat in our market, it"s a tough game. But even amongst the Chinese supermarkets we have done very well." © Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
"We target certain customer groups because we are locally convenient for university students, especially Chinese and Oriental. As soon as they arrive they are coming here to buy all there needs before the course starts. We have done that quite successfully and now try to accommodate a wider market. What we don"t want to do is being another ASDA"s or Sainsbury"s, that"s the only way to survive, I think. They are trying to eat in our market, it"s a tough game. But even amongst the Chinese supermarkets we have done very well." © Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
"We didn"t need to be restricted or confined to Chinese employees, that"s how I felt by that time, so we started to employ one or two Africans and then we realised that they are more serious about there work, they work harder than some of the English people we have had. And they are more reliable. Then we had some Asian people and they showed that they will learn, and over time they did learn. You know, most of these are Chinese products, so it"s going to be difficult to non-Chinese, so we trained them to recognise what they are picking or what they are dealing with. Eventually they learnt, so nothing is impossible.
The team we have now is quite eager, they are all good workers, quite reliable people. Human resources is always a difficult part of a business but we learnt to be more tolerant because people from different cultural backgrounds might misunderstand each other." © Hannah Hauptmann
The team we have now is quite eager, they are all good workers, quite reliable people. Human resources is always a difficult part of a business but we learnt to be more tolerant because people from different cultural backgrounds might misunderstand each other." © Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
© Hannah Hauptmann
"And they are now taking a bigger percentage of the work force. There were prejudices, when they are not Chinese how could they cope with the work? The first question is: they don"t know what they are doing, they don"t understand what we need. Or what we expect from them. Politically, it wasn"t correct, now we changed that. We learn from each other, we share with you our culture as much as they will share their views with us. It"s good, it"s interesting, I think." © Hannah Hauptmann
