A difference in culture

Sometimes I wonder about differences between my 2 homelands.

It has struck me coming home in Sweden from our road trip. I saw one of the big retail chains in Denmark and said that we were nearby home. What made it say me this was nearby Sweden? 

In Brussels coming from the airport and taking the bus to the centre of the city I had the opposite feeling, driving through all these narrow little streets in the suburbs. There are no big chain stores. The chains are in the main street in the centre. Some of these little shops are extremely interesting. The sellers know there stuff. And they sell only good quality. Then people come back. The shop owner is doing this selling sometimes already several decades. But I have not found yet this little shops in Sweden. And are they not disappearing in Belgium? 

In Sweden cities are most of the time rather quiet. Meanwhile the big shopping centres are crowded. If you need some special tools you go to the huge retail shops : Bygmax, Bauhaus, Ikea… . Here you can find as good as everything. It let me feel uncomfortable.

When I see in the Belgian papers that majors protest against this big shopping malls, I wonder if this discussion is already past tense here. And the majors have lost.

Or is it really a difference in culture? Because of the winter and the darkness.