Cho Sung Yoon and his wife live on the 27th floor of a Samsung apartment complex here.
They cook their food on a Samsung electric range. They call each other on Samsung cellphones and check their e-mail on a Samsung home computer.
Recently, they used their Samsung credit card to get a 30% discount at a water park at Samsung Everland, South Korea's largest amusement park. If the couple had a serious mishap there, they would have been covered.
Their insurance company? Who else: Samsung.
Samsung is now one of the world's most recognized brands of electronic goods, and South Koreans regard it as a source of national pride. "There should be more companies like it," says 44-year-old Cho, who works at a marketing business.
But Samsung is so pervasive and its influence so immense in South Korean society that many here say it has turned the nation into a giant company town. They call it the Republic of Samsung.
"They're too big," Cho's wife complains.
Like America's Rockefellers, Morgans and Vanderbilts of a century ago, the family that controls Samsung is contending with a populace increasingly wary of the corporation's vast wealth and power. Many South Koreans are troubled by what they view as Samsung's corporate arrogance and tentacle-like reach in society.
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