Given the figures from the past few years, all alarm bells should be ringing in all city centers and among politicians.

Thousands of shops in Germany will close their doors forever due to rising operating costs and declining consumer purchasing power, 9,000 of them this year alone, and without successful shops city centers do not have much prospect in the future, the German retail association HDE warned on Monday.

The number of retail stores in Europe's largest economy has been declining for years, and during the coronavirus pandemic the trend of their closure accelerated as consumers shopped online.

Every year in the period from 2020 to 2022, 11,000 brick-and-mortar stores closed permanently. In the period from 2015 to 2019, approximately 5,000 stores closed annually on average. HDE predicts that another 9,000 stores will close in 2023.

Leaving aside micro stores, 311,000 stores operate across Germany, while for comparison there were 373,000 of them in 2015, according to the association's data.

“Given the figures from the past few years, all alarm bells should be ringing in all city centers and among politicians. Without successful retail stores, city centers do not have much prospect in the future”, warned HDE president Alexander von Preen.

He added that the situation with costs and purchasing power primarily affects smaller specialized retail stores, such as fashion boutiques, shoe stores, and bakeries. At the same time, many large retail chains are also reducing their store networks.

A growing number of vacant business premises in many towns and city centers makes them less attractive, and also threatens the health of the remaining entrepreneurs, Preen warned.

In order to slow down store closures, von Preen states that “non-bureaucratic and fast approval processes for repurposing and rezoning should be at the top of the government's priority list”.

“If the retail sector dies, the city dies too”, von Preen said.

Source: poslovni.hr