German retailers facing the dark

As online giant Amazon begins Sunday deliveries in some regions of the U.S., retailers in Germany continue to worry about their future.

Walk around the center of any small town in rural Germany, and you will see enough empty store fronts to make you wonder what's happening.
Retail shops in the small towns are closing at a greater rate than you'd expect in the context of slightly declining population numbers.

The plethora of online shops is cutting into their business, that's what many small town shop owners will tell you. You could get on your high horse and tell the bookstore owner that the industry was discussing "ebooks" thirty years ago, but that would be missing the point. You could tell them that, sorry, but you are now feeling the uncertainty most of your blue collar customers have already been hit with in the structural changes and the liberalization of the German labor market. 

While it is perfectly fine for the German national retail association to whine and bitch and to stress the advantages you get at you local store, the personal service, the emphasis on quality instead of on cheap mass produced crap, the national association is a haven of backward thinking.

It's a complex world, but the dirty secret of German rural small town retail was that these folks enjoyed monopoly positions with markups to die for until supermarkets came along. With nationwide store hours limited to 8 to 6:30 Monday through Friday, 14:00 to 16:00 on Saturday, until the end of the 20th century, German shoppers were very much captives, except in the big cities. Then, the canary in the coal mine of online shopping (working conditions in the warehouses do justify the image) was the local book store. Now, lots of other store types are getting hit.

So, what will the town center in an average 10 000 inhabitant small town in rural Germany look like in the near future?

Retailers in one such town not far away decided to give the townsfolk a glimpse. Some 50 store owners blacked out their shop windows with cardboard for a few days to illustrate where, in their opinion, brick and mortar retail is heading. The shops stayed open during the event, pressures being what they are.

The newspaper article did not include lots of whining. It would appear that small town retailers are getting to the acceptance stage in the stages of grief.