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Retail branch: From the leading branch to the suffering branch of the inner city
Photo: Ralph Peters / imago images
How things will continue with Bocholt, Westmünsterland, will be decided in Osterstrasse and Nordstrasse.
A Tuesday morning, hardly anything is going on.
City Marketing Manager Ludger Dieckhues stands in jeans and a shirt in the middle of the pedestrian zone of the city of 71,000.
If he looks to the left, everything is fine, the weekly market is gradually filling up there.
On the right, up Nordstrasse, he sees lots of empty shops.
"The retail space we once had here will never come back," he says.
Bocholt once had zero percent vacancy in the city center.
That was in 2006. Then came the Lehman bankruptcy and the global financial crisis, along with the online boom.
And then the coronavirus.
Now Dieckhues has a problem: 12.9 percent of the slightly more than 300 shops in the city are orphaned.
The beginning of the end, he fears.
"At some point, part of the city center starts to slide."
The concern is the same everywhere.
With center managers and mayors.
At the trade association and the city council.
A downward spiral in which one vacancy follows the next and the once good location becomes less attractive with each closure.
The boom in online retail has made many inner cities desolate.
Is the virus now giving them the rest?
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