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Restaurant terrace in Berlin: "In the catering sector, creative destruction works best"
Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images
The corona crisis has brought only a few industries into existential difficulties like hotels, pubs and restaurants.
Because not only the regulars were missing last year, but also the tourists from all over the world.
According to a survey, the average loss of sales in the industry in Germany in the first half of 2020 alone was around 60 percent.
The peak of the drop in sales was reached in April with losses of 86.8 percent.
The easing in the summer did indeed cause a certain revival - but among other things, the spacing regulations for tables and seating groups dampened the dynamics lastingly.
The lockdown light from the beginning of November and the more drastic one from mid-December finally ruined any hope of a conciliatory end to the year.
The annual losses of a good 50 percent extrapolated in the summer forecasts appear in retrospect like a beautiful dream.
»Pubs open quickly«
Many restaurateurs owe their survival to state bridging aid.
For November and December even 75 percent of the monthly sales of the previous year were in prospect.
At the end of December, however, a large part of the applications was still in the mills of the bureaucracy.
The payment of the full sums is not expected until January.
The costs for lease and loans continue to run.
Economists like Lars Feld, however, do not consider generous help to be the right way to go.
"Creative destruction works best in the catering sector in particular: a pub is quickly reopened when it works again," he told the Handelsblatt.
If Feld and other observers are right, the new year can only get better.
Because in general, after a deep crash, things often go up steeply - and the prospect of mass vaccinations in Germany could provide the basis for this.
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