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A zombie from the Wirtschaftswunder

Jörg Luyken's avatar
Jörg Luyken
Mar 16, 2023
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Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

As inflation started to bite last year and central banks reluctantly reacted by hiking interest rates, Germans began to wonder which companies would turn out to be ‘zombies’ that had been kept alive by cheap debt during the era of zero interest.

Few will be surprised to learn that the first member of the army of the undead to reveal itself is the department store chain Galeria.

After several rounds of brutal redundancies in recent years, the firm’s thinly staffed stores had started to resemble the deserted Monroeville Mall in the horror classic Dawn of the Dead.

The firm managed to stagger through the pandemic, kept alive by a €700 million loan from the government. But now it has filed for bankruptcy.

Plans released this week show that the company wants to close over 50 of its remaining 130 stores while slashing staff from a pre-Covid level of 28,000 down to 11,000.

Galeria is the result of the fusion of four major department stores over…

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