“I’m extremely positively surprised, people just want to treat themselves to something after two years of restraint,” says fashion retailer Ernst Mayr, managing director of Fussl Modestraße with 160 branches in Austria. March went well with a one percent increase in sales compared to 2019, and Mayr was also satisfied with the fashion sales in April.
He notes “a certain uncertainty in consumption” because of rising inflation and the Ukraine war, but the negative news situation can no longer slow people down to catch up on what they have missed.
The division chairman of the oö. Handel, Ernst Wiesinger, even speaks of a “positive sense of well-being” that consumers have rediscovered when shopping, even if there are delivery problems in all sectors. The prospect of masks being exempted after Easter and the abolition of the corona measures in the catering trade have revived the “desire to stroll”. Even the fashion and shoe trade, which had the greatest difficulties, reported satisfactory customer frequency in both rural and small-town areas. Only where tourists bring an important part of the turnover, i.e. mainly in inner cities, did the turnover fall short of the expectations of a “normal” year.
Few bikes delivered
Easter marks the start of the spring season for sports retailers. The demand for all outdoor sports and bicycles remains high. The dominant problem: far too few bicycles were delivered.
“We only got three of 25 children’s models,” says Johann Pötscher, who runs five Intersport branches in Upper Austria. This weighs particularly heavily, because for the sports trade, Easter is like Christmas business. The majority of the bikes ordered for Easter will only arrive in weeks or months because supply chains were and are interrupted, especially in Asia. New markets for e-bikes such as the USA and Canada are also drawing large numbers from Europe. So the buyers had to be satisfied with the models in stock. Pötscher assumes that “this will certainly continue for two years” and that he will now be selling bikes all year round, including at Christmas. “If we get them, we’ll sell them too.” According to the Intersport dealer, those who are broadly positioned as dealers can cope better with the situation. It helps him, for example, that club sports have started again.
55 percent of the adult bicycles sold are e-bikes, says Michael Nendwich, Austria spokesman for the sports trade.
Silvia Bachhalm from the chocolate factory of the same name in Kirchdorf with 20 employees has noticed a “clear willingness to buy” and a trend towards local quality. “It’s better to give the grandchildren a good chocolate bunny than a whole bag of industrial chocolate,” she says. Due to the increased costs (“eight price increases for cocoa in 2021”), they had to increase prices by five percent. “Actually, we would have needed 40 percent. That’s not possible, so we work more.”
Source: Nachrichten
