Traditional downtown high streets aren’t coming back, according to the boss of the dm drugstore chain Christoph Werner. He said that having allowed the big supermarkets and chains to move into the suburbs and to occupy greenfield locations, politicians shouldn’t expect downtown streets to look the way they once did. “Don’t be surprised if customer flows go to the suburbs or migrate to the Internet,” he told Badische Neuesten Nachricten. The trend was reinforced by the rising cost of parking in the city centers. The effect of the coronavirus crisis would be the speeding up of trends that were already underway. Asked if in the aftermath of the crisis, dm would focus more on retail parks than city stores, Werner hinted that there would be advantages to such a decision. “In any case, they do much better than the locations in the city centers, in shopping centers or at train stations.”
