Online shopping accelerates decline of Bavaria’s town centres

Online shopping and long-term vacancies are reshaping town centres across Bavaria, with traditional retailers closing and local officials struggling to find new uses for empty properties, BR reports.

Wolfgang Suckfüll, until recently the owner of a family-run hardware shop in Munich, says online shopping helped bring his business to an end after nearly 94 years. Customers still bought screws in the shop but ordered door fittings costing 200 euros online, he said. “Once you get this sweet poison, it stays that way,” Suckfüll said of online shopping.

In Burglengenfeld, a town in the Upper Palatinate, city manager Wolfgang Dantl has spent six years trying to bring vacant shops back into use by connecting owners, potential tenants and the town. He says efforts often founder on owners’ demands for unrealistic rents. Long-term vacancies can trigger a downward spiral, said Tobias Just, a professor of real estate economics at the University of Regensburg who researches the decline of town centres.

Shops on Burglengenfeld’s main street increasingly include nail salons, barbers, kebab shops and gold buyers in place of traditional specialist retailers. Mayor Martin Antretter said the trend could not be stopped entirely. The aim, he said, was to slow it and preserve town centres as places to live and spend time.

Online retail turnover in Germany rose from about 8.4 billion euros in 2006 to a projected 96.3 billion euros in 2026, according to the German Retail Federation. Just said the pandemic was a turning point, as people across all generations tried online shopping and traditional retail lost ground.

The shift is also visible in Herrieden, a town in Middle Franconia. Supermarkets and shopping arcades opened on an industrial estate outside the town in the 1990s, while many shops in the centre now stand empty. A ruin has also become a feature of the centre since a savings bank ATM was blown up. The number of retail shops in Bavaria fell from 74,519 in 2006 to 58,372 in 2024, a decline of about 21 percent, according to the state statistics office. Just described the internet as “a second city that has crept beneath the city”.

Herrieden is trying to respond by buying buildings in the centre and finding private investors for them. Town planning councillor Matthias Rank said the effort was a marathon, not a sprint, and could take years.

In Bad Reichenhall, a town in Upper Bavaria, the former luxury Hotel Axelmannstein has stood empty for years. The mayor hopes to revive it but has given no timetable. Just warned that playing down the problems might help in the short term but was not a strategy. Reviving town centres, he said, requires an honest assessment, new ideas and sufficient resources.