Anyone who is doing their Christmas shopping in Stuttgart and is looking for a nice book for their loved ones may still notice it painfully: The traditional bookstore Wittwer has been trading there since 2018 with the name suffix Thalia, the book chain from Hagen. The same may happen when shopping in downtown Cologne with the Mayersche bookstore. Although it is a chain in North Rhine-Westphalia itself, it is more of a family one. If it says Mayersche, Thalia has been there since the two merged in 2019 to become more competitive. The bookseller Ulrich Röhm from Leonberg near Stuttgart is also just passing his shop on – to Thalia. In future, Wittwer-Thalia will be displayed at the entrance to his shop.
One can argue about such a dilution of regional brands. When it comes to takeovers, Thalia sometimes likes to refer to the regional peculiarities of the bookstores, for example when the chain takes over a 230-year-old bookstore in Kempten. On the other hand, Thalia does not shy away from adopting fairly interchangeable locations from the general store Weltbild, supposedly in order to preserve “important places for reading”. Thalia is not alone. The Munich bookseller Hugendubel saved the Hanoverian bookstore Schmorl from bankruptcy around 15 years ago. And Hugendubel has also just taken over eight Weltbild branches, but is nowhere near as aggressive.
There are still 5,000 bookstores nationwide, but the density seems to be accelerating more and more. Thalia’s reading campaigns are welcomed. The takeovers are hardly about promoting regional reading culture. Rather, it is about tough expansion policies, even if this is not always as obvious as in Stuttgart or North Rhine-Westphalia.
Thalia boss Michael Busch stretches out his feelers in all directions. First and foremost, there is the new sales platform, through which as many independent booksellers as possible are to dock with the Thalia empire. When it comes to such an alliance, Thalia likes to try the narrative of wanting to form a German counterweight to Amazon, the powerful Internet company from America. Just as another Thalia idea has succeeded in doing since 2013: the Tolino, the German bookseller’s e-book reader.
The mergers also increase the pressure on publishers
But even if the Cartel Office has so far had no objection to this sales platform: Thalia makes booksellers very dependent on itself. Dealers can quickly exit the Tolino program. But to completely rebuild sales with purchasing, internet shop and IT if someone no longer agrees with the Thalia fee-based conditions: It’s not that trivial. Thalia no longer offers its competitors – and the other booksellers for the group – no longer just vitamin tablets in the fight against Amazon. Rather, these are open heart surgeries.
The south-west German book chain Osiander with around 70 branches also uses the new joint sales platform to “make processes more efficient and reduce costs,” as she says. Around 30 logistics employees from Osiander experienced the benefits at first hand – and had to leave. When Mayersche joined Thalia in 2019, the Osiander family Riethmüller had still assured that they would certainly not follow the example of the former cooperation partner. A year later, the Riethmüllers and Thalia founded the Osiander sales company – which, by the way, is majority owned by Thalia. Osiander will remain an independent company, it was said on its 425th anniversary. The question is: how much longer?
The Cartel Office should also take a closer look at such mergers for other reasons. The concentration of the book trade increases the pressure on small bookshops, but also confronts publishers with more drastic discount demands from the chains. And when the Cartel Office replies that publishers also have sales alternatives at their disposal, that sounds pretty cynical: publishers are very dependent on their sales channels. That’s why they can’t just break away from Amazon, even if they wanted to. It will be very much the same with Thalia.