The Pradler workshop in Garching is celebrating its 55th birthday this year. After a lavish party, nobody on the Münchner Straße feels like it, because the traditional shop will close its doors in the summer – forever. “The decision was not easy for us, we had many sleepless nights,” says Albert Pradler, who runs the business with his brother Robert Pradler. But the competition from the surrounding hardware stores and the trend towards online shopping, which has accelerated during the pandemic, leave them no choice. “In 2021 we had a sharp decline in customer numbers,” says Albert Pradler. With the high costs of rent and staff at the same time, this is simply no longer sustainable.
The clearance sale, which is expected to last three months, will begin next week. Then it’s time to clean up, says Albert Pradler, before the lease expires on June 30th. Then the story of the business that Robert Pradler founded in 1967 as a carpentry shop will end. In the wake of the do-it-yourself boom in the 1970s, he expanded the business to include a DIY store; In 1982, the move to the building on Münchner Straße followed. After the sudden death of the company founder in 1998, his sons took over the business: Klaus Pradler was responsible for the joinery from then on, his brother Albert Pradler for the DIY market.
A heavy blow for Garching
This was extensively modernized and redesigned in 2011, but a short time later the company ran into financial difficulties. At that time, Albert Pradler brought a management consultancy on board, after which the situation has since improved, as he says. But then “various factors” would have increased the pressure again – above all the pandemic. “We had to close for ten weeks at the beginning of 2021, and then the weather was bad in spring,” says Albert Pradler. Above all, however, he lost customers to online trade, which received an additional boost from the corona crisis. “If people are already sitting at the computer in their home office, then they buy there right away,” says the managing director.
He is convinced that this trend will continue: “Retail is in a state of upheaval,” emphasizes Pradler. “We’re not the first to struggle and we won’t be the last.” The Rettenberger workshop in Ottobrunn, for example, recently announced that it would also be closing at the end of July after more than 65 years. And there too – along with other factors – the competition from the hardware stores in the area and online trading were given as reasons.
For the shopping landscape in Garching, the end of the Pradler was a heavy blow, says Salvatore Disanto, chairman of the local trade association. “It came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had the feeling that things were going uphill.” In general, however, Disanto paints a bleak picture as far as the future of retail in Garching is concerned. “In the last ten years we have pursued various approaches to revitalize the city center – the trade association, the city and the association “Lebendige Ortsmitte”.
But the bottom line is that none of this was successful.” During the pandemic, online trading has penetrated areas “where it was previously unthinkable – for example with food,” says Disanto. Last but not least, this development has him closed of the conviction: “Retail trade, which is dependent on the sale of goods in the shop, will disappear in small towns like Garching in the near future.”