Numbers on Saturdays above the long-term average
The retail specialist Comfort has presented an update of its analysis of visitor numbers in German shopping cities. These had already increased dramatically in June 2021 with the end of major Corona restrictions for retail and catering. Shortly before the hot phase of the Christmas business, it can now be stated that pedestrian frequencies are largely at a “normal” pre-Corona level - albeit with clear differences in terms of the days recorded.
Olaf Petersen, managing director and chief researcher at Comfort, comes to this conclusion when analyzing the numbers. While on Saturday, November 20th, 2021, the pedestrian frequencies in all ten cities examined were above the long-term average, four days earlier, on Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, the situation was somewhat different. Here the frequencies were only in Dortmund and Düsseldorf above the long-term average, in all other eight cities below.
Comfort analyzed the pedestrian frequencies of various top shopping streets in Germany on Saturday and Tuesday of last week in comparison to the corresponding values of the lockdown level at the beginning of May, the beginning of June, the beginning of October and the long-term average - again based on the frequency figures collected daily and by laser from hystreets.com. The maximum frequency per hour on the respective day is always shown.
Saturday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the week, has now exceeded the long-term average frequency in all shopping streets examined. However, Petersen explains, it should be taken into account that this average was corrected significantly downwards due to the long phases of the lockdown in spring 2020 and especially from the end of 2020 to spring 2021 (with extraordinarily low frequencies). However, the frequency level from the beginning of October was again largely exceeded; this was only missed in Munich, Leipzig and Cologne.
The absolute front runners from last Saturday are old friends: Munich's Neuhauser Straße in front of Cologne's Schildergasse, Düsseldorf's Schadowstrasse and Dortmund's Westenhellweg. The last two shopping streets mentioned in particular have made a noticeable leap forward.
“On the last Tuesday, as a representative of a normal weekday, the recorded frequencies were typically well below the Saturday level,” says Olaf Petersen. The level from the beginning of October was exceeded in Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Frankfurt, but was not reached in the other cities. In general, it should be noted that due to the issue of home office, the weekday footfall tended to lag even more behind the pre-Corona frequency than was the case on Saturdays.
