After two years of state of emergency, one has become somewhat used to the fact that even the most mundane activities require more advance planning.

Spontaneity was one of the first victims of the pandemic.

Even after the so-called "Freedom Day", with which most corona restrictions in gastronomy and retail have been lifted, the return to the old normality is still a long way off.

Alexander Wulfers

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

  • Follow I follow

Since this week, anyone who wants to can leave masks, test and vaccination certificates at home.

The spontaneous visit to a restaurant on a Tuesday evening still comes to an early end at the locked front door.

A sign informs that the restaurant is currently only open from Thursday to Sunday, "because of Corona".

A few blocks away, an antique shop has cut opening hours even more radically.

Customers are only welcome there for a few hours on Saturdays.

And an order from the delivery service in the evening threatens to fail because most of the kitchens are already closed despite the hour being not too late.

The selection is very limited, which is unusual for a big city like Frankfurt.

The hoped-for return to normality is still a long time coming - if it ever goes back to what it was before March 2020. The fact that everyday life has not returned from one day to the next is due on the one hand to the still high incidence figures, the parts made the customers reluctant to throw themselves back into the nightlife, but also due to the lack of staff.

This is still causing problems for parts of the catering trade in particular.

Enzo Weber, professor at the Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB), points out that restaurants in particular have lost a great deal of employment in every corona wave.

These people would not come back from one day to the next.

One difference to past recessions is that during the pandemic, the reopening did not take place over many months, but all of a sudden.

However, the labor market cannot adapt so quickly.

The general manager of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA), Ingrid Hartges, also emphasizes that there has been a large drop in personnel in the entire hospitality industry: As of June 30, 2021, fewer than one million people subject to social security contributions were employed in the industry;

two years earlier there were 130,000 more people.

"The number of mini-jobbers, which is so important for the hospitality industry, also fell by 20 percent from June 2019 to June 2021," says Hartges.

"We know that these have primarily moved into the logistics industry and into retail."

However, many have since returned.

However, recovery takes time.

Figures from the Federal Statistical Office show that in January 2022 employment in the catering trade was still around 82 percent of the level in December 2019, in hotels it was 77 percent and in bars and pubs it was only 58 percent.

Lack of staff is not a problem in retail

Unlike the hospitality industry, the retail staffing shortage problem has not worsened during the pandemic.

"Even through the difficult phases of the pandemic, employment has remained stable, so that 3.1 million people were still employed in mid-2021," confirms Stefan Genth, Managing Director of the German Retail Association (HDE).

Compared to 2019, the proportion of employees subject to social security contributions has even grown by 32,000 jobs.

"On the one hand, this was due to the relaxed short-time work regulations during the pandemic, but probably also to the fact that the need for personnel was temporarily higher, especially in the food trade, so that employees from other retail sectors who were affected by the shop closures were able to help out here."