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Nuremberg (dpa) - In the midst of the hard lockdown imposed in December, the consumer climate in Germany collapsed again.
"The propensity to buy is literally collapsing," says a message from the Nuremberg consumer research company GfK on the basis of its latest consumer climate study for February 2021, which was published on Wednesday.
"The closure of restaurants and large parts of the retail trade in mid-December 2020 hit the propensity to consume as hard as it did during the first lockdown in the spring of last year," said GfK consumer researcher Rolf Bürkl.
At that time, the consumer climate had historically sunk to a low point.
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The value determined by GfK for the consumer climate in Germany is usually relatively stable at around +10.
In spring 2020 it fell to below -20, then recovered to close to zero over the summer and now slipped back to -15.6.
Difficult times are ahead of the consumer climate in the first quarter of this year, he stressed.
"For a sustained recovery, it is necessary that the number of infections decline more than before, so that the measures can be noticeably relaxed," said Bürkl.
"The recovery that many have been hoping for this year will still be a long time coming."
According to the GfK survey, four out of five German citizens (81 percent) are of the opinion that the corona pandemic poses a major or very major threat to Germany.
This is the highest value that has been measured since the beginning of the surveys (mid-April 2020).
54 percent are also concerned about their own economic future.
That depresses income prospects.
Because: With the extension of the lockdown measures, the fear of a wave of bankruptcies in the industries concerned also increases.
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In its study on behalf of the EU Commission, GfK conducted around 2,000 consumer interviews between January 7 and 18, 2021.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210127-99-189215 / 2