Discount battle in the city centre Black Friday drew customers to Bonn in droves
Bonn · Black Friday has attracted customers in droves to downtown Bonn. The action day is important for city marketing in order to strengthen local trade. But not all stores took part.
When prices tumbled earlier in the winter sales, customers usually queued in front of the shops from early in the morning. Today's bargain hunters are apparently more relaxed. On Black Friday the number of customers was still manageable in the morning. Possibly many wanted to wait for the demonstration of Fridays for Future, which with several thousand participants in the early morning temporarily paralyzed the traffic in the city. Around midday, the streets and shops in the city center filled up rapidly. In the Poststrasse alone, around 8000 passers-by were counted around 2 pm. The average number is around 3300 pedestrians.
The figures come from hystreet.com GmbH, which belongs to Aachener Grundvermögen Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH based in Cologne. Aachener Grund is a company of the Catholic Church, which also owns a number of properties in Bonn in a prime inner-city location, including the Karstadt building.
Hystreet.com measures according to own data in different cities in Germany 365 days in the year around the clock the number of persons, who cross an imaginary line on a shopping street. In Bonn, as reported, since May 2018 the laser scanners attached to house facades in the important shopping streets of Bonn - Poststrasse, Remigiusstrasse and Sternstrasse - have been in operation. They generate a quadruple light curtain for reliable pedestrian frequency counting.
This enables the counter not only to distinguish between different zones, but also to determine the walking directions of passers-by. Passers-by who cross the imaginary line several times within a measuring interval are counted anew. The data can be called up free of charge at www.hystreet.com .
"Passer-by frequencies are an important indicator for assessing the attractiveness of shopping and city centers," explained Bonn's business development expert Viktoria Appelbe after the introduction of this measurement method. They provided important information on how to make the city centre even more attractive. Claudia Justen of City-Marketing says the Hystreet figures reinforce in her view that action days such as Black Friday are indispensable for strengthening the location trade.
However, the customers came even if not everyone participated, according to the owner of the fashion and gift shop "Wunderbar" in Friedrichstraße. The business people granted their customers up to 50 percent discount in some cases this Friday. And it is no longer just this one day on which prices are drastically reduced. There are already posters on many shop windows advertising Black Days or even a Black Week. Black Friday has its origin in America, where it joins the holiday Thanks Giving and is often used as a bridge day for grocery shopping. Some people refer it to "black numbers", which traders would write on the day, others see it as an allusion to the chaos on the streets after the stock market crash of 1929.
However, a few shops in Bonn City did not participate in Black Friday. Like the Contigo branch in Wenzelgasse, where fair-trade products such as leather goods, handicrafts and coffee are sold. Luis Abarca Toro has managed the small branch for five years and is pleased to have a growing customer base. The 42-year-old, who comes from Peru, believes that "this is certainly also due to increased environmental awareness and the climate protection movement". He has crossed out the word "Black" on the poster at his shop door and replaced it with "Green" for green. Another poster says "There is no percentage on human rights". Uwe Schneider (53) is a doctor and enjoys shopping with his wife at Contigo, he says. "There should be many more such shops."
Original text: Lisa Inhoffen
Translation: Mareike Graepel
