For the past few days, customers of Soline and Kévin Robion’s bakery, accustomed to placing orders by telephone, have fallen directly on the beep of the messaging system. The judicial liquidation of the small company of Greneville-en-Beauce (Loiret) was pronounced by the Commercial Court of Orleans on Wednesday October 19.
When they opened their business in 2007 in this small village near Pithiviers, this couple in their thirties did not expect such a fate. Their bakery, which employed an employee, could not survive the highly deteriorated economic context and the increase in the prices of raw materials and then energy prices.
4,000 euros of electricity per month compared to 1,400 at the start of the year
After a first half that weakened the accounts of the small company, they quickly realized that they could not absorb the rise in the price of electricity, whose contract was to be renewed at the end of the year on the basis of a three-fold increase in the price per megawatt/hour, from 90 to 275 euros. Estimated monthly bill: 4,000 euros, compared to 1,400 euros at the start of 2022 and 800 euros 15 years earlier. “The coup de grace”, grumbles the 34-year-old baker. “Never, we would have imagined that the story would turn out like this. We can no longer follow. »
In the current economic panorama, destined for recession, history is not anecdotal. The craft industry risks suffering, warned, last weekend on France Inter, the secretary general of the Confederation of small and medium-sized enterprises (CPME), Jean-Eudes du Mesnil, “Today, 150,000 companies are in danger of death due to rising energy prices. This figure is colossal! “.
In Greneville-en-Beauce, the customers of this bakery, shaken by this premature closure, measure that the prediction is not unreal.