Last year, the Real shopping chain filed for bankruptcy. What happened to the company and its employees?
After years of financial difficulties, the Real hypermarket chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2023. The aim at that time was to sell locations to the competition and thus secure jobs. However, the company was only partially successful: at the beginning of this year, the last 45 branches closed – no buyer could be found for them.
At the beginning of the insolvency proceedings, the company still had around 5,000 employees – around 3,500 of whom lost their jobs as a result of the closures. Due to the insolvency proceedings, the payments of their severance payments were capped: they may be a maximum of 2.5 times the monthly salary.
Last year, the company paid its employees an inflation compensation of around 1,200 euros. The bonus should also function as an incentive to keep employees until the end.
CEO Bojan Luncer told the “Lebensmittelzeitung” last March that he was very satisfied with how the bankruptcy process was going after the last branches had to finally close. “We had many rounds of negotiations with works councils, but in the end we found good solutions. There hasn’t been a day of strike in the past four years.” Luncer was also optimistic about the future of the now empty locations: He assumed that 90 percent of them would sell food again after renovation work.
The ver.di union, on the other hand, was much more critical. As Heino Georg Kaßler, the state secretary for retail in North Rhine-Westphalia, speculated to the dpa, the last owner, the SCP Group, was only interested in the real estate: “The investor SCP is shirking its responsibility and the taxpayers are paying for it by paying the insolvency money .”
In 1992, various regional retail chains were brought together within the Metro Group – and the self-service chain Real was founded. At the turn of the millennium, Real was active in almost 300 locations. The company had also expanded outside of Germany and operated its own stores in the Turkish capital Ankara.
After the Metro Group had already sold several branches, the company announced in 2018 that it wanted to sell Real as a whole. The new owner SCP Retail Investments also sold additional branches to Edeka, Rewe, Globus and Kaufland. According to “Lebensmittel Zeitung”, the last 63 locations had a combined sales potential of around one billion euros. For comparison: According to “handelsdaten.de”, in 2021 Kaufland generated an estimated turnover of around 18 billion with 725 branches – a little more when calculated for the individual market.