Essen.
The lack of magic in the booth does not only mean high losses for dealers and showmen: Essen Marketing also lost 830,000 euros.
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The tills never ring sweeter for Essen’s marketing company EMG than at Christmas time – with all the booth magic in the city center: The traditional Christmas market not only attracts guests from near and far, but thanks to the stall fees it also fills the tills of a half-urban one Society that, in the face of the widespread cancellation, now has plenty of costs, but hardly any income. The city will have to help out – with at least 832,000 euros.
In any case, this is the maximum amount that was calculated a few months ago as the required subsidy amount for the worst of all market variants included: namely because the construction work has already been carried out, but the pre-Christmas hustle and bustle with a view to the corona pandemic is not or at most in can take place on a very modest scale.
Events canceled, the workforce on short-time work, but it’s not enough
A company that is sewn on edge like EMG quickly runs out of breath in such a situation: “We don’t have enough equity to survive such a crisis situation on our own,” admits managing director Richard Röhrhoff. Only a good third of the budget of around 4.5 million euros is covered by the city’s subsidy, another 200,000 euros come from the Essen Marketing Service eV dealers’ association, the rest you have to generate yourself.
But where nothing happens, nothing goes into the till. It is true that some things could be compensated by canceling events such as the “Essen Original” city festival and reducing the workforce or taking their vacation forward. The bottom line, however, was that none of this was enough to straighten out the imminent imbalance.
When the financial gap shrinks, EMG has to pay back the money
And so the newly elected city council has a proposal for its first real working session on December 2nd to loosen an extra-budgetary grant of 832,000 euros. If the financial gap turns out to be smaller in the end, EMG has to repay the money, as stipulated by EU law. Röhrhoff still hopes that Essen Marketing will ultimately benefit from federal aid. That would shift costs from the city to another state level.
What costs would then be left in the Essen budget? “In the best case?”, He says: “Nothing at all.”
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