Dhe sight of empty shelves when shopping is one of those images that are still badly remembered from the beginning of the Corona crisis. Only this time there aren’t toilet paper rolls missing in the supermarket, but electric fan heaters in the DIY stores. If there are still offers on the Internet, some of which can be delivered quickly, everything is often sold out in the stores. Sometimes it doesn’t even take 24 hours before freshly arrived goods are gone again: “We still get deliveries, but the demand is so great that people have to be quick,” says the Hornbach DIY chain.
The boom was triggered by concerns that at some point in the winter gas would no longer be available for heating. Electric alternatives have been in demand in the markets for months, especially since the second stage of the gas emergency plan was announced in June. In the first half of the year, twice as many of these products were sold as in the same period of the previous year: “In July, interest increased again significantly, and in August it’s going the same way,” says von Hornbach.
