Schlecker: King of Heilbronn

Part of the Portfolio since 2015

For decades Anton Schlecker ran the largest drugstore chain in Germany, and one of the largest in Europe. At its peak the empire counted roughly 14,000 stores and some 50,000 employees, overwhelmingly women – the famous ‘Schlecker-Frauen’ who staffed the cramped little shops on seemingly every German corner.

It was a genuine retail colossus, and it vanished with startling speed. The museum’s favourite structural detail comes first, because it explains so much of what followed. Schlecker ran this enormous business not as a public company, nor even as a GmbH, but as ‘Anton Schlecker e.K.’ – a registered sole trader (eingetragener Kaufmann), carrying unlimited personal liability. 

A chain of fourteen thousand shops, owned by one man who was personally on the hook for all of it, apparently to keep the books private and the control total. It is a decision that looks like supreme confidence right up until the moment it looks like something else.

The shops themselves were the strategy’s weakness made physical: small, dim, sparsely staffed, and run with a famous parsimony that produced years of bitter labour disputes. For a long time it did not matter, because there was no better option. Then there was.

dm and Rossmann reinvented the German drugstore – bright, spacious, well-stocked, pleasant to shop in and decently run for staff. Against them, Schlecker’s thousands of gloomy little outlets suddenly looked like exactly what they were. The belated response – a dash to convert to bigger ‘XL’ stores – arrived too late and merely accelerated the cash burn.

In January 2012 the inevitable arrived: insolvency. Efforts to secure financing failed, and by the summer every store had closed, putting tens of thousands out of work – a social shock in Germany, where the ‘Schlecker-Frauen’ became a national talking point about precarious retail labour.

The legal epilogue was severe and very German in its thoroughness. In 2017 a Stuttgart court convicted Anton Schlecker of intentional bankruptcy (_Bankrott_), handing him a suspended sentence and a fine, while his children Lars and Meike were sentenced to prison for offences including embezzlement – the court finding that the family had moved millions out of the business before it collapsed. The unlimited-liability sole trader had, in the end, been held very personally responsible indeed.