Planned advertising ban in lockdown – a naive suggestion
No time right now?
The Saarland is planning a ban on advertising anything that is not in the interest of the contact restrictions during the pandemic. But the advance of politics is not only naive and poorly thought out, it is also in no way effective.
The Saarland Economics Minister Anke Rehlinger (SPD) has one suggestion made, which is currently making waves outside of the small federal state. After a self-imposed commitment by the retailers did not work, they wanted to forbid the advertising of all products that are not essential for basic supplies or daily needs. This should apply from February 22nd, but Rehlinger expects the dealers to follow it from now on.
In view of such great naivety, the waves are beating higher within the advertising industry nationwide and within the Saarland merchants. It remains to be seen how the advertising ban should be interpreted – does it only refer to the actually inflationary advertising slips of the discounters or are Saarland retailers no longer allowed to advertise online? And what about TV or radio advertising that relates to specific retailers but not specific offers?
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Less contacts? This calculation doesn’t work out
The minister sums up the reasoning behind this as follows: “The voluntary commitment has not led everyone to rethink – many shops and department stores that are allowed to continue opening according to the priority principle have not waived some extensive advertising measures in the past few days. Not only does this lead to greater customer flows, while our most pressing goal is still to avoid contact. There is also a lack of solidarity with the specialty stores, which have to remain closed at the moment. ”However, the latter will not have a cent left in their till if, for example, grocers are no longer allowed to advertise their marginal ranges. And avoiding contact should also not be useful if less network-savvy customers, as in previous decades, walk into the shops on Monday and Thursday, because there might be something interesting among the promotional goods.
But it gets even stranger: retailers who have just closed their shops are still allowed to offer and advertise their products as part of Click & Collect. This should sensibly ensure a balance to the already busy online trade, but it leads to strange situations – for example if a customer wants to exchange a piece of clothing. Then he can order a new one via Click & Collect, but cannot quickly try it on in the open shop.
The advertising ban is a toothless tiger
It is also a mystery how one can prevent customers from not informing themselves. Because even if the Saarland may see itself as the center of its own shopping world, customers should be able to find out about promotional goods from food discounters, for example, by going to the website of the respective store. In most cases, as is well known, he makes his offers nationwide (or throughout southern Germany). None of this serves to avoid contact – it would only be logical to actually insist that certain product ranges, which will then be equally difficult to define, may no longer be sold. In the case of alcoholic beverages that are not allowed to go over the counter after a certain time or on certain days, this may still work, with many other decisions the dealers will very quickly appeal to the courts and override the state government with interim injunctions.
All in all, a thoroughly irritating proposal – and even if Anke Rehlinger declares that the Saarland is the first federal state to take such a step (and thus suggests that more could follow), it will probably not come to that. Because sensibly the coalition partner CDU with Prime Minister Tobias Hans will not make the proposal into law this week. If it does come to that, the courts will quickly put the overzealous politics in their place in their actionism. Because such a law would neither be appropriate (for this purpose the sale and not the promotion of such non-essential groups of goods would have to be prohibited) nor would it be fair in the interests of those affected – and it would not reduce consumer contact either, on the contrary.
