Retailing

Ljubljana – Swedish furniture group Ikea opened its much-anticipated first store in Slovenia on Thursday. “Although this is not an opening we expected, we are grateful to be here today,” Sara Del Fabbro, the CEO at Ikea South East Europe, said at today’s inauguration event in Ljubljana’s BTC shopping district amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ljubljana – The Swedish furniture group Ikea is set to open its first store in Slovenia in Ljubljana on Thursday. To ensure a safe shopping experience in Covid times and avert long queues in front of the store, Ikea has mandated advanced bookings for in-person shopping in the first weeks following the opening.

While during the Covid-marked 2020 we stayed more at home and walked mainly to the refrigerator and back, it turned out that we had been eating record-expensive foods. The analysis of wholesale prices of staple groceries: sugar, flour, oil, rice and pulses scored an year-on-year increase, with the annual averages for most of them being the highest for the period 2015 - 2020.

As of Thursday, the click-and-collect (dubbed click away by the government) shopping option will stop, the Secretary General of Commerce and Consumer Protection Panagiotis Stampoulidis said on Wednesday, presenting the changes in every sector of the market.

The retail market is particularly unhappy with the third lockdown that begins Thursday in Attica, stressing that neither the full closure of the market since November nor the partial reopening of stores afterward proved efficient against the pandemic and the recession.

Ljubljana – The Swedish furniture group Ikea will be launching its online store for Slovenia on 25 February. If coronavirus restrictions will allow, its new brick-and-mortar store in Ljubljana will also open on the same day, the company said in a press release on Friday.

«Παρέλυσαν» τα καταστήματα ZARA, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka

While their great success may have been dictated largely by the pandemic, it seems that online supermarkets are here to stay. It is no coincidence the investments of supermarkets in 2021, too, mostly concern improving their e-stores and the creation of the necessary infrastructure.

Retail commerce saw its turnover drop by just 7.9% in November 2020, compared to a year earlier, a decline that appears small given that Greece entered its second lockdown on November 7. However, this is due to the significant increase in sales at supermarkets and other food stores.

Brazilian doctors and scientists are working hard to understand the new variant of Covid-19 that was found in the Amazon.

At the same time, doctors in the rainforest's biggest city Manaus are struggling to control rising numbers of deaths from Covid-19 and soaring cases, as the country goes through a devastating second wave.