“Garbage is brought into our branches”

From 2025, points of sale in Austria that sell drinks in PET bottles or aluminum cans will have to take this packaging back from their customers for a deposit. The Austrian Chamber of Commerce (WKÖ) has already criticized the deposit system in the past because it means high costs for “struggling retailers”.

Now there is also criticism from the managing director of the country’s largest drugstore chain, dm. At a press conference on the current company balance sheet Harald Bauer the proposed single-use deposit “a method from the past to solve the problems of the future” and compares it to “milk bottles from the early 19th century”.

Returns planned without a machine

Bauer refers to modern sorting systems, such as those of Altstoff Recycling Austria (ARA) in Ennshafen, with which the desired return rates of 80 to 90 percent could be achieved.

Despite the criticism, Bauer announces that dm wants to “adhere to the guidelines in an exemplary manner. In the company, returns should be done manually and not via machines, as is planned at most food retailers.

Bauer explains the process like this: “Garbage is brought to our branches – there is no other way to describe it – and it is received there and stored in two bags. When the bags are full, they are picked up.”

Dm currently operates 382 branches in Austria with almost 7,000 employees; three locations had to be closed last year. Sales in this country amounted to 1.3 billion euros, 9.5 percent more than in the previous year.

More than 5 billion euros in sales

Sales grew even more strongly in the association together with the subsidiaries managed from Austria in eleven Central and Southeast European countries (such as Italy, Bulgaria and Croatia) – by 16.5 percent to 5.25 billion euros.

The reason for the increases was primarily the sharp increase in the number of purchases, said Martin EngelmannChairman of the Management Board: “We made an average of 15,000 more purchases per day than in the previous year.”

On average, there were 580 customers per day and branch in Austria over the past twelve months; now every second product in specialist drugstores is bought from dm.

Almost half of the products are private label

Bauer particularly emphasizes the low price increases: While general inflation is 3.8 percent according to the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO), the prices for items at dm have only increased by 1.8 percent compared to the previous year.

This is mainly due to the strong dm own brands, such as the whale, Alverde, Baby love, Denkmit or DM Biowhich make up around half of the dm range (47 percent).

Things are going less well at the company’s hair salons and cosmetic studios than in the retail division. Although there is always a need for service providers such as hairdressers, it is a “unstable business,” as the dm managing director says Thomas Köckt says.

For this reason, the company closed locations in the “low double-digit range” last year. dm currently operates 123 hairdressing and 89 cosmetic studios.