Published on 30 January 2024, updated on 29 July 2026
German department store KaDeWe files for bankruptcy
Sam Jones in Berlin
© Bloomberg
Germany’s most famousdepartment store, KaDeWe, has filed for bankruptcy.
The institution, founded 117 years ago and jointly owned by René Benko’s Signa Holding and Thailand’s Central Group, has stated that it cannot afford to pay the rent on its Berlin store, one of Europe’s largest luxury retail outlets.
Signa, which went into administration in November, owns the KaDeWe building through a separate entity from its operating company and charges rent for it.
Creditors seeking to recover money from Benko’s property group have been unwilling to compromise on rent reductions, at the risk of devaluing their collateral.
From *Le Ossa dei Caprotti*, page 205: “[At Esselunga] we set up wine bars (we adopted the [green] colour for the furniture with Bernardo, in Berlin, at the KaDeWe department store), and fish counters [where the fish is served].
In Via Ripamonti, Milan, we trialled meat-cutting counters. We introduced special sections for premium extra virgin olive oil [ Gaetano Puglisi’s idea], and stocked the refrigerators opposite the delicatessen with cured meats [Citterio] and pre-sliced, pre-packaged cheeses.
We are dedicating more space to frozen foods – trialling various types of display counters – as well as to chocolate and sweets.
These are all highly profitable products, which are increasingly enriching the variety of our offering to customers and boosting our profits.
We are further improving our services by expanding our network of cafés, having carried out our first trials in 1998 in Parma and in the Brescia area [in Sarezzo (*)],
then we introduced facilities to help parents who come to do their shopping: we created children’s play areas, toilets with nappy-changing facilities, and so on.
Only a few dreams related to e-commerce remain on the back burner…”
(*) These were two ‘unrelated’, small-scale trials, implemented using different materials and equipment.
Please note that the superstore on Via Ripamonti, in 2002, featured all the services described above, including a café [and many others besides, e.g. newspapers, a perfumery, a children’s play area…].
The wine shops benefited from the advice of AIS sommeliers, and the new management changed the colour of the shelves from green to wood-coloured, but there are still some old-style wine shops, in the KaDeWe style, for example in the Macherio superstore (photo below).
Beneath the Esselunga café in Verbania [the calligraphy is by Germana Chiodi], before the catering division was set up and the cafés – designed by Vico Magistretti – were given the name Atlantic in 2002.
On the left of the photo, you can catch a glimpse of the Esselunga organic products I intended to promote through our cafés: “ [in 2000] I went to San Francisco with Paolo De Gennis to gather ideas, and on our return we redesigned the cafés inside the supermarkets, stocking them with organic products and setting up internet access points..”.
Then the whole affair took on an ideological dimension: “He had the internet stations removed – along with the organic products – and had the cafés redesigned in the somewhat Soviet-canteen style they still have today. He wrote to everyone in one of those communications—somewhere between punitive and pedagogical—recalled by Giulio Malgara: ‘- whilst de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no arguing about taste), it is nonetheless true that the ugly and the disharmonious are absolute values’ – he asserts in his role as guardian of universal taste” (…)
*Le Ossa dei Caprotti*, pages 219 and 220.
I understand that in 2024 there were 117 cafés in Esselunga.
