Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
There is good news that has largely gone unnoticed over the past few days: Christmas tree prices remain stable. That’s hard to believe considering that prices have remained stable for pretty much nothing else.
The cost of groceries, for example, rose by more than 20 percent from October 2021 to October 2022. But for the Christmas tree, retailers continue to expect 27 euros per meter of Nordmann fir. Spruces cost significantly less. This continues a trend of recent years, since around 2016 the tree price has hardly increased. Neither the climate crisis, the euro disaster, Brexit nor the war have upset the prices.
Retailers also rely on stable sales: the German needs a tree every year. Because you can count on stable sales, nobody has to counteract falling sales with higher unit prices. Even the summer, it was said, was said to have been easy for the trees to cope with, although it was particularly dry. It seems to be a completely crisis-proof industry.
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Not even the rise in global temperatures seems to be able to harm the tree business. Germany is the largest producer of Christmas trees in the world. One has to emphasize that too. Undisputed at the top. While almost all sectors in Germany have to deal with lousy prospects because either the raw material prices are exploding or you have to compete with cheap goods from China or you have to switch from petrol to electric motors – the Christmas tree business is not affected by this.
Apparently nobody wants to import a cheap tree from the Far East. Apparently the fear is too great that only a skeleton with dry needles will come out of the container. Such stability should give food for thought. Aren’t trees the last stable values?
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about cryptocurrencies, which you have to invest in because you can no longer trust classic currencies. I think bitcoin has fallen from $60,000 to $16,000 now, trending down. Soon you can only buy a Mettbrötchen with a bitcoin.
The Christmas tree business, on the other hand, was not affected by any fluctuations. If you had bought a plot of Christmas forest instead of bitcoin, then everything would have stayed fine. Buy Christmas forests, invest in conifers, I advise!
You should expand that. Perhaps swap out the federal eagle for the federal tree to increase confidence in democracy. Trade pinecones instead of coins. You should do it quickly, before others get wind of the business and get big themselves. It is to be expected that Elon Musk will have his megafactory demolished near Berlin and plant a forest there.
More: Start-ups want to sell my clothes for me.