‘It makes
me sick’: the Amsterdam shops closing because of soaring rents
As Dutch
capital prepares to celebrate 750th anniversary, small business owners fear for
independent retail
Jennifer
Rankin
Jennifer
Rankin in Amsterdam
Sun 27 Apr
2025 05.00 BST
The floral
perfume of tea and coffee fills the air in ‘t Zonnetje (The Sun), as – behind
the counter – Marie-Louise Velder weighs out loose leaf tea, parcelling black
leaves into paper packets. Mahogany-coloured shelves are stacked with pots
containing beans from Ethiopia, Java, India, alongside bric-a-brac, such as
vintage tea tins and old master-style pictures.
But in less
than two months, the sun will set for good on this cosy shop in Amsterdam,
which was founded in 1642. For the owner, the rent is just too high.
Velder, an
energetic 76-year-old, who took over the business 26 years ago from an English
family, paid 975 guilders (about €440 or £376) rent a month in 1999. Now she
expects a monthly bill of up to €4,500, backdated to last September, after a
legal dispute with her landlord. That was reduced from €6,000 by an independent
arbiter, but still represents a hefty increase on the €3,000 she pays now.
“It makes me
sick, that’s all I can say,” she said over a cup of Ceylon tea. Traditional
shops, she said, “are all dying” because of soaring rents.
Since the
Amsterdam-based newspaper Het Parool revealed the closure last week, she said
she had received a huge response from customers – “love, only love”.
As another
independent shop closes, fears are growing that the city will be increasingly
dominated by chain stores and shops catering to tourists.
Johannes
Wilhelm, a 63-year-old local businessman, who had cycled over for some lapsang
souchong, described ‘t Zonnetje’s imminent disappearance as a real pity. “There
are a lot of cheese and Nutella-pancakes and all kinds of tourist shops.
Tourists are fine [and] good. But this should be here as well,” he said.
Rents have
been growing in the “most sought after high street retail locations” across the
Netherlands, according to one market analyst.
Although the
future of the shop site is uncertain, Karel Loeff, the director of the
conservation organisation Heemschut, has observed that higher rents tend to
mean bigger companies with more standardised offers move in when sole traders
move out.
Founded in
1642, the shop on Haarlemmerdijk began by selling herbs, coal and buckets of
water, but as the Dutch empire prospered it offered tea and coffee.
In the
modern shop, Velder makes Earl Grey in the chilly basement by steeping Assam
leaves in bergamot for three days, a blend that took two and a half years to
perfect. She once sold 350 varieties of tea, but her offer is sharply reduced
as she runs down her stock.
Loeff said
preserving living heritage – one of the aims of Heemschut – was very hard.
“We can
preserve the wooden beams and shelves … but we can’t preserve a function. We
can’t say this is an original tea shop and you should preserve this for the
future.”
Local shops
run by private owners for decades “are what make cities unique”, he continued.
“If you push them away and you only have standard brands and shops, the
attractiveness of the city disappears.”
Amsterdam
has been grappling for years with how to preserve its heritage in the face of
increasing numbers of homogenous chain stores and tourist-friendly novelty
shops selling sweets or rubber ducks in the historic centre. In 2017, the city
government announced that retailers catering mainly to tourists, such as
bike-rental companies or cheese shops, would be prevented from opening in parts
of the city centre.
Iris
Hagemans, an urban geographer at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences,
cautioned about generalising. Amsterdam has places where tourism has created a
“monoculture in the shopping landscape”, she said, citing the congested central
Damstraat. But just a few hundred metres away “the atmosphere is completely
different” and shops confronted with dwindling demand from residents and
competition from online shopping are benefiting from tourist footfall. “I think
this monoculture is sometimes portrayed as a kind of oil spill that will
eventually spread throughout the city, but the effect is much more local.”
Government
support for independent businesses, such as intervention to control commercial
rents, was a tricky area, she said. “There can be quite a big gap between the
type of shops that people claim to want to see in their neighbourhood and … the
kind of shop that they actually frequent … I think there’s a risk there of
supporting a function for which there is not really a demand.”
Hagemans
favours government action to protect basic needs, such as access to healthy
food, healthcare and other essential services, but cautions against the state
as an arbiter of taste. “The retail landscape should be able to respond to the
market and be dynamic. And it’s democratic in the way that you vote with your
wallet.”
Down the
road from ‘t Zonnetje, near a pizza joint and lemonade shop, a banner has gone
up to mark the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam, which falls in October. Velder
has heard there are plans afoot to support small business owners in this
anniversary year, “but it is too late for me”.