"You have to stay flexible"

It seems to hang there a little defiantly in the upper right corner of the entrance front. The small sign with the inscription "Maison Schneider" can only be seen at second glance because of all the advertising. Yet the name of the independent newspaper store has shaped life in the community of Schifflange for three decades.

Since the early 1990s, customers have been coming and going "at Schneidesch". On this Monday afternoon, there is a lot going on in the store. But children who buy candy after school aren't stopping by today. They attend classes from home due to Covid-19.

Irene Schneider leads her visit to the back of the store, where it's a little quieter. She admits to being a little excited. The owner of the store had agreed to the interview just under a week earlier after a brief deliberation. Certainly also because the celebration planned for the 30th anniversary last year fell through due to the pandemic. A little advertising can never hurt.

More customers during the lockdown

Yet the business has actually, it must be said, benefited from the sanitary crisis. "We were lucky, thank God, to stay open", says the store owner. In the first lockdown in March 2020, Irene Schneider and her employees had a lot to do. One reason is that the kiosk offers, among other things, a well-known foreign remittance service, but other points of contact of this kind had to close. This brought customers into the store who wanted to quickly send some money to their relatives abroad in this phase of uncertainty.