6 ms·

Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants

Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over. About 8 or so years ago, a baker closed at the city center, replaced by a chain, and a friend lamented how traditional bakers can't keep up with the chains that basically put frozen products in the oven. Her father laughed and said the place was a gold mine, but the owner retired and nobody wants to get up at 3 in the morning anymore to bake bread.

dmurray 6y ago
Often the people who are willing to work long hours and lack formal qualifications are immigrants. Maybe there are not enough immigrants in your town? Or they would have needed to start as apprentices 5 years ago, and it's hard for them to get into the apprentice system?
- umanwizard 6y ago
  > lack formal qualifications Not sure about Germany, but there is a formal qualification for bakers in France.
- mamon 6y ago
  That's the paradox: Germany took in over 1.4 million "refugees" from Syria and North Africa (predominantly young, healthy males), and they still couldn't find ~20k temp workers to pick up asparagus this summer. They lamented how Polish people can't come anymore, due to COVID-19 lockdown. So no, it's definitely not the lack of immigrants, they are just wrong kind of immigrants, the too-lazy-to-work kind.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    > So no, it's definitely not the lack of immigrants, they are just wrong kind of immigrants, the too-lazy-to-work kind. Refugees are by law not allowed to work until they have a semi-permanent residence permit of any kind ("Duldung" would be sufficient in some, but not all cases). So yeah, they're all lazy and at fault here.
    - mamon 6y ago
      By what law? I'm pretty sure that at the same time Germany allowed them in they also adjusted their policies to make access to jobs easy for them (https://www.oecd.org/els/mig/Finding-their-Way-Germany.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/mig/Finding-their-Way-Germany.pdf) German economy in general suffers from the lack of workers, which is the limiting factor for many businesses growth. If they could make a productive use of those "refugees" they surely would by now. They are not gatekeeping the job market.
      - Xylakant 6y ago
        Here's the rules and regulations: https://www.bmas.de/DE/Themen/Arbeitsmarkt/Infos-fuer-Asylsuchende/arbeitsmarktzugang-asylbewerber-geduldete.html https://www.bmas.de/DE/Themen/Arbeitsmarkt/Infos-fuer-Asylsu... TL;DR: At least 3 month in the best case, never in the worst case. Many cases require explicit permission from the authorities. Even if you're allowed to work before your application has been approved, you still face the problem that your refugee application might not be approved. Few employers will risk investing substantial amounts of education into a person with such a risky status. Once you have a permanent residence status things get easier. Generally, a major problem is that practically no education that refugees may have is recognized in Germany. So even if the person is a doctor, baker or whatever, even if they speak proper German, they're not permitted to work in the job that they're educated for - so even if there's a lack of qualified workers on one side and qualified workers on the other side, you'd still need to go through at least large chunks of the education. My wife who has a full teacher education from a neighboring european country (ECTS credits and all) still had to go back to university before being allowed to teach in Germany. There's also language barriers (obviously) It's also the case that in 2018 43% of the refugees had a job - that's certainly less than everyone would have wished for, but it's not as if all refugees are out of work. Since you cited the case of having to import foreign workers for field/harvest work: That's something that the farmers prefer. The imported workers are unorganized, often speak no German and have little to no knowledge of their rights. They're kept in containers under the farmers control. They're easy to exploit in ways that people with even the least bit of local support network are not. They'd not take natural Germans either if they applied.
  - martopix 6y ago
    If you say something racist and prejudiced like that you need evidence that the problem here is that their unwillingness to work. Furthermore the idea (given by your use of quotes) that people coming from Syria during a civil war aren't refugees also requires a strong justification. Otherwise this message should not have a place here.
    - brippalcharrid 6y ago
      What gives you the impression that a majority of the people in question are even from Syria? Or Iraq? I think that's the reason for the skepticism-quotes.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  You need to have what's called "Meisterbrief" to run a bakery. That's the equivalent of having studied. You need 3 years of apprenticeship, then you make what's called "Gesellenprüfung", then you need to work at least 2 years in a bakery and then you need to go back to school for two years. That's quite some effort and it's not lacking formal qualifications. Also, running a bakery is a fairly capital-heavy investment. Friends of ours closed their bakery when the oven broke - it would have cost at least 50k to repair and that was the point they decided to retire (despite offers from many people in the street to chip in).
  - 2trill2spill 6y ago
    From my perspective that seems heavily over regulated. As long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion and doesn't make people sick, why should a baker be expected to go through so much training/schooling?
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      Meisterschule does not primarily teach you how to make bread. That’s the part before. It also teaches you how to educate new apprentices, how to run a business, etc. Maybe it’s over regulated, but on the other hand, we require solid education for a lot of professions. As long as the bridge doesn’t collapse, why should we expect an engineer to go through that much education? It’s only math and textbooks are freely available. As long as the patient survives, why do we require that doctors pass a certain education? It’s only biology and you can google most of it anyways.
      - earthboundkid 6y ago
        Watching doctors google stuff really makes you worry about the medical equivalent of StackOverflow code.
        Xylakant 6y ago
        We all do google stuff. The part that requires training is knowing what to google for and how to interpret the results.
- avhception 6y ago
  > hard for them to get into the apprentice system? Speaking as a German, it's also a failure to integrate these people properly. The small bakery in my home town closed down, too. Immigrants are in no short supply, but there are a few factors that prevent them from taking on a venture like that: - They're generally forbidden to work until their formal immigration process has made enough progress in our bureaucracy, which can take years - They usually have no capital to pay for up-front expenses like buying the buildings and equipment - We segregate them from society by putting them in some sort of immigrant shelter while the bureaucracy does it's thing Especially the last point is rather bad I think, it leads to parallel societies that keep to themselves rather than integrating into the German society surrounding them. Most Muslim migrants would probably rather not operate a "German"-style bakery in the traditional sense. Our capability for integration is declining, too, because as a society we are becoming more and more estranged from our fellow citizens as community activities, especially in small towns and villages, dry up.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - razakel 6y ago
    It very much sounds as if you're confusing immigrants and refugees here.
    - jbarberu 6y ago
      I disagree. As an immigrant in America it sounds very much like my first 11 months here. Legal immigrant, unable to work while waiting for paperwork.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Cerium 6y ago
In San Jose there used to be a traditional tofu shop in Japantown. It was a small old shop. You walk inside and see the tofu making equipment behind a counter with the cash box. On the side was a handwritten chart: 1 tofu, $2, 2 tofu, $4, 3 tofu, $6 etc. They also sold ginger (tofu's #1 friend) and a couple random items. It was my favorite shop in the city, I used to ride my bike there and buy some fresh tofu. The owner would scold me about buying my green onions at Nijiya "A dollar seventy for a green onion! Daylight robbery!". A year or two ago they closed. The owners (an elderly couple) decided to retire, and their children neither wanted to run a tofu shop nor would they let them. It is hard work. I miss the shop though, truly the best tofu I have ever eaten.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over. Their kids don't want to take over because those peoples kids have better career opportunities that were not available to their parents. Third parties don't want to buy the businesses because it's not as lucrative as it once was.
lqet 6y ago
This is not only a problem with bakeries or butchers (I also know of two shops here and in my home village who closed down not because business was bad, but because it was so good they retired in their mid-fifties - and nobody wanted to take over). Old restaurants and pubs have the same problem.
- qihqi 6y ago
  hmmm it seems a good opportunity to connect profitable businesses to potential investors that would want to take over?
  - jandrese 6y ago
    It would be a valuable service, but there's probably no money in it. Would it be so crazy to put your business up on eBay or some other auction site? Explain how the business works, what the customer base is, what kind of work the owners and staff do every day, make an offer to buy them out so they can retire. Probably would end up being used mostly by corporations looking for new places to bulldoze and set up a chain location through. Weeding it out to just people with a passion for running an independent small business would be hard.
    - wahern 6y ago
      > Would it be so crazy to put your business up on eBay or some other auction site? Business brokering is a thing. In California alone there's an entire association, California Association of Business Brokers (https://cabb.org/ https://cabb.org/), and I would assume such an industry exists elsewhere. I used to peruse listings at sites like https://www.bizbuysell.com/buy/ https://www.bizbuysell.com/buy/ and daydream about owning a small convenience store. I once even tried to buy one, going so far as to sign an offer agreement, but that was before I understood that banks don't normally give small business loans using the business alone as collateral. Federal SBA loans go through banks, which will still expect security, so it's not that much easier even if you're a minority, able to benefit from [mythical] preferential treatment. The owner I tried to buy from was a serial small shop owner. Later I learned that he was trading-up his convenience store (aka liquor store in SF) for a mailbox and shipping store. Apparently in SF those do well, or at least the place he bought in the Outer Richmond (Little Russia) did. He was from Georgia and spoke Russian. I think the problem with butcher shops, flower shops, etc, is that they require apprenticing or at least having significant prior experience. The agreement with the liquor store owner included a month of working side-by-side to learn the business and to verify cash flow, but that's not a very complicated skillset to learn compared to butchering. Also, once you have enough assets to start a business or buy an existing business, you're probably well into a career and have other responsibilities and obligations that make it difficult to switch occupations, and definitely difficult to apprentice. Most small business owners want a quick exit. They don't usually make alot of money. Aside from their home (which may have been mortgaged for the business), their savings is tied up in the business--goodwill, stock, and any intangible assets like accounts payable and licenses. (At that time a liquor license in SF was worth about $20-30k.) So there's a real mismatch between those who hypothetically would be willing to take over a business, and those who are actually in a position to do so. One obvious large cohort is children of the owners, and that's partly because the owner is effectively willing to sell at a discount (at least in terms of risk, if not the nominal price, such as with seller financing).
ponker 6y ago
This is what is happening to a lot of US Chinese restaurants. The parents slaved away at the woks for 40 years but made sure to get their kids well educated so there are no kids to take over, the kids are doctors or engineers. This is the outcome the parents wanted, they’re closing their restaurants with no regrets.

dmurray 6y ago

Often the people who are willing to work long hours and lack formal qualifications are immigrants. Maybe there are not enough immigrants in your town? Or they would have needed to start as apprentices 5 years ago, and it's hard for them to get into the apprentice system?

umanwizard 6y ago
> lack formal qualifications Not sure about Germany, but there is a formal qualification for bakers in France.
mamon 6y ago
That's the paradox: Germany took in over 1.4 million "refugees" from Syria and North Africa (predominantly young, healthy males), and they still couldn't find ~20k temp workers to pick up asparagus this summer. They lamented how Polish people can't come anymore, due to COVID-19 lockdown. So no, it's definitely not the lack of immigrants, they are just wrong kind of immigrants, the too-lazy-to-work kind.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  > So no, it's definitely not the lack of immigrants, they are just wrong kind of immigrants, the too-lazy-to-work kind. Refugees are by law not allowed to work until they have a semi-permanent residence permit of any kind ("Duldung" would be sufficient in some, but not all cases). So yeah, they're all lazy and at fault here.
  - mamon 6y ago
    By what law? I'm pretty sure that at the same time Germany allowed them in they also adjusted their policies to make access to jobs easy for them (https://www.oecd.org/els/mig/Finding-their-Way-Germany.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/mig/Finding-their-Way-Germany.pdf) German economy in general suffers from the lack of workers, which is the limiting factor for many businesses growth. If they could make a productive use of those "refugees" they surely would by now. They are not gatekeeping the job market.
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      Here's the rules and regulations: https://www.bmas.de/DE/Themen/Arbeitsmarkt/Infos-fuer-Asylsuchende/arbeitsmarktzugang-asylbewerber-geduldete.html https://www.bmas.de/DE/Themen/Arbeitsmarkt/Infos-fuer-Asylsu... TL;DR: At least 3 month in the best case, never in the worst case. Many cases require explicit permission from the authorities. Even if you're allowed to work before your application has been approved, you still face the problem that your refugee application might not be approved. Few employers will risk investing substantial amounts of education into a person with such a risky status. Once you have a permanent residence status things get easier. Generally, a major problem is that practically no education that refugees may have is recognized in Germany. So even if the person is a doctor, baker or whatever, even if they speak proper German, they're not permitted to work in the job that they're educated for - so even if there's a lack of qualified workers on one side and qualified workers on the other side, you'd still need to go through at least large chunks of the education. My wife who has a full teacher education from a neighboring european country (ECTS credits and all) still had to go back to university before being allowed to teach in Germany. There's also language barriers (obviously) It's also the case that in 2018 43% of the refugees had a job - that's certainly less than everyone would have wished for, but it's not as if all refugees are out of work. Since you cited the case of having to import foreign workers for field/harvest work: That's something that the farmers prefer. The imported workers are unorganized, often speak no German and have little to no knowledge of their rights. They're kept in containers under the farmers control. They're easy to exploit in ways that people with even the least bit of local support network are not. They'd not take natural Germans either if they applied.
- martopix 6y ago
  If you say something racist and prejudiced like that you need evidence that the problem here is that their unwillingness to work. Furthermore the idea (given by your use of quotes) that people coming from Syria during a civil war aren't refugees also requires a strong justification. Otherwise this message should not have a place here.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    What gives you the impression that a majority of the people in question are even from Syria? Or Iraq? I think that's the reason for the skepticism-quotes.
Xylakant 6y ago
You need to have what's called "Meisterbrief" to run a bakery. That's the equivalent of having studied. You need 3 years of apprenticeship, then you make what's called "Gesellenprüfung", then you need to work at least 2 years in a bakery and then you need to go back to school for two years. That's quite some effort and it's not lacking formal qualifications. Also, running a bakery is a fairly capital-heavy investment. Friends of ours closed their bakery when the oven broke - it would have cost at least 50k to repair and that was the point they decided to retire (despite offers from many people in the street to chip in).
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  From my perspective that seems heavily over regulated. As long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion and doesn't make people sick, why should a baker be expected to go through so much training/schooling?
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    Meisterschule does not primarily teach you how to make bread. That’s the part before. It also teaches you how to educate new apprentices, how to run a business, etc. Maybe it’s over regulated, but on the other hand, we require solid education for a lot of professions. As long as the bridge doesn’t collapse, why should we expect an engineer to go through that much education? It’s only math and textbooks are freely available. As long as the patient survives, why do we require that doctors pass a certain education? It’s only biology and you can google most of it anyways.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      Watching doctors google stuff really makes you worry about the medical equivalent of StackOverflow code.
      - Xylakant 6y ago
        We all do google stuff. The part that requires training is knowing what to google for and how to interpret the results.
avhception 6y ago
> hard for them to get into the apprentice system? Speaking as a German, it's also a failure to integrate these people properly. The small bakery in my home town closed down, too. Immigrants are in no short supply, but there are a few factors that prevent them from taking on a venture like that: - They're generally forbidden to work until their formal immigration process has made enough progress in our bureaucracy, which can take years - They usually have no capital to pay for up-front expenses like buying the buildings and equipment - We segregate them from society by putting them in some sort of immigrant shelter while the bureaucracy does it's thing Especially the last point is rather bad I think, it leads to parallel societies that keep to themselves rather than integrating into the German society surrounding them. Most Muslim migrants would probably rather not operate a "German"-style bakery in the traditional sense. Our capability for integration is declining, too, because as a society we are becoming more and more estranged from our fellow citizens as community activities, especially in small towns and villages, dry up.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- razakel 6y ago
  It very much sounds as if you're confusing immigrants and refugees here.
  - jbarberu 6y ago
    I disagree. As an immigrant in America it sounds very much like my first 11 months here. Legal immigrant, unable to work while waiting for paperwork.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Cerium 6y ago

In San Jose there used to be a traditional tofu shop in Japantown. It was a small old shop. You walk inside and see the tofu making equipment behind a counter with the cash box. On the side was a handwritten chart: 1 tofu, $2, 2 tofu, $4, 3 tofu, $6 etc. They also sold ginger (tofu's #1 friend) and a couple random items. It was my favorite shop in the city, I used to ride my bike there and buy some fresh tofu. The owner would scold me about buying my green onions at Nijiya "A dollar seventy for a green onion! Daylight robbery!". A year or two ago they closed. The owners (an elderly couple) decided to retire, and their children neither wanted to run a tofu shop nor would they let them. It is hard work. I miss the shop though, truly the best tofu I have ever eaten.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over. Their kids don't want to take over because those peoples kids have better career opportunities that were not available to their parents. Third parties don't want to buy the businesses because it's not as lucrative as it once was.

lqet 6y ago

This is not only a problem with bakeries or butchers (I also know of two shops here and in my home village who closed down not because business was bad, but because it was so good they retired in their mid-fifties - and nobody wanted to take over). Old restaurants and pubs have the same problem.

qihqi 6y ago
hmmm it seems a good opportunity to connect profitable businesses to potential investors that would want to take over?
- jandrese 6y ago
  It would be a valuable service, but there's probably no money in it. Would it be so crazy to put your business up on eBay or some other auction site? Explain how the business works, what the customer base is, what kind of work the owners and staff do every day, make an offer to buy them out so they can retire. Probably would end up being used mostly by corporations looking for new places to bulldoze and set up a chain location through. Weeding it out to just people with a passion for running an independent small business would be hard.
  - wahern 6y ago
    > Would it be so crazy to put your business up on eBay or some other auction site? Business brokering is a thing. In California alone there's an entire association, California Association of Business Brokers (https://cabb.org/ https://cabb.org/), and I would assume such an industry exists elsewhere. I used to peruse listings at sites like https://www.bizbuysell.com/buy/ https://www.bizbuysell.com/buy/ and daydream about owning a small convenience store. I once even tried to buy one, going so far as to sign an offer agreement, but that was before I understood that banks don't normally give small business loans using the business alone as collateral. Federal SBA loans go through banks, which will still expect security, so it's not that much easier even if you're a minority, able to benefit from [mythical] preferential treatment. The owner I tried to buy from was a serial small shop owner. Later I learned that he was trading-up his convenience store (aka liquor store in SF) for a mailbox and shipping store. Apparently in SF those do well, or at least the place he bought in the Outer Richmond (Little Russia) did. He was from Georgia and spoke Russian. I think the problem with butcher shops, flower shops, etc, is that they require apprenticing or at least having significant prior experience. The agreement with the liquor store owner included a month of working side-by-side to learn the business and to verify cash flow, but that's not a very complicated skillset to learn compared to butchering. Also, once you have enough assets to start a business or buy an existing business, you're probably well into a career and have other responsibilities and obligations that make it difficult to switch occupations, and definitely difficult to apprentice. Most small business owners want a quick exit. They don't usually make alot of money. Aside from their home (which may have been mortgaged for the business), their savings is tied up in the business--goodwill, stock, and any intangible assets like accounts payable and licenses. (At that time a liquor license in SF was worth about $20-30k.) So there's a real mismatch between those who hypothetically would be willing to take over a business, and those who are actually in a position to do so. One obvious large cohort is children of the owners, and that's partly because the owner is effectively willing to sell at a discount (at least in terms of risk, if not the nominal price, such as with seller financing).

ponker 6y ago

This is what is happening to a lot of US Chinese restaurants. The parents slaved away at the woks for 40 years but made sure to get their kids well educated so there are no kids to take over, the kids are doctors or engineers. This is the outcome the parents wanted, they’re closing their restaurants with no regrets.