18 ms·
The Hyper-Specialist Shops of Berlin (2019)
- smoldesu 5y agoI can imagine that everyone shown here also has a well-managed online presence. If anything, the internet is enabling specialist shops to have a physical presence. We've come full circle.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI'm involved in a community of (mostly online) retro video game dealers down in Australia. You've hit the nail on the head. The fact that e-commerce is so strong allows people to run less profitable physical stores as basically hobby clubs for meeting like-minded customers. A lot of people in specialist retail genuinely care about the niche they're in and it's fantastic to come across someone IRL who cares about it as much as you do. It reminds you that what you're doing is appreciated. Of course, there's also the element of status amongst the other dealers. Running a physical store definitely carries more clout than owning a big house or a Mercedes-Benz.
- JohnBooty 5y agoThis is cool in some ways but not others. There's a vintage videogame/toy shop near here. The physical store is basically a warehouse for the guy's eBay shop. There are no prices on anything. If you want to buy something, the kid in the store calls the boss, who looks up the price on their eBay storefront. It's obviously nice to be able to physically see/visit the goods. But it's also kinda like, "why am I even visiting the store?"
- detaro 5y agoMany do, but not necessarily. For a one-(elderly-)person shop with lots of inventory collected over time the hassle isn't necessarily worth it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mjfl 5y agoI wonder if these shops developed in contrast to, or rebellion against, the uniformity created by communism in East Germany (or just quirky German culture).
- freeflight 5y agoFrom the article: > Germany’s Mittelstand, roughly defined as businesses with between 50 and 500 employees, may be commonly hailed as the “hidden champions” of nation’s economic success, but in Berlin retail, medium-sized businesses have traditionally been less hidden than absent. > Two-thirds of the city’s 9,000 Jewish-owned Mittelstand retail companies were lost in the wake of the Reichskristallnacht pogroms in 1938. In 1972, during the Cold War, East Germany nationalised even small businesses with more than 10 employees. > In such a skewed retail landscape, many small shops found they could compete by specialising in goods neglected by generalist department stores, especially since retail space was cheap and in plentiful supply behind the Iron Curtain.
- mjfl 5y ago> many small shops found they could compete by specialising in goods neglected by generalist department stores So I wasn't completely wrong.
- polm23 5y agoI saw this article shortly before a trip to Berlin in 2019 and went by the button shop. It definitely felt like the guy was some kind of button philosopher, or lord of a button empire. I hadn't brought a picture, but I told him I was looking for some square buttons and he seemed upset - "buttons should be round, you might as well have a square wheel!" I didn't find the buttons I was looking for but it an amusing experience.
- deanCommie 5y agoSounds like someone should start an even more specialized specialty shop (on the same block, of course) selling only not-round buttons.
- mc32 5y agoGuess that merchant never heard of toggle buttons (whose cross section is not the main feature).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axegon_ 5y agoFunny enough, first time I was in Berlin, I was meeting with a friend and one evening we went to a random currywurst stand to grab some food. There was no one else around and the guy came out to talk to us. I generally avoid interacting with people so the guy started talking to my friend(who is the complete opposite) and when my friend told him he was French, the guy entered some strange mode and began a lecture on French potatoes, and 10 minutes later he asked if I was French too. I said I was from Bulgaria, at which point the guy gave an even longer lecture on Bulgarian potatoes, incluing regions, villages and whatnot. I guess by the time he finished I had my wtf face on and he paused for a few seconds and said "Haha, I'm the potato master, I know everything about potatoes".
- axyz 5y agoHey, which one was the shop exactly? At this point I'd like to give a try to his fried potatoes (not sure if calling them french fries would be always appropriate :) )
- pphysch 5y ago> In the age of Amazon, it seems the way to thrive is to specialise Specialize, sure. Have a brick-and-mortar shop-front, probably not.
- mzi 5y agoEverytime I'm in Berlin I go to Jünemann's Pantoffeleck. Maybe it's not as specialized as some of the stores in this article, but it was the first to come to mind when I read the title. For me it was a different experience to buy shoes over-the-counter, not the usual way to buy shoes!
- 7464yejdh 5y agoCan you elaborate on this? To me over-the-counter just sounds like a shoe store.
- shellfishgene 5y agoThere is a literal counter with someone to hand you the shoes you want, not shelves and displays you take stuff out of yourself.
- SECProto 5y agoMost shoe stores I've been to have shoes on display, and a staff member gets you the size you want to try on from a back room. I have been to a few where they have shoe stock boxed on the shop floor near the displays, but they've tended to be poorly organized
- mzi 5y agoAs others have replied the store room is just a counter. On Google maps there is a picture with a girl opening the door, what you see inside is the whole store.
- Mandelmus 5y agoThere are so many shops in Berlin where I constantly wonder how the hell they make enough money to even afford the rent. I suspect that the rapidly rising real estate prices in Berlin will make most of them infeasible soon, but so far Berlin is still relatively cheap compared to other cities of similar political and cultural capital.
- jamil7 5y agoBerlin is a money laundering hotspot of Europe. I think about that too when I walk past some random shop that’s never/rarely open. They may also be grandfathered into affordable leases and paying less rent than you imagine, although not sure that works as well for commercial leases as it does for residential.
- R0b0t1 5y agoRent used to be very, very low. Area was basically blighted, no? Everybody was moving out of eastern Germany.
- jamil7 5y agoYeah but it's been sharply rising in the last 10-15 years and I'm not sure that the protections that exist for residential leases in Berlin exist in the same way for commercial. But still quite possible that the rent hasn't adjusted for many of these shops.
- R0b0t1 5y agoResidential and business rent can be disconnected. Isn't that what happened in SF? Massive oversupply of one because they're not interchangeable. In Kansas City there are some highly gentrified city neighborhoods but then a block or two away a bunch of old warehouse-type factory buildings for rent.
- jamil7 5y ago
- gorgoiler 5y agoThe ultimate example of storefront-meets-pick-and-pack is B&H Photo Video in midtown NYC. I’ve always been excited to see other specialist stores — albeit a little more modestly — follow their model. In the UK, Axminster Tools is one of the best examples that springs to mind. With the collapse of Amazon’s quality for anything except boxed brands, these kinds of storefronts that do pick-and-pack make for an exciting future that will fill the void. I live in a city with a thriving independent sewing supply shop, art supply shop, and hardware store. All have an online presence of the highest quality. It is subtle, but you can see how they have slowly morphed over the years from bricks and mortar stores into online warehouses which happen to take walk-ins. The other big change, aside from the Amazon screwup, seems to be that I buy all my supplies on my phone now. The infra ecosystem that includes Stripe and Shopify makes it so unbelievably easy to checkout from diverse online stores. The phone OSs with Apple Pay / Wallet and automated form filling are great. The one thing that still sticks out like a sore thumbs is iOS seems to have a split brain about which parts of the OS know about which credit cards. Apple Pay knows one thing and Safari Autofill knows another — hopefully the two will converge in future iOS releases.
- alephnan 5y agoThis has always been a thing in Asia though.
- novia 5y agoIn Japan (at least in 2012, the last time I was there) there were several specialist food shops. One dedicated only to different varieties of tofu. Another dedicated only to selling different types of edible mushrooms.
- sleepyhead 5y agoIndeed. And not only specialty shops but entire streets. When I lived in Phnom Penh there was entire streets devoted to whatever you were seeking. Ok maybe not a button street but there was a Khmer dude at our coworking office calling factories to sell his buttons. Needed something for the bathroom? Go to bathroom street. Some wooden furniture, go to wooden furniture street. The sewer street was best to be avoided though.
- taejo 5y agoNot limited to Asia: London has Savile Row for tailors, Harley Street for doctors, and historically Fleet Street for newspapers/printers/publishers.
- axyz 5y agoThere is also a very small shop in wedding that only sells darts (and targets I assume). I passed by in front of it many times and always wondered how big the darting community must be for that shop to stay in business
- stdbrouw 5y agoSomewhat of a tangent, but another (and somewhat more disappointing) trend are "only high margin item stores". There's a lot of this in DIY, where it's easy to find a new drill but hard to find a new drill chuck, easy to find big boxes of screws but never that one particular length and size you're looking for, easy to buy a pump but not 3m of whatever kind of tubing it takes. Stores used to be able to use those big ticket sales to subsidize unprofitable sales of small items and replacement parts, but the internet has made that an impossible business model.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoI hate this too. But it's worse than not carrying these things. I went into 3 small DIY stores looking for 1/4" 20 machine screws for a router fixture I was making. Britain has been metric for quite some time, although we still hang onto some imperial measures (mph, pints, etc). The fact that they didn't carry them wasn't really that surprising, but the fact that no one working in those shops knew what one was, or indeed showed no understanding of the fact that imperial bolts existed is sad.
- MrsPeaches 5y agoIf you happen to be in London, I’ve found some very odd sized screws at Clerkenwell Screws on Clerkenwell Road. No website I’m afraid but easy to find on your chosen map provider.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoNice! That's pretty close to the office so might come in handy if I ever have another weird one to source.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI've noticed this with cookware. Several shops I used to visit have been bought out and they now seem to hold a fraction of the original range.
- opportune 5y ago
- nwellnhof 5y agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785455 (166 comments)
- kaycebasques 5y agoThere are some great quotes in that piece. Must have been a fun piece to research and write. > They don’t call the violin a cello for kids, do they? > One sausage gave birth to another > Of course I can make some fries, I told them. They literally thought I could only make cushions that look like meat > We made this area attractive, now we could be punished for it > I have sticky tapes in my store that mere mortals would never dare to dream of.
- hedberg10 5y agoThat's the German language. That's what you get if you try to translate it very directly. It sounds a bit out of place in English, thus you have a surprise element (jokes work like that), which makes the quotes fun. For example: "I have sticky tapes in my store that mere mortals would never dare to dream of." - I can guarantee the shop owner used "Normalsterbliche" in the original quote. A normal, if not a bit old school, German colloquialism, meaning normal, average people. If you translate it to "mere mortals", it sounds like the Lord of the Rings, sticky tape edition.
- taejo 5y agoI think mere mortals has pretty much the same implication as Normalsterbliche. The tone is jokey but not grandiose.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alangibson 5y agoI regularly order from a store in Berlin that sells only things made our of synthetic rubber. Motto: "Alles aus Gummi"