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A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

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Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#111

Post by dendrite9 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #38
creamyhorror wrote: post #8

It's always bittersweet when I visit Japan and come across old establishments or traditions that an ageing proprietor or volunteers are trying to keep going. You can see the love and spirit they have for it, but it often looks like something too disconnected from the interests of young people and the vicissitudes of the changing economy to survive for much longer. A kissaten (old-style cafe) owner in Nagasaki who sha…

Yes. A seldom discussed aspect of this is the ability to open a business in a residential area. Many of these small self-owned shop are the first floor of a house or building, and more often than not the owner lives upstairs, so it's less of an issue to keep it open with low frequentation as they're no paying extra rent or suffering hours of transit to get there. That also tremendously helps with the community aspect…

I have a weird interest in houses around my city that clearly used to have businesses in them when people didn't travel as far all the time. Some operate as cofffee shops, small specialty retail, or services like therapists/accountants. But others are fully homes now, just with a front room area that was aimed at having customers and sometimes a residence in the back or above. They feel like little markers of another time.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#112

Post by JKCalhoun »

makeitdouble wrote: post #38
creamyhorror wrote: post #8

It's always bittersweet when I visit Japan and come across old establishments or traditions that an ageing proprietor or volunteers are trying to keep going. You can see the love and spirit they have for it, but it often looks like something too disconnected from the interests of young people and the vicissitudes of the changing economy to survive for much longer. A kissaten (old-style cafe) owner in Nagasaki who sha…

Yes. A seldom discussed aspect of this is the ability to open a business in a residential area. Many of these small self-owned shop are the first floor of a house or building, and more often than not the owner lives upstairs, so it's less of an issue to keep it open with low frequentation as they're no paying extra rent or suffering hours of transit to get there. That also tremendously helps with the community aspect…

You may have heard (I read it somewhere) that replacing the aging shop-owners with a new, younger generation is often met with a loss of customers.

Maybe it was regarding a sushi restaurant that I saw this about? The young'en had to apprentice for some time for the customers to get used to the new face before the owner could hand over the reigns. Maybe you need the old customers to age-out, new customers to age-in, ha ha.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#113

Post by savanaly »

gcheong wrote: post #88

“ He believes businesses exist to serve society and contribute back to people in the community. That they make profits are merely a side effect and that somewhere along the line the side effect became the main goal.” That change came about in 1970 with Milton Friedman’s ideas about the purpose of a corporation being solely to maximize shareholder value and we’ve all been paying the price ever since: https://www.forbe…

I believe the fairly relentless pursuit of profit is moral and necessary to continue raising the standards of living of all people. In that sense Milton Friedman was very right. However it is an additional moral imperative to ensure the profits that originate from "land" (where land is taken to mean all the resources of nature, not just actual land) are redistributed equally to all people. Have you read Henry George?

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#114

Post by rkho »

rjh29 wrote: post #35
rkho wrote: post #21

The two coolest places I've found Dagashi in Japan have been the top floor of the Super Potato retro gaming store in Akihabara and the faux alleyways inside the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. The product itself isn't really exciting, but the ambiance is just incredible.

If you like that you should check out a Showa Museum (Showa-kan) as the whole place will have that aesthetic. Or a real dagashiya if you can find one!

Thanks, I'll check that out next time I find myself in Japan. I also really liked the Shitamachi Museum in Ueno, similar aesthetics there.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#115

Post by simonw »

kizunajp wrote: post #107
simonw wrote: post #106

Anyone able to find this store on a map? I found this but on satellite view it doesn't look like it has the same solar panels as were shown in the photo in the article: https://goo.gl/maps/V1oAYvUpFcDbaken6

Stick this into Google maps: 〒701-4262 岡山県瀬戸内市長船町東須恵1373-5 Their access page has a map too: https://ohmachi-site.co.jp/access/

Thanks! Yeah that matches the photo on satellite view: https://www.google.com/maps/search/dagashi/@34.684421,134.14...

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#116

Post by anigbrowl »

modernpink wrote: post #55
kizunajp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything I can read to understand this better? Naively, I would think making a profit is not strictly necessary to serve society as long as the business makes as much money as it pays out?

My favourite explanation comes from Hayek [1]. Profit is a signal for other economic actors to move into the market to provide more goods and services. If something is profitable it means people (society) sees value in it so it is right that we would want more of it to be produced. If we say no to profit, it means we extinguish a mechanism by which society can allocate resources. On top of this, it's impossible for r…

If we say no to profit, it means we extinguish a mechanism by which society can allocate resources.

That's fine, we have others. Efficiency is overrated because it leads to excess concentrations of capital, an economic diabetes if you will.

Knowledge about wants, desires, propensity to manufacture and supply is dispersed and distributed among billions of people (and always in flux).

Amazon, Walmart etc. demonstrate this to be wrong in many respects; in any case nobody was arguing for central planning, so it's irrelevant.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#117

Post by anigbrowl »

hcks wrote: post #51
janalsncm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have thought about this almost every time I have visited other countries (usually in Asia). Many times there are a number of employees standing around “doing nothing”. In America that would be considered fat to be trimmed. But the number of times I have walked around a big box store in the US trying to find someone who works there makes me feel that the American model actually cheapens the experience and having red…

[flagged]

Not sure why you're viewing this as a class issue. If you work at the supermarket and can't find anyone to help with a purchase at the hardware store after work (or vice versa), you're suffering inconvenience despite being in the same class.

Meanwhile, the people who are working there stocking/ cleaning/ etc are suffering constant interruptions by frustrated customers who can't find what they're looking for. On paper, their productivity looks poor because it takes them longer to perform any given task while the store is open and this is probably offered as an excuse to limit wage increases or promotions, since one can hardly write up a service ticket for every spontaneous customer inquiry.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#118

Post by mathattack »

bobthepanda wrote: post #102
mathattack wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also gives Grandma or Grandpa something to do. Keeps multi-generational families together. Seems economically inefficient though that’s not really the goal.

Japanese families are largely not multigenerational in the same house. Coresidence of parents and children have fallen in half over two decades from 50% to 24%: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/62/5/S3... Here's the wikipedia article about elderly dying in Japan and being undiscovered due to being lonely and forgotten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

Thanks for sharing! My experience is dated, and (like everywhere) Japan evolves.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#119

Post by mc32 »

RajT88 wrote: post #84
awongh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I like the vibe of these shops too but maybe there’s a bit of japan fetishization for a kind of commerce that anywhere else wouldn’t make sense to have. One of the reasons for the Japanese economy’s stagnation over the last 20+ years is a lot of government spending on things that are not contributing to a healthy economy. I’m thinking about huge infrastructure projects but I’m sure this extends too many other a…

Like extending the Shinkansen to Hokkaido? That comes to mind anyways as "Big Infrastructure".

The Bridge to Hamada bridge to "nowhere" in The Sea of Japan, is a better example.

Re: A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store

#120

Post by Lapha »

htag wrote: post #98
gcheong wrote: post #88

“ He believes businesses exist to serve society and contribute back to people in the community. That they make profits are merely a side effect and that somewhere along the line the side effect became the main goal.” That change came about in 1970 with Milton Friedman’s ideas about the purpose of a corporation being solely to maximize shareholder value and we’ve all been paying the price ever since: https://www.forbe…

There is a general mythology that business greed is a new thing, and that it is an American invention. This is not the case. I'd specifically like to call out the ancient slave trade as an example of business existing for profit at the great determent of communities. I'd also like to call out that the Europeans explores immediately starting exporting tobacco around the world when introduced to it, even though it clea…

Smoking tobacco has clear negative health consequences today, but the association may not have been so strong when the predominant forms of heating households were open wood and coal fires. It's also worth keeping in mind that smoking tobacco wasn't always the predominant form of taking tobacco, chewing tobacco and nasal snuff are as old as tobacco itself to Europeans, and if Google's ngram viewer is anything to go by, cigars only overtook snuff in the late 19th century (bit of a dodgy data point, since snuff has multiple meanings).

Today some 500k-1m Swedes regularly take snus, and the association with oral and pancreatic cancers is tenuous at best, and the BMJ reported in the 1980s that there has been one case of nasal cancer linked to nasal snuff in the 300 years it has been used in the UK. Chewing tobacco is a little more harmful but not by much.

Cigarette companies have done a good job the past century of associating any harmful effect of smoking tobacco with tobacco and nicotine itself, despite cigarettes being 100x more harmful than either snus or snuff.

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