The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin

So the value of brick and mortar retail becomes the ability to get you exactly what you need, and this often involves human expertise which by its nature specializes.

The button store on the Upper East Side in New York City has a lady there who just hands you the button you need. You show her your jacket where the button got caught in a cab door, and she doesn't even have to hunt -- she walks to one of her thousands of teeny drawers, and pulls out your exact button or something pretty damn close. In the article, the scotch tape guy knows exactly what scotch tape you need, and that's the reason for his store existing. He could as easily have an office where he then orders you the tape online for drone delivery.

That is not what happened. What happened is that Stalin ordered to kill them. It was paranoia on top of other things (breaking the nation was not ment just as a side effect). They reorganized the society very quickly once they could start organizing people into agricultural communes (JZD in Czech) and steal everything (literally) from them in the process. Of course we know how well it worked.

Those killed were killed not because they refused to give ownership (the communists usually just sent people to uranium mines in that case, or later to prison), but because they were undesirable.

One feature of Berlin is that it is very spread out and people mostly don't use cars to get around. It has a center technically but it's not where people live or shop. All the action is in the dozens of neighborhoods and micro neighborhoods around this. You can walk for two hours without leaving what most people would consider the downtown area or reasonably close to it. These micro-neighborhoods is where you find loads of small restaurants, bars, art galleries, and indeed weird, specialized stores and pop up stores. There are many thousands of these all over Berlin.

Part of the reason is simply that there's a lot of space for small stores all over building. Most apartment blocks have space on the ground floor. That type of space does not make sense for bigger chains since the locations are wrong and the spaces are too small. So if you want to open a small store for whatever, you can without spending too much money. Most of these efforts are short lived for obvious reasons but some of them succeed or at least survive.

Given that Berlin is crawling with tourists, foreign students, entrepreneurs, artists, etc. pretty much any time of the year, there's plenty of business for small quirky stores selling whatever. You don't attract tourists by being a bland boring franchise in Berlin. Star Bucks tried to open up a branch near where I live. They pretty much got laughed away and got replaced by a Poke bowl takeaway within a year. Just not a thing when you have several of the top coffee bars within a 3 minute walk.

Post internet, retail is increasingly specialized. You get all the staples online. Amazon is huge in Germany and Amazon Prime is operating in Berlin with their full set of services (including groceries).