This reminds me of when I was in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei area --- it's mostly electronics, but you can find plenty of shops selling only varieties of one type of product.
The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
31–40 of 172 posts
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#32I also find hyper-specialist shops in america wherever there is still cheap land enough for it. When I used to live in Buffalo, there were small shops- one specifically for new agey "gypsy" clothing, one for bath soap made in house, one for herbs for witchcraft, one that specialized in stones. I really enjoyed those places and miss them now how I live in NYC (although NYC has its own quirks- big gay ice cream is great!)
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#33Surely the obvious question is: is the high street shop really a justified expense? Surely all the sales are online? The more specialized the shop, the less one can hope to fulfill ones sales volume from people in physical cruising distance. The article doesn’t seem to address this, except for acknowledging that most sales are online.
The answer is probably that shop owners would rather work in a shop that satisfies online orders than in a warehouse.
The physical shopping radius for a specialty shop is also a lot larger than a generic store.
If you have the store to find mid-century burnished widgets at, people might regularly come from a hundred or more miles away when they really need just the right sort of widget, and when they do -- if your stock lives up to the hype -- they will tend to be big customers, buying a lot (since they weren't casually dropping in), being fairly price insensitive (since they have few alternatives for what they need), and repeat customers (since you seldom end up needing a specialty item once).
You might still need an online storefront, or you might take phone orders from your regulars, but the clientele of a specialty shop is radically different than the clientele of a generic shop, which relies more on people wandering by and which competes with ten other stores a mile away, and the big box store off the highway.
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Your comment feels more like vitriol than fact statement, regardless of being correct. It's just about the shortest, blandest way to make that statement. That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive to say X did Y when that is fact (or as close to fact as you can get with a subjective matter like this, nobody is going to say that communism was good for Eastern Europe) says something about culture here in 2…
> That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive says something about culture here in 2019. I'm literally writing this comment from mobile while standing in a crowd near anti-communist protest in Prague. I can't really wrap my mind around this culture change.
People are very tired of the mildest bit of social democrat market intervention being denounced as "communism". Like "Nazi" it's a word that has been overused into uselessness, so it gets reflexively downvoted. Besides, communism in the original sense is realistically dead. The Berlin Wall has been down for almost 30 years. So people complaining about it in the present come across as McCarthyite.
(I think your original comment would have gone down better if it had been clearer about the past tense - that communism did destroy a lot of small businesses, but this is not an ongoing thing)
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#35For many many years there was a shop on Victoria street in Edinburgh that appeared to sell nothing but brooms and large balls of string - it was even mentioned in Complicity by Iain Banks. Here are some pics of it: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_MY_P_S/0_my_photographs_shops_... Edit: Sad to say that I passed that shop for many years going to uni in the Grassmarket (both as a student and working there) and never went…
"Toilet brushes re-bristled" - never knew that was done, and glad that's not my job.
With enough cleaning solvents and disinfectants, any object can be made safe again. There are people who dive into literal sewage retention ponds full of human waste in full SCUBA gear every day to work (clearing obstructions). After reading about that, squeamishness was never an issue for me. As long as it isn't some kind of chemical/biological/radiological warfare agent type substance, or a compound that makes chemists run from a room, I'm fine with it now.
That said, I'm absolutely delighted that toilet brushes can be rebristled, and sad that it seems there isn't any place in the US that does this. It irks me that when a brush is retired, a gigantic chunk of plastic heads into the landfill. I have yet to find a low-impact scrubbing solution, and rebristling with some organic-origin bristle that breaks down amending the soil would be ideal. I'd pay 2-3X the cost of a normal throwaway plastic brush to mail in a brush head and get back a rebristled brush head, and wonder if the rebristling could be automated.
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#36Surely the obvious question is: is the high street shop really a justified expense? Surely all the sales are online? The more specialized the shop, the less one can hope to fulfill ones sales volume from people in physical cruising distance. The article doesn’t seem to address this, except for acknowledging that most sales are online.
The answer is probably that shop owners would rather work in a shop that satisfies online orders than in a warehouse.
I think this is exactly it - these stores are now perfect fusion of small online store and small offline store. If you order something online the owner picks it off the shelf and puts it in an envelope - and the online shop can drive traffic to the physical one.
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#37While it's basically more of a cafe, I really like that a Brownie-specialized place opened here in Kyiv, Ukraine (called "Veterano Brownie", a concept they took from "Veterano Pizza", where only war veterans or forced migrants are hired). Always nice to see that something that you previously perceived as a treat of one type can be developed into a whole mini-company with lots of care and a variety of forms and tastes.
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive says something about culture here in 2019. I'm literally writing this comment from mobile while standing in a crowd near anti-communist protest in Prague. I can't really wrap my mind around this culture change.
People are very tired of the mildest bit of social democrat market intervention being denounced as "communism". Like "Nazi" it's a word that has been overused into uselessness, so it gets reflexively downvoted. Besides, communism in the original sense is realistically dead. The Berlin Wall has been down for almost 30 years. So people complaining about it in the present come across as McCarthyite. (I think your origin…
I used have because these businesses remain to be dead, there are not new ones in their place, only a group of shady businessmen that own all the properties and rents them to scam shops. I think that is an important distinction. Today no businesses would be destroyed by them of course, but there is also no business to destroy.
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Toilet brushes re-bristled" - never knew that was done, and glad that's not my job.
With enough cleaning solvents and disinfectants, any object can be made safe again. There are people who dive into literal sewage retention ponds full of human waste in full SCUBA gear every day to work (clearing obstructions). After reading about that, squeamishness was never an issue for me. As long as it isn't some kind of chemical/biological/radiological warfare agent type substance, or a compound that makes chem…
If you start putting used toilet brushes in the post, I will no longer accept any mail. Are you not confusing biodegradable with repair? Wooden brushes with bamboo bristles or something instead of poo post?
Re: The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin
#40In Cambridge (UK), on an out-of-the-way side street, for many years there was a shop called "Roll On Blank Tape". I never understood how they could possibly do enough business to stay _in_ business, and always suspected that if you asked in just the right way they might sell you some ... not-blank tapes. Boringly, the available evidence suggests that actually it's just that the person who ran the shop was really inte…
From what I’ve seen and heard, that place closed some time between 1999 and 2008, although the shopfront remains unchanged even now. I last went past it in March, dog walking with a friend — and he used to buy tapes there.