The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take) • Hacker News Board

Re: The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

#71

Post by mlyle » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

Xylakant wrote: post #69

2trill2spill wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said in my original post as long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion. You can have health codes and food safety without requiring years of school. And your final point of flour exploding, that's a issue for flour mills not little bakeries. Most of the world does not require such extensive training to become a baker as Germany and the rest of the world is doing just fine.

The example page I picked is the workplace safety page of the union responsible food processing, bakeries among other things. And it explicitly list flour explosions as the largest danger in bakeries: “In Bäckereien und Mühlen sind Mehlstauexplosionen die größten Gefahren.“ (translated: “In bakeries and mills, flour explosions are the biggest dangers.”). A flour explosion in a bakery is something every local fire dep…

This is why you have fire regulations and inspections.

As best as I can tell, we haven't had a fatality from a bakery explosion in the US in the last 70 years, despite a much lower level of regulation. There's been a couple of large factory explosions and a few grain elevators/mills that have killed people, but ordinary bakeries seem not to have managed to do so.

There's also health risks from flour dust, but there's ample workplace safety regulations that help mitigate these.

Re: The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

#72

Post by jbarberu » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

razakel wrote: post #58

avhception wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, w…

It very much sounds as if you're confusing immigrants and refugees here.

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.

Re: The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

#73

Post by brippalcharrid » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

martopix wrote: post #35

mamon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

#74

Post by wahern » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #64

qihqi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmmm it seems a good opportunity to connect profitable businesses to potential investors that would want to take over?

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 chai…

> 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/), and I would assume such an industry exists elsewhere. I used to peruse listings at sites like 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).