The Hyper-Specialist Shops of Berlin (2019) (opens in new tab)

Berlin 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.

One weird thing with rents Germany is that old contracts have very low rents that barely increase over the years. So, you get this weird dynamic of very old shops and restaurants that have been there for decades paying almost nothing right next to very hip/trendy places that have to pay through their nose for the privilege of being there. Some of the older restaurants get away with this by simply charging less for their food and drinks. Newer places can literally not afford to do so.

Especially West Berlin still has quite a few places that pre-date the fall of the wall 30 years ago. Lately, Charlottenburg (a big neighborhood in the West) has been gentrifying rapidly. So, you get this weird contrast between these old places and very new & trendy things opening right next to them.

You see the same dynamic in East Berlin though large parts of that have been gentrified by now. I live close to the wall memorial on the East side and most of the old shops and restaurants in my area have disappeared over the last 12 years. Mostly the reason is that the business owners hit retirement age and scale down or sell their business. In some cases, a relative takes over but more often than not the place closes and some other business moves in.

> There are so many shops in Berlin where I constantly wonder how the hell they make enough money to even afford the rent.

Some of them are just money-laundering fronts for organised crime.

I 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.

These items are hard to get on Amazon too unless you buy them in bulk. I guess because to list them on Prime they need to be profitable to ship by themselves, they can’t list single bolts for $0.30 each. Fortunately hardware stores are still good sources of these

It’s also a problem with cheap plastic crap. Either you pay $9 for something that actually only costs $0.80 each off Alibaba or you buy a pack of 3 for $12. Amazon really needs to come back with a way to buy really cheap stuff if you’re also making some minimum margin/amount purchase on other things in the same order

From experience, in small town's hardware stores you still have that kind of convenience, and when they don't have what you want, they order it for you without any additional cost.

With this kind of service, in addition to being able to touch how the product is and even being able to test it, make the customer to develop a trust with the seller, with more predisposition to buy again in that store over from the Internet.

I'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.

Funny 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".

Sounds like someone should start an even more specialized specialty shop (on the same block, of course) selling only not-round buttons.

Guess that merchant never heard of toggle buttons (whose cross section is not the main feature).

Can you elaborate on this? To me over-the-counter just sounds like a shoe store.

I'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.

Many do, but not necessarily. For a one-(elderly-)person shop with lots of inventory collected over time the hassle isn't necessarily worth it.

Indeed. 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.

In 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.

That'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.

From 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.