The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
About 8 or so years ago, a baker closed at the city center, replaced by a chain, and a friend lamented how traditional bakers can't keep up with the chains that basically put frozen products in the oven. Her father laughed and said the place was a gold mine, but the owner retired and nobody wants to get up at 3 in the morning anymore to bake bread.
It was my favorite shop in the city, I used to ride my bike there and buy some fresh tofu. The owner would scold me about buying my green onions at Nijiya "A dollar seventy for a green onion! Daylight robbery!".
A year or two ago they closed. The owners (an elderly couple) decided to retire, and their children neither wanted to run a tofu shop nor would they let them. It is hard work. I miss the shop though, truly the best tofu I have ever eaten.
Probably would end up being used mostly by corporations looking for new places to bulldoze and set up a chain location through. Weeding it out to just people with a passion for running an independent small business would be hard.
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).
Also, running a bakery is a fairly capital-heavy investment. Friends of ours closed their bakery when the oven broke - it would have cost at least 50k to repair and that was the point they decided to retire (despite offers from many people in the street to chip in).
Food preparation is food preparation, and the practices needed to make food safely do not require years of education (and are proactively ensured by inspections everywhere in the developed world). So that risk can be crossed off the list easily.
Other risks? That the bread tastes bad, or that the business will not be run profitably? Those risks are better borne by the person investing their capital and labor, rather than trying to protect people from themselves through more education.
Edit: Changed example.
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.
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, which can take years
- They usually have no capital to pay for up-front expenses like buying the buildings and equipment
- We segregate them from society by putting them in some sort of immigrant shelter while the bureaucracy does it's thing
Especially the last point is rather bad I think, it leads to parallel societies that keep to themselves rather than integrating into the German society surrounding them. Most Muslim migrants would probably rather not operate a "German"-style bakery in the traditional sense.
Our capability for integration is declining, too, because as a society we are becoming more and more estranged from our fellow citizens as community activities, especially in small towns and villages, dry up.
Not sure about Germany, but there is a formal qualification for bakers in France.
Their kids don't want to take over because those peoples kids have better career opportunities that were not available to their parents. Third parties don't want to buy the businesses because it's not as lucrative as it once was.
You get this all over the small picturesque villages in the UK, people love the idea of village shops and village pubs but few are willing to put any money behind them. Remember my parents remarking that their neighbors where sad the village pub was closing down, my parents thinking its ridiculous because they only see them in there twice a year at best, it's 2 minutes walk up the road. Pub did reopen thankfully, but if you want your village to retain it's soul you have to spend your money there.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It's a perfectly valid thing to sell and there's clearly a market for it but it is a luxury good and the viability of such businesses are fundamentally dependent on the amount of discretionary income sloshing around the local economy. That kind of business might make a killing outside NYC but could be struggling to keep the lights on in a suburb of Buffalo.
Its history reaches back to the year 1331 when the mill Toratsmühle was mentioned for the first time. It must have existed before that date.
"Bavarians can do anything[2] — except speak German"
Akkadakka nach bayerischer Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_gtGfAail4
PS. Fasching means Münich is part of the civilised world (as if the Limes weren't enough?). Ändä miini Miinig!
[1] The oldest venue where I've ever played a gig was built ca. 130.
[2] You all even have us beat for dialect wikipedia articles:
Also, he told me that he is very unhappy with high land prices around Munich. He could be a multi-millionaire immediately by selling his land, but his familiy tradition does not allow this. Due to the high land prices, if he gives a small part of the land to his daughter to build a house, he must sell another part to pay the property sales tax (not sure I understood this correctly).
> South of Munich
Bavaria is interesting; I was wondering how it would have fared as the various armies swept Europe in those eight centuries - Thirty Years War, Hundred Years War, and so on, but Bavaria seems to have been astonishing stable apart from a few incursions by Sweden and Napoleon.
Per wikipedia, "The Wittelsbach dynasty ruled Bavaria without interruption from 1180AD until 1918AD."
The middle ages wars didn't really involve the population. They were more a matter of aristocracy. Cities were raized, since those where the way to control land, but you generally left the peasants and their lords alone.
Peasants really didn't care who was the king. Nationalism was not a concept yet! Somebody was your liege lord since feudal competition abhors vacuum, but you didn't have much say in it. He probably didn't even speak your language.
They way medieval states handled their state business was that more or less, you had the king, the king had a large box called the "treasury", and then the aristocrats who had bent the knee for the king brought taxes to that box.
These barons and whatnots then extracted some surplus from the land as taxes for themselves, and for the king.
But this was really inefficient in pre-bureaucratic times! The state could maybe utilize 1 percent of the output since nobody knew how much a person produced, so everything was very, very, approximate.
So basically the 'state' and the 'people' were quite disconnected, and wars mostly affected the 'state' and not the people that much.
Wars really were a way to extend policy - which meant basically kings competed from what area they could command the nobility to carry taxes for them.
There was none of this 'total war' business. There were no industries to destroy, no population whose morale to pummel - since the morale of the population did not matter!
How do you exactly think armies are fed, armed, and paid? There are innumerable examples of revolts ignited due to the abuses of the local or occupying army.
This idea of "limited" warfare where a king took a few men and fought it out with his rival with the population not caring or suffering much is utterly deluded.
The Grande Armee marching across Europe would have made a huge impact to the zone within a day's ride of it, and much less outside of that. It was the 20th century which made giant fronts and mass bombing of civilians behind the front possible. Not that previous war was without its atrocities (Magdeburg), but the scale was proportionally smaller.
And, yes, tax and fiscal policy was completely dominated by warmaking related costs. As the state was much smaller and had little remit outside that.
"Nationalism was not a concept yet" also deserves looking at; the map looked very different, with either huge loose polyglot empires (Austria-Hungary, HRE) or smaller monarchial states, and the idea of self in the world that people would have had looked very different. Especially for much of the middle of that period it was bound more to religion.
The main question I wanted to answer was how could a stable culture survive in an area that went through so many wars. Not to make claims about "better way of living" or anything like that.
Another point which I wanted to stress that state powers in nations that lacked advanced bureaucracy (China, Ottomans) really did not have any way to extract wealth from the land efficiently.
Yes, if an army parked nearby they likely foraged the nearby areas. But an army is a very localized thing. There was no concept of "nation wide war economy". The extraction caused by the army was localized around the army.
So when we think about state induced horrors of the 20th century which were enabled by sophisticated bureaucracy and monoculture as anything else, those things did not really exist in medieval europe.
You really did not want a king to park his army in your backyard, that's for sure.
According to a report published by the Bank of Korea in 2008 that looked at 41 countries, there were 5,586 companies older than 200 years.
3,146 (56%) are in Japan
837 (15%) in Germany
222 (4%) in the Netherlands
196 (3%) in France
Of the companies with more than 100 years of history, most of them (89%) employ fewer than 300 people. A nationwide Japanese survey counted more than 21,000 companies older than 100 years as of September 30, 2009.
> Frank had stood on the same patch of shop floor and been told about the death of his father, then his mother, now his girlfriend. . . . So the shop wasn’t only a place of business, Frank said, as he took back the photograph. It wasn’t only a local curiosity. That little room down there was the staging place for almost every major event of his life, and he could not bear to think of it being shuttered, cobwebbed, uncared-for.
Widespread private transport means that people don't _have_ to use local shops any more, so they need to find a way to differentiate themselves from the supermarkets. An independent butcher could thrive there, but, unfortunately, probably not as an "everyday shop". Like many of these places, the route to success is to embrace the gentrification and move up the quality ladder, marketing themselves as a premium option and making local people feel good about making the effort to go (and probably spending more money).
Weirdly online is a massive driver for that kind of business, but could be a struggle for older generations(?). Without wanting being too prejudiced, most working 80+ year olds are unlikely to be posting pictures of their produce on Instagram, replying to reviews on Google Maps or having a stylish little Squarespace site explaining how they get their lamb from farmer Dave who lives with his wife and lovely children and rare breed animals on Daisy Farm just a couple of miles away.
Being able to do online sales, and have a small storefront where you keep your inventory and also have a showroom for the public seems to be a winning combination.
But running a small business takes a certain level of stubbornness, and it's often easier to just check out and take an office job.
I had prepped well but there's always a few things you need and crave. In those times searching the big stores you will be unlucky.
However the local butchers, corner shops were ok. Plus you discover some treats that you don't get in the supermarket (Lorne sausage, freshly baked rolls/baps/barms/whatever you call them locally).
Can't wait to see what economists research on shopping habits over the year 2020.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2342691-het-gaat-goed-met-de-bakker-g...
A study by the market organisation GfK found that butchers and greengrocers saw a 30 to 40 percent increase in sales (sales of the same products in supermarkets also increased, but not by as much). Bakers also saw their sales go up.
Butcher shops are also about the only place i've been able to find lean or extra lean ground beef that don't contain some percentage of 'reconstituted meat products', that pink slime shit.
All beef labeled organic will be free of the additive, and CostCo, Kroger, and Whole Foods (at least) never use it. There's also a cattle collective in my home state, all the grocers around me carry it, and they never use pink slime.
I think it's a scandal that it's allowed to be slipped in without labeling the addition. But there are a lot of places which carry the genuine article.
I grew up in neighbouring Leicestershire and in my town we had numerous butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers - much of the produce was sourced locally and sold wrapped in paper / paper bags and we used to walk into town to buy it.
Now we drive to buy those goods from a single supermarket, flown in from all corners of the globe and wrapped in layer upon layer of plastic.