The Hyper-Specialist Shops of Berlin (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Hyper-Specialist Shops of Berlin (2019)

theguardian.com

98 pointssuketk57 comments

I saw this article shortly before a trip to Berlin in 2019 and went by the button shop. It definitely felt like the guy was some kind of button philosopher, or lord of a button empire.

I hadn't brought a picture, but I told him I was looking for some square buttons and he seemed upset - "buttons should be round, you might as well have a square wheel!"

I didn't find the buttons I was looking for but it an amusing experience.

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).

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".

Hey, which one was the shop exactly? At this point I'd like to give a try to his fried potatoes (not sure if calling them french fries would be always appropriate :) )

It wouldn't, call them just Pommes. Pommes mit Mayo.

Pfff that was in 2014, hell if I remember. All I can remember is that it was 15-20 minutes walking from the Estrel hotel but that's as much as I can narrow it down.

The ultimate example of storefront-meets-pick-and-pack is B&H Photo Video in midtown NYC. I’ve always been excited to see other specialist stores — albeit a little more modestly — follow their model. In the UK, Axminster Tools is one of the best examples that springs to mind.

With the collapse of Amazon’s quality for anything except boxed brands, these kinds of storefronts that do pick-and-pack make for an exciting future that will fill the void.

I live in a city with a thriving independent sewing supply shop, art supply shop, and hardware store. All have an online presence of the highest quality. It is subtle, but you can see how they have slowly morphed over the years from bricks and mortar stores into online warehouses which happen to take walk-ins.

The other big change, aside from the Amazon screwup, seems to be that I buy all my supplies on my phone now. The infra ecosystem that includes Stripe and Shopify makes it so unbelievably easy to checkout from diverse online stores. The phone OSs with Apple Pay / Wallet and automated form filling are great.

The one thing that still sticks out like a sore thumbs is iOS seems to have a split brain about which parts of the OS know about which credit cards. Apple Pay knows one thing and Safari Autofill knows another — hopefully the two will converge in future iOS releases.

Somewhat of a tangent, but another (and somewhat more disappointing) trend are "only high margin item stores". There's a lot of this in DIY, where it's easy to find a new drill but hard to find a new drill chuck, easy to find big boxes of screws but never that one particular length and size you're looking for, easy to buy a pump but not 3m of whatever kind of tubing it takes. Stores used to be able to use those big ticket sales to subsidize unprofitable sales of small items and replacement parts, but the internet has made that an impossible business model.

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.

If you happen to be in London, I’ve found some very odd sized screws at Clerkenwell Screws on Clerkenwell Road.

No website I’m afraid but easy to find on your chosen map provider.

Nice! That's pretty close to the office so might come in handy if I ever have another weird one to source.

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.

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.

Everytime I'm in Berlin I go to Jünemann's Pantoffeleck. Maybe it's not as specialized as some of the stores in this article, but it was the first to come to mind when I read the title.

For me it was a different experience to buy shoes over-the-counter, not the usual way to buy shoes!

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

There is a literal counter with someone to hand you the shoes you want, not shelves and displays you take stuff out of yourself.

Most shoe stores I've been to have shoes on display, and a staff member gets you the size you want to try on from a back room.

I have been to a few where they have shoe stock boxed on the shop floor near the displays, but they've tended to be poorly organized

As others have replied the store room is just a counter. On Google maps there is a picture with a girl opening the door, what you see inside is the whole store.

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

I suspect that the rapidly rising real estate prices in Berlin will make most of them infeasible soon, but so far Berlin is still relatively cheap compared to other cities of similar political and cultural capital.

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.

Rent used to be very, very low. Area was basically blighted, no? Everybody was moving out of eastern Germany.

Yeah but it's been sharply rising in the last 10-15 years and I'm not sure that the protections that exist for residential leases in Berlin exist in the same way for commercial. But still quite possible that the rent hasn't adjusted for many of these shops.

Residential and business rent can be disconnected. Isn't that what happened in SF? Massive oversupply of one because they're not interchangeable.

In Kansas City there are some highly gentrified city neighborhoods but then a block or two away a bunch of old warehouse-type factory buildings for rent.

You could be right, I honestly don't know. The media here tend to mostly cover the residential side of things. You do see stories of businesses like bars and bookshops being forced out when an investor buys a whole building that includes both commercial and residential spaces.

Small scale money laundering maybe. For the big money look at the property prices in London.

Serious question. I can see how to launder money in a shop, I'm failing to see how to launder money with property.

Surely you can't buy a £1M property in £20 notes right?

You can pay a £1M mortgage in £20 notes.

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.

>One weird thing with rents Germany is that old contracts have very low rents that barely increase over the years

Does it really work that way all over Germany or is it something specific to Berlin?

It is more extreme in Berlin, but I think in general the spread between new rent and old rent is very high.

I.e. in Munich, the average rent per square meter is about 10€, while the average for new offers is almost 17€.

This is a problem because nobody is moving out of their places, so people get stuck in the wrong flat. Old people won't leave their too big places after their kids left, young people with kids live in places that are to small.

(No shade thrown at the old people, I'd also not want to leave the place I lived in for so long. But on a bigger scale, it's an issue.)

I believe Switzerland has a similar approach.

Anecdata #1: a long-established barber shop paying a fifth of the rent that the very similar empty unit next door was advertised for.

Anecdata #2: just too many ‘businesses’ which offered little of interest and which never seemed to have any customers; some shops even only opened for a fraction of the year (eg those selling Fasnacht regalia).

Switzerland also has the 'hobby-business' problem, where a rich housewife wants to have a fashion brand or something similar. Walk through Niederdorf in Zurich for an example of what happens when this takes over...

The insane rent increase is a more “modern” thing in European cities. I put modern in quotes because it still goes back more than 20 years, but in many places rent hasn’t increased much for the people with old leases.

In some buildings the owners have found ways around the rules, like selling the building to investment funds with enough money to tear it down and build a new one. Or maybe made enough renovations to make larger rent increases legal, but some building owners seem content to just get the steady income without doing much about it.

The big rent increases mainly come from all the new or completely renovated buildings and those are mostly owned by large investment companies.

I personally hope we eventually get enough grip on our cities to tell those investors who are foreign to go fuck themselves and seize their buildings, but it’ll probably take some time until we get to that point. Or maybe it won’t, around 30% of the population supports it or something similar.

Yes, yes, I know this is communism and will bleh bleh bleh, but we can’t keep letting the wealthy herd the poor around like this and expect our society to remain positive about our democratic ideals.

I'm not sure it's fair to call telling foreign investors that they're not welcome to use your country as a rent farm is fairly called "communism." Until the rise of neo-liberalism that seemed to be a pretty core part of all economic populism on both the left and right.

Well, you either tax the land to reduce its value to investors or you don't let people own land in the first place.

No, you can prevent certain types of land ownership. Which is the second one, but it's more nuanced than "don't let people own land."

The real issue I think is that modern wages can't support the cost of new construction. If they could people would simply build more houses themselves.

> 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.

There are some great quotes in that piece. Must have been a fun piece to research and write.

> They don’t call the violin a cello for kids, do they?

> One sausage gave birth to another

> Of course I can make some fries, I told them. They literally thought I could only make cushions that look like meat

> We made this area attractive, now we could be punished for it

> I have sticky tapes in my store that mere mortals would never dare to dream of.

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.

I think mere mortals has pretty much the same implication as Normalsterbliche. The tone is jokey but not grandiose.

There is also a very small shop in wedding that only sells darts (and targets I assume). I passed by in front of it many times and always wondered how big the darting community must be for that shop to stay in business

I can imagine that everyone shown here also has a well-managed online presence. If anything, the internet is enabling specialist shops to have a physical presence. We've come full circle.

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.

This is cool in some ways but not others.

There's a vintage videogame/toy shop near here. The physical store is basically a warehouse for the guy's eBay shop.

There are no prices on anything. If you want to buy something, the kid in the store calls the boss, who looks up the price on their eBay storefront.

It's obviously nice to be able to physically see/visit the goods. But it's also kinda like, "why am I even visiting the store?"

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.

This has always been a thing in Asia 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.

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.

Not limited to Asia: London has Savile Row for tailors, Harley Street for doctors, and historically Fleet Street for newspapers/printers/publishers.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785455 (166 comments)

I regularly order from a store in Berlin that sells only things made our of synthetic rubber. Motto: "Alles aus Gummi"

I wonder if these shops developed in contrast to, or rebellion against, the uniformity created by communism in East Germany (or just quirky German culture).

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.

> many small shops found they could compete by specialising in goods neglected by generalist department stores

So I wasn't completely wrong.

> In the age of Amazon, it seems the way to thrive is to specialise

Specialize, sure.

Have a brick-and-mortar shop-front, probably not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com