Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over.
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.
In San Jose there used to be a traditional tofu shop in Japantown. It was a small old shop. You walk inside and see the tofu making equipment behind a counter with the cash box. On the side was a handwritten chart: 1 tofu, $2, 2 tofu, $4, 3 tofu, $6 etc. They also sold ginger (tofu's #1 friend) and a couple random items.
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.
This is not only a problem with bakeries or butchers (I also know of two shops here and in my home village who closed down not because business was bad, but because it was so good they retired in their mid-fifties - and nobody wanted to take over). Old restaurants and pubs have the same problem.
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 chain location through. Weeding it out to just people with a passion for running an independent small business would be hard.
> 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).
This is what is happening to a lot of US Chinese restaurants. The parents slaved away at the woks for 40 years but made sure to get their kids well educated so there are no kids to take over, the kids are doctors or engineers. This is the outcome the parents wanted, they’re closing their restaurants with no regrets.
Often the people who are willing to work long hours and lack formal qualifications are immigrants. Maybe there are not enough immigrants in your town? Or they would have needed to start as apprentices 5 years ago, and it's hard for them to get into the apprentice system?
You need to have what's called "Meisterbrief" to run a bakery. That's the equivalent of having studied. You need 3 years of apprenticeship, then you make what's called "Gesellenprüfung", then you need to work at least 2 years in a bakery and then you need to go back to school for two years. That's quite some effort and it's not lacking formal qualifications.
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).
From my perspective that seems heavily over regulated. As long as the bread is made in a sanitary fashion and doesn't make people sick, why should a baker be expected to go through so much training/schooling?
Meisterschule does not primarily teach you how to make bread. That’s the part before. It also teaches you how to educate new apprentices, how to run a business, etc. Maybe it’s over regulated, but on the other hand, we require solid education for a lot of professions. As long as the bridge doesn’t collapse, why should we expect an engineer to go through that much education? It’s only math and textbooks are freely available. As long as the patient survives, why do we require that doctors pass a certain education? It’s only biology and you can google most of it anyways.
IMO, how much regulation there should be has to do with the potential risks.
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.
People could actually die. Food poisoning of all kinds is a thing. Some of the stuff a baker works with is dangerous and flour explosions are a thing. Here’s a case where people died because of flour exploding in a mill: https://150.ngg.net/arbeitsbedingungen/gefahr-am-arbeitsplat...
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 department trains for - and they’re not doing that for fun.
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.
> 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, 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.
> So no, it's definitely not the lack of immigrants, they are just wrong kind of immigrants, the too-lazy-to-work kind.
Refugees are by law not allowed to work until they have a semi-permanent residence permit of any kind ("Duldung" would be sufficient in some, but not all cases). So yeah, they're all lazy and at fault here.
By what law? I'm pretty sure that at the same time Germany allowed them in they also adjusted their policies to make access to jobs easy for them (https://www.oecd.org/els/mig/Finding-their-Way-Germany.pdf) German economy in general suffers from the lack of workers, which is the limiting factor for many businesses growth. If they could make a productive use of those "refugees" they surely would by now. They are not gatekeeping the job market.
Here's the rules and regulations: https://www.bmas.de/DE/Themen/Arbeitsmarkt/Infos-fuer-Asylsu... TL;DR: At least 3 month in the best case, never in the worst case. Many cases require explicit permission from the authorities. Even if you're allowed to work before your application has been approved, you still face the problem that your refugee application might not be approved. Few employers will risk investing substantial amounts of education into a person with such a risky status. Once you have a permanent residence status things get easier.
Generally, a major problem is that practically no education that refugees may have is recognized in Germany. So even if the person is a doctor, baker or whatever, even if they speak proper German, they're not permitted to work in the job that they're educated for - so even if there's a lack of qualified workers on one side and qualified workers on the other side, you'd still need to go through at least large chunks of the education. My wife who has a full teacher education from a neighboring european country (ECTS credits and all) still had to go back to university before being allowed to teach in Germany. There's also language barriers (obviously)
It's also the case that in 2018 43% of the refugees had a job - that's certainly less than everyone would have wished for, but it's not as if all refugees are out of work.
Since you cited the case of having to import foreign workers for field/harvest work: That's something that the farmers prefer. The imported workers are unorganized, often speak no German and have little to no knowledge of their rights. They're kept in containers under the farmers control. They're easy to exploit in ways that people with even the least bit of local support network are not. They'd not take natural Germans either if they applied.
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.
>Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over.
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.
> "So they say you can’t close. And I think, well, come and spend your money with me instead, then."
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 saw this a while ago with a startup I was working for, we did online grocery delivery for butchers, bakers, greengrocers and the like. Eventually we had to shut down because we ran out of money, but we did one final week of deliveries - that week was the biggest week we ever did, and the first to make a profit, if all the people saying how sad they were to see us go and making one last order had just used us instead of a supermarket every other week we’d still be delivering.
Another part of the equation is that in many places the threshold for "viable business" has shifted upwards a lot. It's not just increased rents, also what people expect from life in a very general way. (see also other parts about viable business that close simply because they don't find a successor)
There's a butcher fairly close to where I live that's been open since 1760 and there's often a line out the door on weekends etc. I love going there as if you ask where the meat is from, they'll give you directions to their fields up the road! If that's not the best way to determine animal welfare then I don't know what is.
The meat is just the transport mechanism. They're selling the known chain of custody and novelty that comes with it being local. The product they're imparting it on just happens to be meat.
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.
Hofpfisterei is a chain of bakery shops, headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Its business focuses on southern Germany. It has 163 branches and employs about 950 people.
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.
I once talked to a farmer south of Munich who claimed to have documents showing that his farm belonged to his family since the early 12th century. Society must have been really stable there for a long time.
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).
> Society must have been really stable there for a long time.
> 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."
Basically entire Europe was a warzone from the end of the Roman period to... oh, Ukraine.. well, Europe still is a warzone but much less so now than in the past centuries.
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!
> wars mostly affected the 'state' and not the people that much
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.
Parent is more right than wrong; while armies were fed by forage, local purchase, and outright looting, they were also necessarily localised and the apparatus for total war didn't really exist until railways, despite Napoleon beginning mass mobilisation.
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.
Perhaps I wrote imprecisely. I did not claim the population did not suffer. I meant that the aim of the warfare was rarely annihilation of native population. You wanted to have native population, as having native population farm the land was the only way to extract revenue from the land.
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.
Japan has the most stable environment for companies. In the list of the oldest 5 worldwide the japanese companies were founded in 578 until 771 AD, which makes them more than 1400 years old!
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.
Japan had some advantages in this regard. Being a fairly small nation it was possible to centrally administer it without the government splintering every couple of decades. Being an island nation meant they were difficult to invade. The final point in their favor was a rigid political hierarchy that discouraged mid-level officials from getting too ambitious unlike Europe.
I wonder if this is because of mixed, pedestrian-friendly zoning. In the UK it's equal effort to drive to a supermarket as it is to walk to a 'local' shop.
The list contains a few pharmacies from the 14th century that are still in business. Quite impressive, I really wonder what they were selling more than 600 years ago.
no, no and no. For the last part: gifting to family in Germany is so very cheap and in the case of land nearly unrelated to actual worth. Second he could sell it at a low price and - if this is price is not lower than, what municipalities, she had to buy 3% tax. Even better: put it into a company, load on debt for the house and do a share deal (some thousands for lawyers but definitely inheritance tax free)
Amazing and sad story, with some very poignant passages
> 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.
Dronfield is no longer really a market town in the sense of being a bit isolated and independent - it's becoming an increasingly expensive suburb for people who commute to the two large urban areas which it virtually touches. I suspect that most people who live are used to driving a fair bit and doing a "big shop".
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.
Growing up in one small town in the Midwest, and currently living in a slightly larger but less vibrant small town in the Midwest, the internet is the driving factor for most of the small businesses that I see thriving here.
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.
Covid showed me that decentralisation is the way to go (at least in terms of food in the UK).
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.
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.
Think this is really wishful thinking, small villages are already crammed with much more wealthy people who lived through the best parts of the housing boom than the majority living in cities and these shops and local pubs are mostly already gone. People would rather just order online or just do one cheaper trip to the supermarket.
That's fairly sad. I've never found a butcher whose quality or price is beaten by a grocery store yet. I've also yet to find a quality butcher shop that wasn't packed(pre-covid i suppose)
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.
I was with you on the first paragraph, but have never had difficulty finding genuine ground beef free of LFTB/pink slime.
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.
Thousands of shops like this must have closed in the UK over the past 20 years.
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.
I went to a French baker in Dallas when I lived there, his breads were the most amazing food item I think I ever ate, everything was amazing and made in a very traditional French way. Not sure if its there any more (been 5+ years).
I mentioned this to a friend who lives in Dronfield (well, Coal Aston), and he said there are two other butchers there that are still open. They haven't been there for three hundred years, but perhaps they're better butchers.
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.