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.<p>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!"<p>I didn't find the buttons I was looking for but it an amusing experience.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>For me it was a different experience to buy shoes over-the-counter, not the usual way to buy shoes!
There are so many shops in Berlin where I constantly wonder how the hell they make enough money to even afford the rent.<p>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.
There are some great quotes in that piece. Must have been a fun piece to research and write.<p>> They don’t call the violin a cello for kids, do they?<p>> One sausage gave birth to another<p>> Of course I can make some fries, I told them. They literally thought I could only make cushions that look like meat<p>> We made this area attractive, now we could be punished for it<p>> I have sticky tapes in my store that mere mortals would never dare to dream of.
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 <i>also</i> 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 wonder if these shops developed in contrast to, or rebellion against, the uniformity created by communism in East Germany (or just quirky German culture).