I have thought about this a lot over the years and tried to spot these companies - many of them are the type of business that Berkshire Hathaway would love to find.

Some of them are a little more visible simply because they’ve scaled and developed a moat - logistics, particularly trucking in the UK, and international cargo shipping, stand out here for me. But also social care, floristry and grocery wholesaling, weird sectors in aviation (I worked in that for a while), all sorts.

And then I look at family businesses that shouldn’t be able to exist all the time. In my nearest town centre there is a grocer, a fish shop and a butchers on the high street. Common sense tells us the extra large supermarket built on the outskirts of the town in the 1990s should have obliterated them, but no.

In the UK there is a common assumption that a lot of vape shops, barbers and even some takeaways are fronts for money laundering (and that definitely happens - there is a chicken shop in one Northern town I know that to my knowledge has no ability to actually sell you chicken, nor can the 4 others next door to it). But there are definitely some that are making good money via the legal route.

As a software guy I look for opportunities to sell to them and there’s one theme that stands out across many of them that is also an invisible sector: have you noticed how many small companies make and sell touchscreen tills/cash registers? In the UK it seems to be a thriving cottage industry.

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Animats 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I used to think that all those Persian carpet stores on University Avenue in Palo Alto were a way to get immigrants jobs in the US. But no. Turns out the carpet store guy had been renting upstairs office space to startups in exchange for an equity stake. That worked out very, very well for him.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/165_University_Avenue

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jyounker 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Oriental carpet stores are interesting businesses. I always wondered how they stayed open until I met someone whose family has been in the business for several generations.

Individual sales are in the thousands, so they operate more like high-end jewelry stores than a "normal" business. One sale a day is minimum 250K/year.

The store itself seems to be more of just a show room. There are other sales routes too. Selling into hotels would be an example. There are also maintenance services, so a high end rug in some sense can be seen as a recurring revenue source.

It's a interesting little corner.

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OkayPhysicist an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I recall going to a carpet/tapestry shop in Turkey where, as we enjoyed the ever-present sales-pitch tea, the owner showed us his wares. After the 5 grand mark, he just stopped listing prices. For the final assortment, he brought out some exquisite silk tapestries about the size of welcome mats. He joking clarified that these were tapestries, to be hung on walls. If you bought one without having a wall to hang one on, he'd be happy to fly out and build you one.

	▲	pinkmuffinere 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My family is Persian and I grew up in Turkey. You definitely develop an appreciation for carpets, and it's sooooooo heartbreaking to see people use art as an entryway rug, simply because they don't know :(

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a34729t 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just buy them direct in Kabul, and get the guy to age it for you by driving his truck over it until you have the desired "weathering".

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abhayaya 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oriental carpet stores seem to be doing alright still in the bay; less so in Manhattan, though you would think the same opportunity to rent property to startups could exist. Many of them have shut down or are only open by appointment. None of them offer the personal service I suspect the author is insinuating exists still. Near as I know that level of bespoke care died off a couple of decades ago unless you are very wealthy. No doubt the competition (but not competition) of sites like etsy, temu, ebay, and the large number of people who think things look sorta like something nicer contributed to the death of the end-to-end streets of Persian carpet stores. I still remember purchasing a knock off for under $85 during the dotcom boom. Nothing was individually dyed; it was all mostly just meant to look that way, like most 'oriental' carpet now. The materiels going into making the new-fangled rug bears no resemblence to those which make an old-style one. God-forbid you drop the wrong beverage or something on a really good old hand-made rug and the dye runs. Shopping in those large Persian rug stores are still lovely, when you can find one that is open (by appointment or not). They rarely have posted hours either.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I had a phase when we bought several rugs at the price point you're talking about and also found some "subprime" sources of rugs that were authentic but not so go good and much more affordable.

Then I had a house full of oriental rugs and haven't needed a new one ever since.

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browningstreet 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Kinda like.. pianos?

	▲	PaulHoule 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Guitars don't seem to be like that. Like sometimes my son is talking with my son about his latest guitar with my wife and that guitar is newer than the guitar that my wife thinks is his latest guitar. If he hasn't bought a new guitar he just made a new one.

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WarmWash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>make and sell touchscreen tills/cash registers

Probably 2 or 3, all based in China, that will happily print your company logo on the machines.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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