Mother eating business

Tokyo
I visited Akihabara today.  The relationship of my visit and the title of this blog will be explained.

Akihabara is the world famous electronics area that has always been filled with tiny shops that sell electronic parts: resistors, chips, amps and micro-disks. Every geek knows about Akihabara, even if they have never visited Japan and never heard of Kyoto.

Today, I saw the end of Akihabara on its way.  Much of the area of tiny shops has been leveled to the ground and the rest is surrounded by high rises including offices, restaurants, and electric appliance mega stores.  With the attendant rise in land prices the tiny geek shops will not survive.

I love commerce.  Unlike people who don't love commerce I can see the genuine problems of commerce.  Such as promoting old timers and loyalists to the tops of corporations (informal nepotism) and old line stores fighting against new upstarts and chains maliciously.

The other problem  that I have seen for decades needs a name.  It is what is going on in Akihabara.  The small irregular business that brought the foot traffic in the first place is being crowded out by businesses that never knew and still can't see what brings customers to the area.  The vitality will be gone in roughly a decade.

I saw this happen on the dull boring intersection of Sacramento and Presidio in San Francisco. In the late 1970's a brilliant women's handmade clothing store opened: Obiko. The foot traffic was so great that dozens of businesses were drawn to the area by the “Site Location” experts who just look at the pedestrian traffic numbers. After less than ten years Obiko was forced out when a Savings & Loan took the space next door and wanted to expand.  The area has slowly died every year since then.

Hence my title: Mother eating business. That is when new business drives out the original business that created the thriving business neighborhood in the first place.