Who Has The Buyers?

On subtly different ways of doing business

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I read a very interesting piece from fellow Substacker Coco Liu, on the nitty-gritty world of trade and import-export business. She details how this is much more granular, physical stuff than most of us in America probably think, if we think about it at all.

This observation that Liu makes after visiting a Chinese trade expo really stood out to me. I’m going to start with a long-ish bit from her piece:

Canton Fair (广交会) is China’s largest import and export fair, the largest of its kind in the world. Here, I saw a glimpse of the manufacturing prowess behind “made in China.” A vacuum cleaner sells for $8.80 per unit with a minimum purchase of 1,000 units. “How many orders do you want?” “It depends on the price.” Walking the endless halls, I heard the rhythmic churning of food container manufacturing machines and watched pool cleaning robots crawl up and down demonstration tanks. Products span from service robotics and Christmas decorations to ambulance vehicles and ice cream manufacturing machines. And they sell not just the machines, but complete packages—skilled personnel who will accompany a business to their market and train local talent as part of skills transfer.

I watched people from all nationalities move through the stalls with purpose. There was no small talk, just price negotiations, technical inquiries, and potential business deals. Trade fairs like this are unlike the conferences I’m used to—networking over hors d’oeuvres, panel discussions and presentations few genuinely care to attend. Here, there are only transactions. Relationships and trust are built afterward in the process of actually doing business together. Once an order is fulfilled and a payment made, trust is earned.

It felt like the modern Silk Road—a network of trade routes connecting the East and West, linking China to the Middle East and Europe since Marco Polo times. Despite seeing people of all colors, the fair was dominated by those from Central Asia, India, and Russia, along with a number of Africans and some Europeans and Australians scattered throughout. In the days I was there, I didn’t meet a single American—an absence shaped by our geopolitics, our tariffs, our deliberate distance from this world.

America feels almost sheltered from this world of trade.

Not a single American. Of course, plenty of this stuff made in China ends up on American shelves. You see other countries of origin, depending on the product—Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Bangladesh—but the lion’s share of cheap and mid-range consumer products still seem to be made in China.

So the point isn’t that, as countries, China and the U.S. are not still major trading partners. Despite tariffs, there is still an enormous amount of U.S.-China trade. The point is more subtle. And what I’m going to write in this piece is a bit anecdotal, but Liu’s essay added a dimension to something I’ve really been thinking about with regard to American retail chains.

The stuff you find for sale in mainstream stores seems less…quirky, interesting, or whimsical than it once was. There’s a certain irreducible…creativity or weirdness or specificity to a lot of older products. My hypothesis is that this je ne sais quoi is due to those products having been conceived, designed, and sold within an ecosystem of people who knew about buying, selling, and making things.

Here is an example that I’ve been thinking about. My parents have several of these colanders and organizers, which my mother bought in the mid-1990s at Jamesway, a now-defunct discount department store chain headquartered in New Jersey that operated in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

They’re simple, stylish, and extremely sturdy. Some are labeled “Basic Line,” and some are labeled “Yaffa”:

See the bottom of the colander:

There’s not much online about this company except reminiscences about their products (for example). The things they made are, apparently, mildly famous and sell for some money on eBay.

I can’t determine whether Yaffa and Basic Line were always the same company, or whether they were at one time different entities, but at least in later years they were the same. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2010, according to a page for the website of a firm that specializes in remnant assets:

Basic Line was a manufacturer of various plastic storage products for retail sale.

Basic Line also operated as Yaffa Blocks.

The former headquarters of Basic Line was located in Perth Amboy, NJ.

There’s also a Bloomberg entry for Basic Line, which only says: “Basic Line, Inc. was founded in 1973. The Company’s line of business includes the manufacturing of plastics products.” The company was once located at 920 State Street in Perth Amboy.

My parents’ Basic Line colander has a Perth Amboy, New Jersey zip code embossed in the bottom. That tracks with these products being available in Jamesway in New Jersey, though they must have had wider distribution based on the number of them that are still floating around.

From 2009, here is a hopeful story from the trade publication Plastic News, with a profile of Basic Line, which is ironic given its bankruptcy only a year later:

Basic Line Inc. of Perth Amboy, N.J., takes it one step further, noting that its storage containers, hangers and other products are not only molded and designed in New Jersey, but the company uses only North American-made injection mold tools and American-made presses. The U.S. angle will not work for processors that make parts for other firms, Vazin [an executive of another plastics company profiled] noted. Those firms still are forced to make parts where their original equipment manufacturers are located.

So while I don’t know how widely available these Basic Line products were, what I do know is that a New Jersey branch of a regional discount department store once sold extremely well-made and affordable home organizing products made in the same state. It wasn’t the kind of company whose name got sold around and licensed, or whose product line got picked up by someone else. They just made stuff in a plant, and closed, and that’s all she wrote.

There is a level of local, embodied, granular, on-the-ground knowledge in this little story that feels like it is missing from much of American business and retail.

The same kind of knowledge you might pick up from walking the floor of a trade expo in southern China.

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Another thing I’d like to show you, in this same vein, is the Walmart store in Clinton, New Jersey. This store used to be a Laneco, another now-defunct regional discount department store. Unusual for Walmart, it remains almost unaltered from its Laneco days, complete with drop ceiling, tight aisles, and that general nostalgic, slightly claustrophobic, slightly run-down feel.

I want to show you some of the pictures of the inside of this store:

Now I might just be a retail nerd, and you might not notice anything about these pictures. But this doesn’t look like a Walmart to me. It was actually quite striking, because I haven’t seen a store that had this general feel to it in ages.

The aisles are narrow, the density of stuff on the shelves is impressive. The store feels like a remnant of a whole vanished world of middlebrow discount retail, that same slightly quirky feel that I get from those Basic Line organizing products. This feels like a store to me: packed absolutely full of stuff.

The whole private equity phenomenon may be part of this denuding of character from retail, though that generally applies to struggling or somewhat has-been retailers. In some ways, this is just a way of stating something that is often observed and fairly obvious, but it seems like a lot of the people who run companies today are generic, interchangeable businesspeople, rather than industry people with granular, idiosyncratic experience in the specific industry to which their company is tied.

You notice this if you look at the origins of a lot of older companies. Some of the most famous ones are the fast food origin stories, like KFC and Harland Sanders, who wasn’t a business guy with a disembodied idea, but the actual man who tinkered with pressure fryers and chicken recipes until he landed on a hit.

There are many others. For example, Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys ‘R’ Us, wasn’t a general CEO or managerial type whose experience could translate into running toy stores. He was a toy store owner, and that experience allowed him to scale up what began as one store into a whole successful chain.

The relationships and knowledge he built of the toy industry, specifically, gave him a great deal of insight, and what we call “tacit knowledge,” that there is simply no way, almost by definition, a general corporate officer could have accumulated. Toys ‘R’ Us evolving out of an actual toy business must have influenced how the stores were built and designed, and how the company found and bought their merchandise.

Most of the people who started the big discount chains, like Walmart and Kmart, also started as shopkeepers, not executive-path businesspeople. Of course, they were businesspeople, but the formal trappings of that came after the meat and potatoes of the business itself.

The two guys who started Two Guys, another now-defunct regional discount department store, have a particularly interesting origin story. They managed to put together a discount chain based on their unlikely success at something like closeout retailing. This bit from the Wikipedia article on Two Guys is very good:

In 1946, the Hubschmans operated a snack bar concession in the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) plant in Harrison, New Jersey, which was one of the earliest US manufacturers of television sets. They became friendly with one of their customers, an RCA executive who invited Herbert to tour the plant. During the tour, Hubschman saw a batch of scratched-cabinet television sets returned from the retailers as unsalable. The Hubschmans worked out a plan to buy these sets for a low price, and sell them in a vacant lot for a $5 markup on each set, providing their own publicity using car windshield flyers. The sale was so successful, that the batch they figured would take a month to sell were gone in a few hours. They continued the arrangement with RCA, and soon were ready to open their own store and use newspaper advertising. By this time, they had heard of their competitors whining, “We can’t compete with those two bastards from Harrison!” The Hubschmans wanted to use that as the store name to taunt the competition, but no newspaper would print it, so they settled on Two Guys from Harrison.

A couple of guys running an in-facility restaurant wheedling their way onto the floor, and then getting the company to sell them stuff that today would either be liquidated to large liquidation firms or destroyed and claimed as a tax write-off? And then turning that experience towards building an entire discount-store chain?

It’s such a different path—so much more contingent and irreducibly rooted in the choices and hunches of real, quirky, individual people—than the “business-types come up with an idea and find venture capital to back it” path.¹

But this general idea—that “finance guys” or “corporate guys” rather than “industry guys” are now the preponderant managerial and intellectual force in a lot of American business—ties in with the idea that Americans are no longer actually doing the trade expo/import-export/“buying” for companies. A lot of that is probably outsourced. There are probably not a lot of people at Target or Walmart, say, who know exactly what they carry, and why, and who designed it for what reasons. Who could get a product designer or factory owner on the phone, or go visit a factory and speak to an actual plant manager. Someone can. But there are layers of distance between these things now.

The Jamesways and the old-school Walton-run Walmart and a whole host of other erstwhile chains felt like stores that had buyers; where there was less of a barrier between the people making the things the stores sold, and the people in the stores who actually got the stuff in there.

There’s a lot more of “let’s go check out their factory and see how good they really are” and a lot less of brand-name licensing and contract manufacturing and outsourcing. So many businesses today, in a certain sense, aren’t really even businesses at all. In the same way that junky cartoons in the 20th century served as mere vehicles for advertising, many “businesses” are mere concepts that serve as vehicles for profit-making, venture-capital raising, or stock-price boosting, with the nitty-gritty of the business itself in a subordinate role.

I can only think of two chains that talk self-consciously about their buyers, or use that concept in marketing explicitly: Ollie’s, also a discount store (but a different branch of retail from the discount department store), and Trader Joe’s.

I can think of one from the past: Bradlees, another Kmart-style discount department store, which had a mascot called Mrs. B. The Bradlees slogan went, “At Bradlees, you buy what Mrs. B buys. And nobody can buy like Mrs. B.”

I’ve written about this with regard to the issue of scale: my supposition is that smaller regional chains worked more naturally with smaller manufacturers, who might be more likely to have quirky and interesting products. The nationalizing of retail also meant the scaling-up of suppliers, which probably adds a blandness and sameness.

But that observation of there not being any Americans on the expo floor in the biggest trade expo in the world feels like a key I was missing. That is another thing that can happen when the scale gets too large.

The old way was deeply contingent, arising out of a world of relationships, and out of a whole ecosystem in which designing, manufacturing, distributing, buying, and retailing were all closely related and overlapping endeavors.

Someone is buying the merchandise for big retail companies today. But something nonetheless feels subtly different.

If you asked Mrs. B if she was going to Canton Fair, I suspect that her answer would have been yes.

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Related Reading:

Vornado’s Long Life

A Bit of Super History

Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue

“We’re Rich, We Can’t Afford That”

Why Aren’t More Supermarkets Like This?

The Neighborhood Supermarket Never Disappeared

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1. There are many of these. A good recent example is Wonder Food Hall, a venture-backed company that is trying to ape the food hall trend by basically reheating chef-designed meals from a central kitchen. It’s almost an imitation of the business it claims to be. Take a look at this paragraph for an excellent example of how to build a business divorced from the actual business of the business:

The e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore, who ran e-commerce at Walmart from 2016 to 2021, founded Wonder in 2018. Before that, Lore was a co-founder of Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for approximately $3 billion in 2016. Lore was also the co-founder of Quidsi, which ran e-commerce sites including Diapers.com and Wag.com until it was acquired by Amazon in 2010. Lore’s current level of involvement in Wonder is relatively recent: While at Walmart, he initially acted in more of an advisory role, leaving his brother Chad Lore to run the company, before coming on as executive chairman in December 2021 and CEO in October 2022. Wonder also has investment from companies including Bain Capital Ventures, Amex Ventures, and Nestlé.