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Japan, baby

It is a reference to US culture's big box store and monopoly driven markets. The USA has lots of products and niches, but very few people here seek them out.

Retail here in the USA is mostly driven by big box stores and wholesale distribution chains that hold monopolies in every major product category from which consumers make purchases. These outlets tend to offer high profit margin products and limit consumer product availability to just these high profit items from convenient local retail sources. It happens in stores from your local bike shop's distribution chain to big box home improvement stores to the small business general retail killers of Walmart and Target, or local grocery stores. Either the store chain is as large as the major wholesale distributors, or the small business is dependent on the wholesale supply chain. Product profit margins are always kept low, putting a strain on any small retailers, and the wholesale distributors readily offer credit lines and the convenience of central product ordering and combined free shipping, while general shipping prices in the USA are very high for small businesses.

This complex combination makes the US market mostly a situation where the consumer just goes to a big box store and buys whatever is available without doing any research or shopping around. This in turn has lead to further profit margin optimisation where even the large competing big box stores are all carrying the same physical hardware contract manufactured by the same factory with only different lettering and colors.

This junk is so prevalent that even major Japanese brands like Makita are not the same high quality tools as the ones sold in Japan and are the exact same contract manufactured junk found in every other big box store's tools section.

There is no path to retail market for grass roots innovations in the USA and therefore no interesting novelties or innovations in niches like there are in Japan. Stuff no doubt exists and many trying to succeed, but the distribution and big box monopolies rarely take on any product unless it is highly profitable in their middle man niches on par with their highly optimised source chain. So the only real products that can break into the market are ultra low quality over priced junk.

• I was the wholesale buyer for a chain of retail stores for 6 years.