A walking primer: where “old” means open for business
If you want to feel Latvia’s commercial past under your feet, start in Vecrīga (Old Riga) and the ring of 19th–20th century districts just beyond the medieval streets. Here, “heritage retail” isn’t only façades; it’s businesses that kept trading through upheaval, then adapted to post-1991 life while keeping their purpose. You’ll see the difference in scale: small shopfronts with deep back rooms, street-level windows set for browsing rather than scrolling, counters where staff still know their stock by touch. Among the most telling stops are a century-old bookstore chain, a confectionery house whose name is synonymous with Riga, a perfumery brand with roots in an 1849 atelier, and two urban institutions—an elegant, late-19th-century shopping arcade and one of Europe’s great interwar markets—that still host long-running merchants. Each keeps a thread intact between what Riga once sold and what it still loves to buy.

The book nerve: Jāņa Rozes grāmatnīca, founded 1914
Ask any Riga reader where they bought their first school atlas or exam anthology and the name “Jāņa Rozes” will surface quickly. The company dates to 1914, making it Latvia’s oldest bookstore brand in continuous public memory; today it operates as a nationwide chain, but its center-city stores still feel like the classic European “grāmatnīca”—tall shelves, wide tables, staff who recommend from experience rather than algorithm. The firm’s own history pages sketch a lineage through the 20th century’s hardest turns, and its flagship addresses remain reliable for Latvian literature in translation, design magazines, and school requisites. For visitors, it’s a practical stop (English-language shelves are decent) and a cultural one: the store is a quiet indicator of how reading culture has anchored urban life here for more than a century, surviving paper shortages, ideology shifts, and the pull of screens.

Chocolate as a city institution: Laima, a 1920s original
“Let’s meet at the Laima clock” is a sentence you’ll still hear in central Riga, a clue to how thoroughly the confectioner has entered the city’s shared map. Laima emerged as a modern chocolate brand in the early 1920s and quickly wrapped itself around local taste: bitter bars, hazelnut pralines, classic assorted boxes. A look at the company’s historical gallery shows interwar product lines and branding that Riga residents still recognize on shelves today; step into a Laima shop and you’re browsing a living design archive as much as a sweets counter. The brand’s staying power matters: it links today’s purchases to interwar café culture and family rituals, and it explains why chocolates here are a default souvenir that isn’t kitsch. For the fullest hit of nostalgia, time a visit near the famous clock on Brīvības iela and then carry a ribbon-tied box into nearby Esplanāde for an impromptu tasting.

From H. A. Brieger to Dzintars: perfumery with 19th-century roots
Latvia’s oldest beauty story begins in 1849, when Heinrich Adolph Brieger opened a perfumery in Riga. That 19th-century atelier eventually fed into the best-known modern local name—Dzintars—whose products many Latvians still associate with their parents’ and grandparents’ dressing tables. The lineage is important for two reasons. First, it proves how early Riga was connected to European fragrance and cosmetics expertise; second, it shows how a brand can mutate across political and economic systems and still be recognized by scent alone. While the corporate structures have changed in recent years, the historical through-line—from Brieger’s shop to Dzintars’ decades of creams, lipsticks, and classic flacons—remains a distinct part of Latvia’s retail heritage. If you find vintage Dzintars at a boutique or market stall, you’re not just buying a product; you’re holding a trace of a 175-year habit of making and wearing scent in this city.

Bergs Bazaar: Riga’s first shopping arcade, still a stage for small merchants
Built in the late 19th century and completed around 1900, Bergs Bazaar was Riga’s original purpose-built shopping arcade—an elegant, brick-and-arch complex that introduced a modern way to stroll, browse, and meet. Today, after sensitive renewals, it functions again as a cluster of boutiques, cafés, and services, and remains one of the best places to observe how heritage real estate can house contemporary commerce. For shoppers, the value is twofold: you can patronize long-standing local names alongside newer artisan labels, and you can experience a retail setting that predates the department store era while anticipating it in spirit. The architecture frames the experience—courtyards, covered passages, human-scale doors—and turns each purchase into part of a larger walk. In a city known for art nouveau façades, Bergs Bazaar adds a different note: the social rhythm of an arcade that has been selling things, and hosting conversations, for well over a century.

Riga Central Market: interwar hangars, long memories, daily trade
Opened in 1930 within five monumental former airship hangars, Riga Central Market is not a “shop” in the narrow sense, but it is Latvia’s most enduring retail organism. The point here isn’t only the UNESCO-listed silhouette or the architectural reuse; it’s the stall-level continuity. Many families have traded here across generations—in fish, smoked meats, pickles, dairy, and seasonal produce—passing down suppliers, recipes, and customer rapport. For visitors, the market is where you can buy what locals actually eat and watch the transactions that keep Riga’s pantry stocked. For retail historians, it is the city’s best case study in how a 1930s civic project can stay economically and socially relevant. Go for rye bread and caraway cheese, stay to talk to a vendor who can tell you how the hall has changed since the 1980s, and you’ll leave with more than groceries: you’ll carry a sense of how daily trade stitches one decade to the next.

Why these addresses matter (and how to use them)
The shops and complexes above aren’t just “old”; they are legible. Each shows how Latvian retail absorbs modernity without surrendering its core habits: reading as a social good, sweets as a civic brand, scent as a quiet pride, and public markets as the anchor of food culture. Practically, this means you can plan a half-day heritage route that is also useful: pick up books and maps at Jāņa Rozes, buy a Laima box for the train, browse a boutique in Bergs Bazaar, and fill a tote at Central Market before dinner. More deeply, you’ll have supported businesses and places that have already proved their resilience—and you’ll have something specific to say when people ask what Latvian “tradition” looks like in everyday life. It looks like a till that still rings, a shopkeeper who remembers your face, and a city that lets you step into its past without stepping out of the present.