Leaving the grocery trade for the family restaurant (1970)

What it means to change your trade

Reading the shift from grocer to family restaurant purely as far-sighted timing makes the story too simple. What the four brothers held was not a picture of the future but a tactile sense of the limits of earning inside a small retail catchment. Pressed daily by the cheapness of the large supermarkets, they judged that carrying the manners of volume retailing over into food service would make for a much bigger business. The instinct for buying and for thin-margin, high-volume selling that Yokokawa Kiwamu acquired at Tsukiji before dawn led straight into the standardization of a suburban chain.

That step did not, however, bring only the glory of the pioneer. The format that opened up eating out as a family grew tired in about twenty years; Skylark itself swapped its signboard for the cut-price Gusto, and in time the founding family left the management. The decision to abandon one trade for another did not end with a single instance — it went on demanding conversion after conversion of the company. The lightness that let it let go of its original business was also an inability to settle in one: Skylark carried both sides of that from the very start.