Converting every restaurant to the ¥760 Gusto (1992)

What it means to fold your origin

It is easy to file this conversion under “a response to deflation.” But that drops the question of why the company folded a profitable signboard of its own accord. Skylark was not collapsing; even with profit falling, its flagship was still the group’s earner. Repainting that format into the ¥760 Gusto while strength remained — and stripping off the founding name as well — is the core of the decision. President Kayano Ryo, who accepted that “a company lives thirty years,” declared the full conversion without waiting for the results from the pilot stores, and said that being the founder was what let him make up his mind alone.

That said, we can call the conversion correct only because we know the recovery that followed. Pushed all the way to self-service, Gusto’s floor operation brought a decline in service, and even Vice-Chairman Yokokawa Norio conceded it was “still only sixty out of a hundred.” The complete removal of the old signboard slipped from the announced 1996 to 2009. Even so, moving to the next format while the current one could still earn, and not sparing even the name of its origin, is what characterizes a company that rebuilds its signboard at every crisis.