Going to a flat ¥100 a plate at the Takashi store (1996)

The author’s view

To read the 1996 move to a single price as merely following the low-price competition does not fit what the company had been doing in the years just before. Sushi Taro had switched to directly operated stores five years earlier, and the year before had built a preparation plant next to its Takarazuka Akura store. To fix a price at ¥100 means the store side takes the swings in cost onto itself — a hand hard to play for a company that does not hold its own preparation in its own hands. That president Shimizu Yoshio could descend into that territory was, it appears, because the eye for fish he had carried since his 鯛すし days and the structure of direct operation and in-house processing were both in place.

That said, the ¥100 price did not go on protecting the company forever. The flat pricing begun in 1996 ended in October 2022, moving to ¥120–150 a plate in the face of a weak yen and rising raw-material costs. The thirty consecutive years of revenue growth that Toyosaki Kenichi spoke of were themselves the flip side of years spent absorbing rising costs while holding the price still. A single price was a weapon in competition and, at the same time, a promise the company would one day have to fold up itself once the market moved.