The Sayama refit and the turn to a food-proposal supermarket (1998)

Not chasing scale, but differentiating through editing on the floor

The heart of this decision lies in a double step: deciding deliberately not to pursue economies of scale, and then, on top of that, releasing head office authority to the floor. It takes nerve merely to step out of the competition to sell cheaply and in volume, but Yaoko went further and handed the power to decide the assortment — which chains have always held through standardisation — to store managers and part-time staff. That choice, running against the common sense of a chain built on efficiency and control, produced the distinctiveness of a store that kept being chosen in the middle of a price war, and sustained a long run of consecutive profit growth.

And yet a strength built by going all-in on the proposal format can turn into fragility when price sentiment strengthens. In 2017 Yaoko bought the discount operator AV and came to hold two formats at once, and in 2025 it moved to a structure that binds several supermarkets together under the holding company Blue Zone Holdings. How much of the density of store-level management — the bet placed in 1998 on serving ten different tastes in one person — can be preserved while taking on scale and multiple formats: the question the Sayama store raised is still at the centre of management.