From suburban discounter to the urban all-night store (1997)

Whoever masters location masters the format

The core of this decision was to move the home of its late-night strength from the suburbs to the city centre. In a period when the wall of land prices kept it out of downtown, Don Quijote moved early to secure prime sites released by the financial-sector restructuring, finding a way to occupy locations without buying them. The feel for land that Takao Yasuda had cultivated in real estate worked as a lens that read the landlord’s circumstances before the customer’s. When the discovery of late-night demand meshed with the supply of prime city-centre sites, the offbeat suburban store transformed into an urban discounter.

Urban locations drew more customers than the suburban stores and underwrote the growth that followed. Yet securing prime land rested on a one-time supply of vacated bank branches; the same opportunity does not come around again and again. In his later years Yasuda himself questioned the danger of an oversupply of large suburban stores under a shrinking population. The 1997 choice to push into the city centre left Don Quijote with a lasting question: how to choose a location, and when to let it go.