Abolishing seated selling for display floors, and declaring a department store (1904)

The declaration was a conclusion the selling floor had already reached

By October 1900, when the whole of the main store had been turned into display floor and seated selling abolished, Mitsukoshi was already a shop capable of laying out goods other than kimono cloth. The Department Store Declaration came four years later, in December 1904 — the month the joint-stock Mitsukoshi Gofukuten was founded. The declaration did not summon a new format into being; nine years of rebuilding the selling floor, begun when display selling was first adopted, had already produced the condition in which such a declaration could be made. That Hibi Osuke chose the month the company changed its legal form to say so publicly suggests he judged the remaking of the way goods were sold to be essentially complete.

Even so, it took another ten years for the goods to catch up. Mitsukoshi said it would add lines beyond cloth, but the building that housed the food and horticulture departments was not finished until September 1914 — a long distance between the statement of intent and the actual floor. Nor did the head start hold. By the early Taisho years every department store had put the same format in place. The road from drapery to department store was common to all of them; what Mitsukoshi held was not a direction but a lead of a few years.