From consignment retail to fixed-term leases: the “store that doesn’t sell” (2015)

From a place that sells to a place where people gather

The heart of this transformation was that it let go of retailing’s given — earning gross margin by selling goods — and moved over to the side that leases its stores out as places where people gather. Marui repriced the strength of owning its own stores on prime downtown land not as the power to sell goods but as the power to draw crowds itself. Drawing on the experience of the 2003 reform, forced through top-down at the cost of employees’ trust, President Hiroshi Aoi avoided the same rut and, layering dialogue with the front line, took five years to swap out the form of its contracts. In remaking it without haste yet without backtracking, one glimpses the consistency of a manager who had raised the banner of dialogue-based management.

By combining fixed-term-lease rents with Epos-card financial income, Marui put distance between itself and the fragility of a single revenue source reversing with the economy or the law. Beneath the decision to diversify its revenue base runs the memory of once depending on high cashing earnings and then piling up fifteen years of loss processing after the revised Money Lending Business Act took effect. Yet whether a store that does not sell goods can keep drawing people will go on being governed by the line-up of its tenants and the quality of the experience. What does a retailer that owns stores provide, if not goods, in order to earn? — Marui’s turn offered one answer to that question, and was at the same time a choice that demands it keep answering.