Restructuring the Keio Department Store: own merchandising, specialist scale (1994)

How much of it was management’s doing?

The heart of this restructuring was not an emergency response to losses but the fact that a manager who had come from the supermarket trade cut in from outside at the very disposition that had settled comfortably into the Shinjuku location. That Kawamura Rokuro said publicly that “department store management is management-less,” and brought in own-merchandising as a counter-axis to a commercial custom that had left buying to manufacturers and wholesalers, can be read as one answer to a problem that many railway-affiliated department stores were carrying at the same time.

That said, it does not seem that the order from the top was the only thing that made the reform stick. People on the floor — Takeguchi Hidekatsu, the menswear department head, or Obata Yuki, a womenswear buyer — read the data and took on the discretion over buying and assortment themselves, and that did much to carry a 1990s slogan through into 2000s practice. The question of where a department store earns once it can no longer lean on its terminal location remains, in a changed form, with the Keio group today as the Shinjuku redevelopment proceeds.