Discarding the connoisseur’s eye: a standardized buyback and the franchise chain (1991)

The choice to throw away your own barrier

What makes this decision striking is that Bookoff deliberately tore down the very barrier to entry that most companies try to defend. A connoisseur’s practiced eye was, for the secondhand-book trade, both a moat that kept newcomers out and a shackle that kept the business from scaling. Takashi Sakamoto filled in that moat and turned it into a shallow anyone could wade across, throwing wide open a market that had been sealed behind it. Replacing person-bound judgments of value with a single standard visible to everyone — how dirty a book was — created the conditions to load the business onto a replication device called the franchise. It is a case in which giving up a strength converted into a strength of another order.

Standardization was not, however, a cure-all. A system that buys regardless of content turns sellable and unsellable books alike into inventory. While growth continued that inefficiency was absorbed by opening stores; once the room to open more shrank, it rebounded as stock on the shelves. That Bookoff would later widen its goods from books to CDs, clothing and hobby items and steer toward comprehensive reuse was, at once, a move to replicate this standardized model onto other products and a move to spread the inventory risk of a single category. The first decision — to reduce the business to work anyone could do — had already shaped, in advance, both the expansion and the problems that followed.