Filing for reorganisation, and rebuilding on closures and the original sauce (1980)

It looked like a question of money; it was a question of the product

Followed only in outline, this bankruptcy looks like a classic dead end of overexpansion and swelling debt. But the fact that openings did not stop even though everyone inside the company shared the view that 200 shops was the limit, and the decision to sacrifice the taste with freeze-dried beef in order to get around the import restrictions, can both be read as cases where the convenience of expansion overrode the conditions the product itself imposed. That the first thing restored in the rebuild was not the shop count or the headcount but the liquid sauce reads as the reverse of the same proposition.

Chance also entered into the choice of backer. That the Seibu distribution group, having refused once before the bankruptcy, took the company on owed much to a personal connection — the old school tie between the preservation administrator and Seiji Tsutsumi. Nor was it obvious at the time that the reorganisation law, as an institution, would be applied to a restaurant company. If what sustained the reorganisation was that this is a business taking cash daily, one where keeping the doors open keeps money circulating, then the rebuild was helped in part by the nature of the format itself. Remembering that the same company was holding a thick financial cushion when it lost its signature product again twenty-four years later, one is left to consider what the experience of 1980 actually left behind.