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1 October, 2001
JAPANESE
SHOPPING, AMERICAN-STYLE
My memories of shopping in Japan are the memories of a child.
| Going to a department store in Tokyo was like going to Disneyland for American kids. It wasn't just shopping - it was a life-affirming experience. |
And, I remember the department stores, which were glorious displays of wealth and luxury with brand names galore (Seiko, Asahi Pentax, Shiseido), bright lights and perfumey smells like my mom's Chanel No. 5. I remember that each large department store along the great neon-lit strip of the Ginza district hosted a variety of fine restaurants that served everything from Chinese-style ramen to sushi and traditional Japanese fare. Most vividly, I remember that every great department store seemed to feature a miniature amusement park on its high-rise rooftop. There were no roller coasters or Ferris wheels, but I can flash back to my brother and me with my mom, twirling around crazily in spinning teacups.
For me, going to a department store in Tokyo was like going to Disneyland for American kids. It wasn't just shopping - it was a life-affirming experience. Smartly uniformed ladies greeted people as they entered the air-conditioned softness, as if they were royalty entering an unworthy stable house. Customers were pampered by clerks who acted as if they were servants. There was room around every item, and every item was lit as if it were a work of art. The atmosphere was almost museum-like, or better yet, church-like with its muffled reverence for consumerism. Everything made shopping special.
As an adult, I still enjoy shopping, though I don't need the amusement park rides or deferential greeters (some servile clerks would be nice once in a while, though) to make shopping special. I'll settle for finding great bargains or picking through a huge stack of Hawaiian shirts for just the right combination of color and pattern. That's modern American-style shopping.
Shopping in Japan has changed over the years too.
The small, dusty and crowded family shops have been eclipsed by the modern convenience store - an invasion led by the familiar American companies 7-Eleven and Lawson's.
And though the grand department stores of yore - Mitsukoshi, Takashimaya, Matsuzakaya, some hundreds of years old - still stand and still feature fine dining alongside fine shopping, a new US import has arrived with a new concept to replace the old-fashioned coddling consumers used to get.
Costco, a membership shopping ware
house based in a suburb of Seattle, Washington, is doing bustling business in Chiba, just east of Tokyo. The store is the company's second in Japan - a location opened in Fukuoka in southwestern Japan in 1999.
Costco is the US company that introduced shoppers to the idea of a membership warehouse, where an annual fee gives consumers access to mountains of merchandise at (often) great discounts because they are purchased by Costco in bulk. Costco opened its first warehouse-sized store in San Diego in 1976, and now boasts over 335 locations worldwide.
There are several Costco locations in the Denver area, and we visit them regularly. Shopping at Costco is anything but the luxurious experience of the grand old Japanese department stores.
Well, there is one similarity. When you first enter the store, there is a greeter who glances at your membership card, waves you in and rolls out an oversized shopping cart for you to collect everything you'll be buying.
Once inside, you are on your own, with little help from staff, who are usually busy stocking shelves with everything from large jars of peanut butter to very large and heavy sets of weightlifting equipment. At first sight, the store seems to carry everything - groceries including produce, meats and fresh-baked goods; household items from televisions and stereos to carpet cleaners and vacuums; clothing; and books, music and movies. For Asians, Costco (at least the ones we shop at) has some special treats: Crispy Asian pears, Fuyu persimmons and sweet tangerines when they're in season, and a constant stock of incredibly cheap instant ramen, including not just the Maruchan brand but also a tasty Korean brand of spicy ramen with kim chee.
The stock varies from week to week - many items change or simply disappear as they sell out, because they were one-time purchases from a distributor or manufacturer. Still, the mystery of what's available is one of the reasons I like to shop at Costco - it's never the same store.
The one drawback is that as the company buys goods in bulk, so does the shopper. You can't buy one roll of paper towels, you buy a dozen at once. Instead of a normal jar of peanut butter, you'll go home with one the size of a bucket. The ramen comes by the case. You may need a pound of ground beef, but you'll take home a tray of 10 pounds. But hey - you'll eventually go through a bucket of peanut butter (in a year or two), and hamburger can be frozen after you've divided it into smaller packages. The price is what makes it worth buying such large amounts. With most of the goods, you really do save money - sometimes, a lot of money - by shopping at Costco.
The cost seems to be what Japanese shoppers find most compelling too (they're also flocking to another US retail invention: the outlet mall). After years of economic duress and rising prices of products in every category, Japanese consumers are finally starting to change their spending habits. Instead of buying the same expensive premium rice they've always bought, they're seeking out cheaper alternatives. Even imports of European luxury brand name goods by such companies as Gucci and Louis Vuitton, long popular in Japan, have dropped in recent months. Bargain-hunting has become more important than the status of a fancy name.
But in a recent news story about Costco's popularity, one happy shopper admitted there was another mystique about spending her money at Costco. It's "like taking a trip to America. It's big, you choose the items yourself, and it's cheap," she told the reporter.
"Like taking a trip to America" - I like that. Maybe US retailers can take a tip from the traditional Japanese stores sometime. Wouldn't it be nice to see something other than a puny rocking horse in front of a store? How about one of those teacup rides?
For me, that would
be like taking a trip back to Japan.