|
     
|
   |
 |
Fall 2000  |
||
|
Tokyo Metabolism Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer are contributors to the Harvard Design Schools Guide to Shopping(©2001). Excerpts of that guide follow. New YorkAs of 1996, Japan had 48,567 convenience stores with total annual sales of 7,378 billion yen. The number of stores exceeds the combined number of police stations, post offices and telephone offices in the countrys metropolitan areas. Since their arrival in Japan in 1974, convenience stores have fundamentally changed life in the city and are now considered one of its main amenities. The large chains usually stay open for 24 hours, seven days a week, bypassing regulations regarding opening hours due to their small size. Yet most convenience stores are owned or franchised by large retail conglomerates. They constitute a distributed retail system with all the financial might but much greater political, economic and urbanistic flexibility than the older larger store formats. All the convenience stores in Tokyo have a similar economy of scale as all the department stores but their effect on the city is utterly different. The convenience-store chains form a system that clearly shows how information technology affects the store format, the distribution of goods, the consumer and the city. GOODSINFORMATIONINDIVIDUALSCITY | Convenience stores combine the virtues of brand identity, just-in-time delivery and a highly computerized system for store inventory and consumer profiles into a network of distributed point stores. Point-of-sales data allow fine-tuning to the neighborhoods preferences, just-in-time delivery a perfectly flexible inventory, and branding the maintenance of a perceivable Gestalt. Forever in flux, each store molds itself to the needs of the single urbanite: Its inventory is a panoply of daily life, emanating reassurance and pleasure in its ordered display, its location a function of neighborhood demand, highly mobile due to the comparatively low investment. Compared to the franchise as a whole, single stores are just the tips of fiber-optic cables, glowing heavy with light and data. They are organs of an urban organism that is distributed, networked and highly adaptive. In apparent randomness, though in tune with the metabolism of the city, three luminous points transform in sudden blips that fuse into the sparkle of continuous flux: 3,218 on, 1,485 off in 1996. They are subject to a strategy, not a form; a network, not an architecture; an algorithm, not an ideology. Their urban presence is pure processa Metabolists dream. GOODSINFORMATION | 7-Eleven Japan is owned by Ito-Yokado, a complex conglomerate of companies from supermarkets to real-estate firms. It is the biggest and most successful of the convenience-store chains and originated most of the advance in information technology. The basic components of its information system have been developed in-house in association with the Nomura Research Institute, a globally active daughter company of Nomura Securities. Point-of-sales cash registers speed up the checkout operation and record data such as the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.), the time of purchase and the type of customer. This information is processed by the companys host computer and is available to the individual stores a mere two hours later. Store clerks operate hand-held scanners and portable graphic ordering terminals, notebook-sized portable computers that provide product sales information and advice to employees as they check shelves for items to be ordered. These components are linked within the company and its suppliers via an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) that 7-Eleven Japan claims is the largest of its kind in the world. Incessantly, slow-moving items are eliminated, fast-moving ones replenished, and purchase peaks anticipated. Stores carry minimal stock and therefore offer no sale promotions. The merchandise mix is adjusted according to breadth of inventory, location and time. Approximately 50 to 65 percent of the product lines are replaced in any one year. In the soft drinks market, for example, 7-Eleven Japan has identified the most important 70 to 80 of the 4,000 available products, and its stores stock these alone. Overall, the franchise provides a pool of around 6,000 items of which the average store carries half. This product consolidation is orchestrated using information from the head office and advice from field consultants. In an iterative process of hypothesizing what will sell, ordering the product and verifying the performance, stores focus on successful products, diligently adapting to and following the demands in their 500-meter operating radius. Overall, the network generates an instant market study that can be employed for larger strategic decisions, such as the collaboration with a manufacturer or the development of a product range. 7-Eleven Japan can also insist that competing suppliers cooperate to gain access to its market. From 1976 on, the company began to develop a delivery system that would allow for the consolidation of products before they arrived in storesa revolution in the Japanese distribution system, which is still more fragmented and layered than that of any other advanced nation. Guaranteeing freshness and efficiency, deliveries now combine products from different suppliers in a system that categorizes products by temperature requirements rather than by producer or wholesaler. Perishable items are strictly just-in-time delivery. Vehicles follow a timetable that may give them no more than a 30-minute margin of error when delivering to a store, subject to some form of compensation in case the delivery is too late. With numbers so small and life spans so short, goods are just transient incarnations of the field of information that constitutes the convenience store. Conversely, they are the link, the sampling device, the sensory organ through which the metabolism of the stores adapts to the metabolism of the city. INFORMATIONINDIVIDUALS | Of the 1.8 billion customers that visited 7-Eleven Japan stores in 1994, each was keyed in by store clerks according to age group, gender and items purchased. From these visits some 7 billion pieces of point-of-sales data were collected on the range of customers, sales volume of all products, type of products sold out and changes in sales patterns. Thus the stores gather up-to-date data on the constitution of their neighborhood far beyond any tax statistics or census information. It is a system that captures the faintest of trends and fads. In its iterative and evolutionary process of €ne-tuning to demands, however, the reasons why consumers prefer certain goods over others become quite irrelevant. The convenience stores react so fluidly to consumers desires that they become perfectly organized and soothingly clean prosthetic extensions. In sharp contrast to the often crammed living quarters of the single working urbanite, the convenience stores have been described as "salons." The people who frequent them tend to belong to the younger age groups: In 1997, 36 percent were in their 20s, 19 percent in their teens and 18 percent in their 30s; unmarried men accounted for 39 percent of the shoppers. Due to the precisely calibrated inventory, customers encounter not only a perfect representation of daily life, but also an undepletable source of organization in the midst of the vagaries, complications and general ennui of urban existence. Overall, the 7-Eleven chain sells more food than any other retailer in Japan, outstripping even the largest superstore chain, Lawson. Many Tokyo residents visit the convenience store several times a day, using it as an extension of their own refrigerators. To the store, customers and products are all the same, data that are captured, analyzed and reshuffled. Perfectly value free, so it seems, the store emulates diversity and change in a regime of utmost control. Increasingly, the stores become hubs for other kinds of information. 7-Eleven Japan pioneered the electronic payment of electric and gas bills in its stores. The company asks no fee for this service, but sees the time in its network as an investment in data. Subsequently, the service has been expanded to include payment of life-insurance premiums, television and telephone bills, as well as other utilities. Customers far prefer the in-store service to that of a bank, and in the fiscal year 1994 over 10 million such electronic payments were made. The electronic network can also be used to ensure the delivery of fresh flowers or made-to-order lunch boxes. In the future, regulations are expected to be eased for the convenience stores handling of pharmaceuticals and travel-related services, so that after picking up a supply of Viagra, customers will be booking their trip to Europe. Already, mail-order companies do business through the convenience stores, their extended opening hours a clear advantage over the post offices that also serve as a venue for catalogues. Convenience stores have developed into a one-stop urban amenity, an interface of urban life with the flow of information. Like the goods themselves, they are sensors by which this flow perceives the environment and through which it evolves; they are anchors for the increasing amount of intangible qualities that brands sell, substrate for "added value." ELECTRONIC KEIRETSU | Convenience stores in Japan are highly consolidated. The top three chains7-Eleven owned by Ito-Yokado, Lawson by Daiei and FamilyMart by Saisonaccount for over half the market, 7-Eleven being the market leader with approximately a one-third share. All the big corporations have an entire array of retail formats, ranging from department stores to supermarkets, from banks to insurance companies. Saisons founder, Tsutsumi Seiji, has described the corporation as a rhizome, the horizontal underground plant stem (conduit for ideas) for the core-company shoots above. As the convenience stores are linked by a network of shared information, so are the larger constituents of these conglomerates. Moreover, companies with similar attitudes tend to enter into strategic alliances and exchange data much like "electronic Keiretsu." In 1990 7-Eleven Japan acquired the bankrupt American Southland Corporationowner of 7-Eleven America from which Ito-Yakado purchased its area franchise in 1974revamping it according to Japanese principles. It has reimported a system that has been streamlined in the metabolism of Japan and is connecting it to the networks of American counterparts. Much of the distribution is being handled by the Wal-Mart subsidiary McLane Company, which is, itself, interesting to Ito-Yakado. At one level, the structure of a city can be perceived by its blocks, roads and parks. On a different level, the city can be seen as a composition of convenience stores, each one ever so slightly affecting rental and real estate values in its surroundings. These chain stores overlay a new network of points onto the city network whose mode of expansion and contraction is much freer and more elastic compared to the physical structure of the city. Deceptively mundane, the stores are ephemeral polling and pollinating organs, transient fruit-bodies of information. Behind the scenes, the information networks are increasingly integrated, connecting the store to a worldwide repository of proprietary data and know-how. By investing in Bit Structuresthe underlying metabolismrather than inventory, production or large real estate, 7-Eleven Japan is able continuously to update in an environment of rapid obsolescence and to follow any shift in the landscape of shopping. It represents a system that can follow the metabolism of the city, with ease and even profit. The metabolists attempted an expression of the collective, a proposition for the coexistence of technology and man and for a Japanese form of modernist individualism. They proposed group forms and megastructures to gain conceptual control and to achieve formal coherence in a city of accelerated modernization. But as captives of the ideal of single concept and sole agent and as producers of form, they were confined to mere representation. Tokyos convenience stores conjure an urbanism where capital acts in the city almost without friction, where a corporation achieves coherence of concept and identity in the urban realm with relative ease by means of information and brand management and where diversity and freedom of choice are represented (rather than truly enabled) by the anticipation and creation of desire. The network is oblivious to actual content and impermeable to individual intervention, yet constantly fine-tuning itself to the metabolism of the city. It is the metabolists dream in its starkest, most pragmatic and so far most successful implementation. The problem of the metabolists was that they were architects. back to index |
||
|
|||
 |