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Over the last few years, Japan's retail industry has been hit by collapsing prices. The nation's long recession has led to deflation, with many products discounted by 20-30% or even more--some prices have fallen so low that "fixed price" has little meaning now.
100-yen shops are part of this trend. Everything in these stores is priced at 100 yen. Lots of people are talking about 100-yen shops, and lots of housewives, young people and others are shopping at them.
Daiso Industries started the craze. Daiso is now a big corporation with more than 2,000 stores nationwide, called "The 100 Yen Shop Daiso." The company's sales were 23.3 billion yen in 1995, and a whopping 200 billion yen in 2000. That's a more than 850% increase in only six years! Daiso is still opening new stores at an average of 40 a month. Sales are increasing and new stores are appearing at rates that are reportedly the highest in Japan. If someone says "Daiso" we think "100-yen shop," and vice-versa.
The practice of selling all store items for 100 yen was first seen almost 30 years ago. But the idea is only now attracting a very positive consumer response, probably because the quality of the 100-yen items is very high, even though they're so cheap.
In the past, retailers used to think this way: in a restaurant a cheap cup of coffee would go for about 180 yen, so if the owners wanted to sell it for 100 yen and still make a profit they would have to use a cheaper brand that cost them only around 70 yen.
But according to Daiso, you can sell something for 100 yen even if it's worth more. The strategy is to make wholesale prices work in inverse proportion to quantity. For example, if a retailer can buy 1,000 items from a wholesaler at 1,000 yen per item, the trick is to order hundreds of thousands of them, to bring the price way down. According to this principle, you should keep increasing your order until the cost price drops below 100 yen per item. Then you can sell it for 100 yen, even though it would normally cost 500 or even 1,000 yen elsewhere.
This concept has spread throughout the retail industry, and the end result has been that product quality has improved, relative to price.
In addition to quality, 100-yen shops offer another advantage--they sell a very wide range of goods--and this also explains their popularity. If the shop is large enough, it will handle hundreds of thousands of items, including all kinds of miscellaneous things for day-to-day living, and maybe even things like handicrafts, dictionaries and CDs. You'll find two dozen pairs of scissors, hundreds of different file folders, a thousand varieties of cosmetics--there's such a wide choice it's hard to decide what to get. And new items come in every day, continuing to attract the attention of buyers.
Daiso's president, Yano Hirotake, says, 'We're a bit like a resort, because people find the store fun and exciting. It's fun to choose things that are worth more than the price. If our customers become bored some day, we're finished."
Daiso's success is stimulating other merchants, like some big supermarkets that have begun launching 88-yen shops. The boom shows no signs of subsiding. Cheap one-price stores are spreading beyond Japan's shores, too, opening up in Thailand and other Asian countries. They seem to be doing well.
Maybe the buy-more-to-sell-for-less trend will spread from Japan throughout the world soon. 
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The store is filled with so many things that seem like a fantastic buy:
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(1)
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plastic boxes, each one ready to serve some purpose
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(2)
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cosmetics
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(3)
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from left: earthen pot, and cup, bottle and box cups for drinking sake
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(4)
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kitchen utensils
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(5)
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glass dinnerware.
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