Yen for Living

No raises here: Recently shuttered convenience store

If Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plan to boost inflation and the economy along with it is to succeed, companies will have to raise employee salaries and wages, otherwise there will be no increase in consumer spending. Earlier this week, a number of automotive companies and electronics makers said they would go along with this plan and announced bigger bonuses, seemingly as a gesture of support for Abe’s scheme. However, one company got the jump on all of them, the #2 convenience store chain Lawson. The company’s president, Takeshi Ninami, who happens to also serve on the government’s Advisory Panel on Industrial Competitiveness, said earlier this month that employees “in their 20s to their 40s” would be eligible for a pay hike of 3 percent, or one percentage point higher than Abe’s inflation target.

Ninami told Nihon Keizai Shimbun that Lawson employees in this age group account for 70 percent of the company’s workforce. It should be noted that the vast majority of Lawson employees who interface with the public, meaning clerks at Lawson’s stores, are not eligible, since they are either hired by the franchise owners or, if the store is company-owned, employed as part-time help (arubaito). Ninami admitted this to Nikkei, but said that Lawson would try to “secure higher incomes” for these workers by implementing “activities to increase profits for our franchisees, starting in March.”

In response, Seven and i Holdings, which runs the No. 1 convenience store chain 7-11, and Family Mart, which operates the No. 3 chain, will also boost pay to stay competitive, since there’s a danger some of their regular employees might bolt to Lawson if they don’t. Ostensibly, however, or at least according to Tokyo Shimbun, the convenience store industry believes it needs to support the Abe plan because retail “is very close to the consumer” and thus must provide an example that could help open tightly closed wallets. Because convenience stores have continued to do well even during the recession, and retail workers tend to be paid less per hour than workers in other industries, CS companies need to take the lead in the hope that other distribution-related firms will also increase wages and, as a result, boost consumption in general.

Domestic consumption accounts for 60 percent of Japan’s GDP. That’s why Abe stood in front of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) and two other business associations in February and bowed deeply, asking them to increase salaries. They reacted “cautiously,” saying that the business situation is “still difficult,” but Abe probably expected that. He made sure cameras were there to record it so that the public would know that he was trying and other business leaders might be shamed into going along. Then Ninami, who is basically part of the Abe team, announced Lawson’s wage plan. In addition, Family Mart announced its wage hike right after economic reconstruction minister, Akira Amari, told reporters that he hoped the company would do exactly that.

Specifically, Lawson will increase bonuses for 3,300 of its 3,500 regular employees for an overall 3 percent boost in employee income. The 54 group companies of Seven & i Holdings comprise 53,500 regular employees, who will receive a “base up“ — meaning all affected receive a uniform raise — in addition to regularly scheduled individual salary increases (teikishoku) based on position, age and number of years at the company. Family Mart will give 2,700 of its 3,100 regular employees a 1.5 percent raise in teikishoku and a 0.7 percent bonus increase.

As Tokyo Shimbun points out these measures are mostly cosmetic. Since more and more workers are non-regular employees of the people they work for, there is no chance for a boost in inflation unless they get wage increases as well, and except for Ninami’s vague promise to “increase profits for franchises,” no one has said anything about non-regular and part-time workers, including major media. To give some idea of the scale involved, there are more than 13,000 7-11 franchises and 400 company-owned stores; the respective breakdown for Lawson is about 9,300 to 1,000; and for Family Mart its 7,500 to 450. Franchise employees are paid by the franchise owner, not the company whose name is on the store.

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Just add rice.

The newly elected Liberal Democratic Party government and the Bank of Japan have set an inflation target of 2 percent as a means of reviving the economy. It’s a plan that has been met with as much skepticism as approval, but what sort of impact will it have on the average person? According to an analysis in the Asahi Shimbun, inflation has only exceeded 2 percent several times in the last 25 years. In 1989, when the consumption tax went into effect, and 1997, when the tax was raised, consumer prices spiked for obvious reasons. In the early 90s, after the bubble burst, it went up due to an increase in the global price of oil, but during that period wages also went up by 4.8 percent, so the increase wasn’t that noticeable. In the summer of 2008, just before the subprime crisis, consumer prices went up by 2.4 percent, also due to a rise in energy costs, but wages actually decreased by 0.3 percent. It’s this dynamic between consumer prices and wages that determines how the public “feels” inflation. According to Japan’s Tax Bureau, the average income of salaried workers in 1997 was ¥4.67 million, and in 2011 it was ¥4.09 million. In terms of total money, Japanese salaried employees earn ¥25 trillion less than they did at the peak of the bubble era. Some of this loss in buying power has been offset by the attendant decrease in retail prices. Anyone who lived in Japan during the bubble will tell you that consumer prices were very high, especially when compared to those in other countries, so the subsequent drop doesn’t seem unnatural.

All of which is to say that we plan to post occasional observations about price changes over time as a means of putting Abenomics — whose core strategy is to boost inflation — in perspective. First up: retort curry, meaning prepared curry topping in a pouch that is heated in a pan of boiling water. Except for noodles, it’s the most common instant meal in Japan and there are dozens of retort curry product lines. The volume of a single serving package is usually 200-210 grams, with higher end products topping out at ¥300 retail per piece. However, above the ¥100 price line, there really isn’t that much difference from one brand to another except maybe in terms of meat volume.

Below ¥100 is where the competition lies, and in that price range the most representative brand is House’s Kariya. Though the recommended retail price is ¥120, after the turn of the millennium Kariya usually retailed for about ¥98 in line with the “one coin” marketing strategy that said people tended to resist a product once its price floated above ¥100. Following deflationary patterns over the course of the decade, Kariya’s price actually dropped, first to ¥88 and then to ¥78, in discount and drug stores that specialized in bulk sales. The spread of such stores put pressure on regular supermarket chains to also reduce the price of Kariya, since it was so popular. Last weekend, we found it on sale at our local discount drug store for ¥68. That’s even cheaper than generic brands, which usually go for ¥296 for a set of four pouches. More significantly, the price of other brands of retort curry has also come down, and while none are as low as ¥68, more have drifted below the ¥100 line. This means a curry meal can actually cost less than two convenience store onigiri (¥200), the standard model for a cheap lunch, since a microwave package of prepared white rice is ¥80-¥90. Of course, non-instant curry, made from packaged roux, costs less per serving, but retort curry will likely become even more in demand with the projected increase in single-person households, and so we predict it will resist any inflationary pressure.

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