Yen for Living

Aeon’s beer case: Does this look cheap to you?

Late last month, the Fair Trade Commission issued a warning to three liquor wholesalers whom the commission suspected of violating the Antimonopoly Law by selling beer to the supermarket chain Aeon at below cost. It was the first time the FTC ever made such a warning about dumping for alcoholic beverages, and while the media is reporting that the commission apparently does not have enough evidence to prove a clear violation of the law, the FTC has made an exception and issued the warning anyway, which would seem to indicate that it strongly believes some hanky-panky is going on.

The main reason for the warning in this instance is to protect smaller liquor retailers located near Aeon outlets who can’t hope to compete with such low prices. In fact, a closer reading of the coverage would seem to indicate that it is really Aeon who is bending the rules to its advantage rather than the three wholesalers — Mitsubishi Shokuhin, Nihon Shurui Hanbai, Itochu Shokuhin — but in any case the warning was mainly directed at them. Nevertheless, Aeon decided that the adverse publicity attached to the warning was serious enough for it to hold a press conference on July 23. A representative stated that the company made no such demand to the three suppliers to sell them beer at below cost.

Apparently, the FTC was suspicious of dumping as long ago as 2005, when it heard that 10 brands of beer and happoshu (malt liquor) were being sold to Aeon at prices that were below the price they paid to the manufacturers, even with ancillary costs like transportation factored in. Aeon would then add its own margin and, supposedly, still undersell competitors. For instance, the wholesaler would buy a case of beer from a manufacturer for ¥3,800 and then sell it to Aeon for ¥3,700. The wholesaler would supposedly make up for the beer loss by carrying out a business practice known in Japan as arari-mikusu, which means jacking up the prices of other alcoholic beverages they sold to Aeon. Consumers would pay more for these products than they normally would. Such a practice violates National Tax Agency guidelines for fair trade.

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You can buy Daigoro anywhere, even in drug stores like this one

Like many people, I had many surprises when I first arrived in Japan, and one of them was the sight of men (always men) drinking openly on the street. Often it was canned beer, but if any one product was ubiquitous it was One Cup Ozeki, which for years I assumed was actually marketed with street drinking in mind. Actually, it was developed for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as an all-in-one package for nihonshu-lovers. The packaging itself is a sturdy glass “cup” with a metal pull top and a plastic replaceable cover, meaning you can enjoy it without having to provide your own container. This was just the sort of thing that street drinkers, a class of recreationists that includes a good portion of day workers, chronic alcoholics and homeless, were waiting for, so to speak, especially since a 180-ml portion was less than ¥220. In fact, Ozeki, the major sake brewer behind the brand, had to contend with an image that associated One Cup with the indigent. For a while, the company actually embraced this image indirectly with award-winning TV commercials that showed how the cups could double as flower vases and containers for household items, a utility to which the homeless had been putting discarded One Cup Ozeki containers for years.

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