The Single-Price Store
Woolworth's first store (February 1879, Utica, New York) failed in three months. The store he opened that June in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, took — and the five-and-dime spread across America, until in 1913 he paid $13.5 million in cash for the tallest building in the world. It reached Japan in 1926 as Takashimaya's ten-sen stores, 106 of them at the peak: the direct ancestors of today's 100-yen shops. Daiso's Hirotake Yano started in 1972, selling housewares from a truck. «Make it 100 yen» — the answer he gave customers because there was no time to put price tags on, an anecdote so settled that it became the headline of his obituary. Not a strategy; an accident. The original Woolworth closed its last American store in 1997. The inventor's shops are gone, and the model flourishes in the country that imported it — a trade model owes no loyalty to its birthplace.
The myth, corrected
The 100-yen shop is a Japanese invention
Woolworth's five-cent store opened in 1879. Forty-seven years later, in 1926, Takashimaya opened its «everything ten sen» floor — and Takashimaya's own records say it modelled the idea on the American dime store. Even the fixed-shop 100-yen store was first opened in Japan by a small shop called Life in Aichi in 1985; Daiso's first directly run store came in 1991. Go further back and Edo had the «nineteen-mon stalls» of the 1720s. The single price has been re-invented over and over.