Cash, and No Haggling

In a kimono trade where price was settled by negotiation, Echigoya announced «at the shop front, in cash, with no marked-up price». Ten years after opening in 1673, when the shop moved to Surugacho in 1683, it distributed a printed sheet — «kimono for cash, cheap, no marked-up price» — to almost every household around Nihonbashi. It is among the earliest printed advertisements in Japan, later called hikifuda. One price for everyone was practised here a hundred and seventy-nine years before Le Bon Marché in Paris; since there is no scholarly proof of a «world first», this map records only the comparison of dates. Peter Drucker judged that Mitsui Takatoshi anticipated Sears by some two hundred and fifty years. The shop became Mitsukoshi, and the source of the Mitsui house.