Work-life balance, profits, fair prices, and successors must be considered or the business will close early.

＜prologue＞

I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.

So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.

It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.

It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.

If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.

I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.

my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています

my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X

There are many restaurants in Takatsuki City, where I live, but many restaurants are opening one after another and closing before you know it.

The “closure rate within one year” of the restaurant industry is 18.9%, which is by far the highest among all industries. According to the White Paper on Small and Medium Enterprises, the “business closure rate within one year” for sole proprietorships is 37.7%, and only 11.6% survive for the next 10 years.

It sounds good to say “giving up too soon,” but there are several reasons for this.

１．Management with Work-Life Balance in Mind

(1) “Hyakushoku-ya,” a set meal restaurant limited to 100 meals a day

This is a restaurant run by Akemi Nakamura, who has become famous as the “power mom” who runs a restaurant limited to 100 meals a day, overturning the conventional wisdom of restaurants.

She operates three restaurants in Kyoto, including “Hyakushoku-ya” and has published a book titled “Let’s Reduce Sales. She has also published a book titled “Let’s Reduce Sales. What I Found was Liberation from Performance Supremacy”.

The “steak donburi” that her husband made for dinner was so delicious that she coaxed him, who was an office worker at the time, into opening the restaurant. The business model of the restaurant is “open only for lunch. The restaurant has attracted attention for its business model of “open only for lunch and close when sold out” and for achieving a good work-life balance for its employees.

There are also other small-scale inns that “limit the number of guests per day,” small-scale bakeries that “close for business as soon as they run out,” and small-scale Japanese restaurants that “limit the number of customers with reservations,” which may be based on the same concept.

FamilyMart’s decision to “only sell by reservation” on “Summer Eel Day” in 2019 is, I believe, from the perspective of “reducing food loss” and “correcting excessive sales quotas for employees,” but there is a similarity in the meaning of “management by shrinkage” and “management that fits one’s size.

２．Profitable Management

This is “cost-conscious management” in reverse.

(1) Restaurants run by retired salarymen will go out of business in a month.

I have written an article before titled, “Do people who appear on ‘Paradise for Life’ lead happy lives afterwards?

Retired businessmen who are coffee connoisseurs often start coffee shops as their second life. However, if they have a splendid roasting machine and other equipment, prepare a wide variety of coffee beans, hire young female staff, and serve high quality coffee at a “low price,” they will go out of business within a month. If you continue to force your business, your losses will only continue to increase.

If you do not set a “fair price” that is commensurate with your costs, you will not be able to run your business.

This is a story introduced in “HORIE MON’S STYLE OF RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT” written by Takafumi Horie.

(2) Open 24/7, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is a big loss.

The “24-hour business” that became an issue in 2019 at 7-Eleven, the largest convenience store chain, is not only a problem of employee shortage for franchise owners, but I believe that sales during late night hours are probably not worth the cost of utilities, labor, and other costs.

I hope that not only convenience stores but also department stores and other retailers as a whole will move to “restore regular holidays.

Although not a convenience store, Kin no Buta, an all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu restaurant, is “open from 5 p.m. on weekdays. On weekends and holidays, it opens at 12:00 p.m.” This makes sense. This is probably because, unlike other family restaurants, Kin-no-Buta mainly offers a “dinner” menu.

3. management with fair prices in mind

(1) Calpis will raise prices to stop excessive competition for market share through price wars

This is a decision by Asahi Breweries, which sells Calpis, and I believe it is the right decision.

(2) Nissan is reviewing sales with real discounts due to excessive sales incentives

Under the management policy of Carlos Ghosn, who is suspected of violating the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (misstatement in securities reports) as well as business embezzlement and special breach of trust, the company tried to increase its market share by “sales supremacy,” which led to years of real price discounts with excessive sales incentives in North America. As a result, the reputation of “Nissan = cheap cars” became entrenched. Reversing this situation will be as difficult as restoring trust and confidence.。

４．Other management considerations

(1) Successors

In order to keep your business going for a long time, you need to keep your successor in mind. You may not have time to think about this when you first open your business, but once your business gets going, you will need to envision what the future should look like.