Supermarket Woman (film)
What a 1990s Japanese romcom has to share about running a business
The filings of publicly traded companies are not the only intellectually stimulating business content I am finding in Japan. Supermarket Woman is a Japanese romcom about a struggling supermarket that faces a new aggressive competitor and seeks to turnaround its operation. I want to briefly highlight how it presents a realistic, and therefore useful, portrait of the interpersonal relations that reflect the difficulties of any business.
The movie has a familiar plot. A family owned supermarket, Honest Goro, that is tired and traditional is on its last legs when a brash discount modern supermarket, Discounts Galore, opens nearby. Hanako, an old classmate of Goro’s owner, helps to turn it around using housewife common sense. She encounters a mix of hurdles – gender norms, tradition, resistance to change. Movie ensues.
At the beginning of the movie, Goro’s owner is a drunkard, the store has trash on the floor, the onigiri is cut with subpar ingredients, and the meat and fish on the shelves is graying and rotting. Stale food gets repackaged with a new date. Cashiers don’t know the difference between lettuce and cabbage, and argue with customers about deciding not to purchase an item after it has been rung up. The specials signs aren’t taken down and then the company must keep honoring the prices and losing money. This is an amateur operation with deservedly poor results.
Hanako, a determined and well meaning person, reorients the business around treating the customer fairly and stopping any deceptive practices. She recognizes that things sell when they are well priced, which helps inventory turnover so that the products are always fresh and customers keep coming back. The movie is not notable for stating textbook best practices, but for how it is not exactly easy to implement them. There is resistance every step from the other managers, senior employees, junior employees, and suppliers.
The senior butcher wants to hand slice Kobe beef all day and put it at the center of the beef aisle. This is at the expense of ground meat that most shoppers actually want to buy. The ground meat is unattractive and the Kobe beef doesn’t really sell, a lose-lose. When pressed about this, the head butcher says “folding screens and business fall flat on their back if they are straight.” Goro’s original strategy is to raise the price on ground meat to make up for the losses on not selling the Kobe beef, which also hurts ground beef volumes. Goro’s eventually starts selling fresh daily ground meat and all of the housewives quickly buy it. The junior butchers are proud to tell the customers that they grind it fresh and even offer to freshly grind more for them right on the spot. Navigating the dynamic of change, both in identifying the need for and then communicating it to a reluctant party, is a recurring scenario that plays out in the movie.
The film even covers supplier relations. Kanako sees that the cod roe onigiri doesn’t sell and tastes funky. She visits the supplier and finds out he cuts it with 10% of much cheaper smelt roe. He says that everyone does it. Goro’s doesn’t want to deceive their customers though, so Kanako asks the supplier to consider the supermarket as the supplier’s own storefront. He is asked to set his own cost and told Goro’s will do their best to sell them. Goro’s and the supplier have a very successful taste testing with housewives. The supplier joyfully cries upon witnessing this – he has never met this end users and is touched by the reception.
What is my point exactly? Consumer facing businesses, such as supermarkets, are not very different from any other business at the human level. The mediocrity that emerges from complacency, the complex web of human relationships that can thwart any attempts to change, or the gravity of average business practices requiring concerted effort to rise above it are present across the business world. These are amongst the many forces constantly exerting themselves on quagmire stocks like Hertz, Jack in the Box, Dave & Busters, Thryv, Albertsons, Rentokil, Advance Auto Parts, or PPG. Investors let down by these names seem to be overlooking the daily difficulty of running a business.
None of this is to say Supermarket Woman is a film that will make you a good stock picker, but it is a helpful approximation of everything an excel model will never reveal. Representations of commerce in film are rarely done from the perspective of the mundane aspects of managing a mediocre business requiring change (Wolf of Wall Street, Margin Call, You’ve Got Mail, The Founder, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, The Insider), which is why I’ve chosen to highlight Supermarket Woman.