Re: [tlug] ... Rant about Akihabara

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > It is kind of funny that T-Zone has closed down, given that 
 > Bic Camera and Yodobashi Camera have succeeded.  So, it 
 > isn't like such a large superstore cannot succeed.

T-Zone wasn't that big, actually (I never could find much of interest
there, anyway, and their selection of books was crap).  I think that,
as you point out, the important thing was television and digital
cameras and video.  The Japanese companies were making huge profits in
the early to mid 2000s, and I suppose they passed some of that on.  On
the other hand, PCs and peripherals were already getting squeezed, and
a lot of computer-oriented companies and stores bet on stuff that
never did make them a lot of money: PDAs, dictionaries, stuff like
that, and software.  The way those superstores are set up, they need
people to make 100,000yen purchases or they find it hard to pay their
employees.  People just don't buy enough units of anything (except
keitais -- where the real money goes to the providers -- and AKB48 CDs
in "general election" season ;-) to compete with Amazon.  Cameras are
a better bet for the "besuto puraisu" scam on tourists, too.

Another issue is that I suspect that there aren't as many computer
geeks as there were then (or maybe we're all still around, but it's
not a growth market).