Long lines at the time of opening! IZUMIYA IZUMIYA SC Hirakata, which was the “best store in the area,” used to have almost all of its own sales floors, with food supermarkets and clothing stores on the lower floors and home electronics stores on the upper floors. In the past, most of the sales floors were owned by the company. The term “GMS” (General Merchandise Store) is an industry term for a type of business that also owns non-specialty sales floors. The GMS format is a specialty of stores such as Daiei in the Kansai region and Ito-Yokado in the Kanto region, and from the high-growth period of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, they recorded explosive sales throughout the country. IZUMIYA was no exception, and the Hirakata store, when it opened in 1970 (at that time, it was called “Izumiya”), recorded exceptional sales of 120 million yen in three days, and was so busy that the surrounding streets were paralyzed by waiting lines of cars. Hirakata City, which had a population of about 200,000 when IZUMIYA opened, doubled in size and developed into a “bedroom town with commuting access to Osaka and Kyoto” along with the neighboring city of Neyagawa. The Kuzuha Mall, Daiei Kori Store (already closed), Neyagawa Green City (closed after the conversion to AEON), and Daiei Kyobashi Store (already closed), all located within a few kilometers of each other, were all among the top-ranking stores in Japan in terms of sales and customer traffic, and people related to the distribution and urban development industry at the time, People in the distribution and urban development industries at the time used the stores along the Keihan Main Line as a reference for development.
© Source travel watch