Am I missing something? There is a 30 year waitlist, but they make a loss on every croquette sold because they refuse to raise the price?
The notoriety also has led to increased orders of other products from customers far away through the internet.
I guess the 30 year waitlist also helps with the marketing. Presumably, almost no one will actually wait that long.
Wish the author had at least asked that question.
To state a more obvious thing: you can sell many croquettes, but selling larger portions of beef means you are gong to be involved in less transactions per yen. And the margins are going to be much better anyways.
Another thing that is true with more family oriented businesses is that the objective is often not to maximize profit. Of course people want sales, and healthy and stable businesses, but Japan in particular is rife with stories of something becoming very popular all of a sudden and the restaurant owner just gets overwhelmed and overall is negative on the extra business. This is probably the top point, the whole exercise of running a butcher is up to the personal whims of the people working there, and so often is not about min-maxing.
Normal retail stores do this all the time. Sell something relatively cheap on a small loss to get you through the door and hope to make it up when you buy something else while you are there.
They did raise the price.
They do it as a promotion and they believe that associated/follow up sales outweighs the cost.
Not mentioned in the article: it also got them on cnn and probably a lot of other news outlets. If you are a believer in “any promotion is good promotion”.
They got a lot of press coverage out of 200 daily croquettes.