Tokusen Ichiba (クロネコヤマトの得選市場)

» see kuronekoyamato.co.jp/tokusen as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In Turkey the heavy thing that comes to your door is water. Nineteen-liter damacana jugs arrive by van because nobody is carrying that up four flights from the market, and the arrangement is ordinary enough that nobody here remarks on it. Japan solved the same problem from the other end. Instead of a water company building a delivery fleet, the country's largest parcel carrier looked at the fleet it already had going to every address in the country and decided to put something in the van.

What it put in the van was toilet paper. 得選市場 went on sale in June 1997 and Yamato Transport's own corporate history records it in plain terms as オリジナル物販商品第1号, own-brand merchandise product number one. The company that moves other people's boxes for a living had been in business for nearly eighty years at that point without ever selling a product of its own, and when it finally did, the product was toilet rolls.

The reasoning is written into the shop's own description, which lists what it stocked as things indispensable to daily life and things too heavy or too bulky to be worth the trip home from the shops. That is the whole brief. Yamato was not trying to be a retailer. It had identified the narrow set of goods where the cost of getting them home exceeds anything interesting about the goods themselves, and it owned the cheapest way in Japan to get something home.

Tateyama spring water joined in November 1998, sold as six two-liter pouches for a thousand yen, and only in five regions of the country. A softer two-ply toilet paper arrived in June 1999. By 2000 a pack landed at your door for 480 yen with nothing added for delivery, and you could put it on a standing order.

~ the case file ~

~ you could not buy it on the website ~

There was a page for 得選市場 on kuronekoyamato.co.jp from at least October 2000, and it never became a shop. The page described the goods and told you how to get them, which was to speak to your セールスドライバー, the sales driver assigned to your area, or to ring up. There is no basket anywhere in it.

That arrangement survived the whole rise of Japanese e-commerce. In 2016 the page was still directing you to a driver or to a Yamato branch counter, with the toilet paper at 497 yen and delivery free, payable in cash or with transport-card electronic money, which had been added in May 2011. A J-CAST piece in March 2020 found it taking orders by telephone at 510 yen, one pack per customer. The ordering model that shipped in 1997 was still the ordering model twenty-three years later, and the website spent all of those years as a brochure.

~ down to five kinds of toilet paper ~

Yamato posted the notice on 5 July 2021 under the heading 「得選市場」「デリバリー・プラス」等の販売終了のお知らせ. Orders would be accepted up to Tuesday 31 August 2021 and no further, with a caveat that individual items might stop earlier once stock ran out, so the real last day varied by what you were buying.

The list of what was ending tells you what had become of it. 得選市場（トイレットペーパー5種すべて）, all five varieties of toilet paper. The water was long gone and so was everything else. A line that had opened with a plan about heavy and bulky household goods closed as a paper merchant with five products. Going out alongside it was デリバリー・プラス, a catalog of food and daily goods, together with an unnamed residue of regional food lines.

No reason is given. The notice thanks customers for their patronage and stops. Yamato had announced a company-wide restructuring the year before, and this single notice closed two other side businesses alongside 得選市場, but the document itself offers no cause for any of them. What is on the page is a date and a thank-you, for a product that had been in the back of the van since 1997.

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