[ad_1]
TOKYO: Sixty-year-old Yashiro Haga is closing his Tokyo noodle ramen shop after 15 years in December, unable to overcome the prospect of a lasting customer drop due to the coronavirus crisis.
“The flow of people has changed because of the coronavirus,” Haga said, standing behind the counter of his shop on the ground floor, Shirohachi. “Customers no longer come in and queue outside the stores.”
The pandemic is damaging Japan’s “family” restaurants, including noodle shops like Haga, at an increasing rate, despite evidence that the government’s massive effort to avoid bankruptcies is working in other sectors of the economy.
Wounded by deflationary pressures and mounting competition in the run-up to the now-delayed Tokyo Olympics, noodle bars are particularly prone to the economic malaise that the pandemic unleashed in the service sector.
Small and medium-sized businesses like Haga’s Noodle Bar employ about 70 percent of Japan’s workers and account for 99.7 percent of the total number of businesses, according to government data, leading some to worry about that a resurgence of COVID-19 could trigger an increase in layoffs among small businesses.
While general bankruptcies among companies with at least 10 million yen ($ 96,228) in liabilities in the six months through October fell 5.2 percent from a year earlier, those in restaurants increased 4.5 percent. , according to data from the private credit company Teikoku Databank.
Bankruptcies among restaurants with less than 10 million yen in liabilities rose 137 percent over the same period, said Tokyo Shoko Research, a firm that tracks similar data, while the total for the service sector, including restaurants, rose. 64.4 percent.
But industry insiders hope that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as local stores often close without an official presentation.
“Many ramen shops will not appear in numbers when they close because they are small, privately owned businesses,” said Haga, who has not received a salary since April.
Hiroaki Nakazawa, a 42-year-old pharmacist who has frequented Shirohachi for about a decade, said he was saddened by its closure. “There is only one place like this.”
At least seven other noodle stands in the central Tokyo area, popular with tourists, where Haga has his tableless shop, which seats nine people at the counter, have already closed since March this year.
Nationwide, 34 ramen companies with at least 10 million yen in liabilities went bankrupt during the first nine months of 2020, also a record for the period, Teikoku Databank said.
LACK OF FUNDS
Another reason experts say the statistics underestimate the true impact of the pandemic on ramen shops is that closing the door is expensive due to the requirements of owners to leave the shops dismantled after a six-month notice period. months.
“There are many companies that lack cash flow,” said Manabu Shintani, CEO of Actpro, a provider of real estate brokerage services.
Among noodle shops, the first to pull out this year were those whose businesses were already on the razor’s edge before COVID-19, often run by elderly owners, said Takeshi Yamamoto, an independent ramen critic who tracks the store closings.
These were followed by a wave of noodle chains closing outlets, and now some places with younger owners are closing, said Yamamoto, who has eaten at more than 10,000 noodle shops.
He estimated that the actual number of ramen shops that closed across the country was about 290 in October and November alone.
The avalanche of closures has helped some. Actpro’s platform for linking businesses looking to close with businesses hoping to move to the vacant location has been a success.
Once a match is made, a restaurant owner and incoming owner negotiate with the owner to cut costs.
The company has seen pairings quadruple to around 70 to 80 a month after the crisis began to take its toll, Shintani said.
Shirohachi’s Haga used about $ 29,000 in government subsidies to go through its shutdown.
She tried offering her noodles via takeout but couldn’t make up for the income she lost after office worker visits decreased due to work-from-home restrictions.
“Even among the most popular places, take-out sales do not exceed” the crisis sales decline, said ramen critic Yamamoto.
