Daiso fixed 100 yen price, then made costs fit

Hirotake Yano started out in 1972 hawking miscellaneous goods from the back of a truck under the name Yano Shoten, moving from town to town and selling whatever he could source cheaply. Individually pricing and tagging a truckload of unrelated items ate into the time he could spend actually selling, so he began charging a flat 100 yen for everything instead — a shortcut born out of a traveling vendor's logistics problem, not a pricing strategy.

He incorporated the business as Daiso in 1977 and kept the flat price as the company grew into fixed stores, opening the first shop under the Daiso name in 1991. The constraint that started as a way to save time on price tags now had to hold across an entire assortment of manufactured goods, at a scale where any given item genuinely priced at 100 yen would usually be too cheap to make without feeling like junk.

Yano kept 100 yen as a fixed ceiling and treated it as the starting point of every sourcing decision rather than the end point of a cost calculation: instead of finding a product, costing it, and adding margin to set a price, Daiso's buyers negotiate directly with manufacturers for large-volume orders — placing bulk commitments for millions of units at a time, a scale strategy Yano himself compared to Walmart's — specifically to push a product's landed cost down until it could clear the 100 yen ceiling without cutting the quality customers would notice. Not every item ends up costing exactly 1