Tesco Express

I’m trying to get back to writing regularly, and in the last few days a new story came up in Japan, that turned out to be pretty interesting, and –rather usefully- actually on topic for this blog. You'll see why in a bit...

Tesco (a big retail store in the UK, for those from outside of the country) has recently moved into Japan under the name of "Tesco Express" Apparently they first started to investigate Japan about 7 years ago and only recently began to “move in”. They’ve had people in Japan for this time, just looking at the market and the culture. Apparently one of the things they did over the last three years was place staff in Japanese houses to get an idea of peoples buying patterns.

Japan is known as a graveyard for stores just like for missionaries. Two years ago the second biggest retailer in the world pulled out and the biggest –Walmart- is still making a loss. While Walmart did the same as usual -big stores in out of town retail parks, “low” prices etc, Tesco is going in a radically different direction. They are starting small stores within the city, stores that you can walk to, selling fresh food. They point at the lack of storage space in houses and an aging population can’t or won’t drive to the suburbs. They’re working through local people, building up loyalty with customers in their area.

What has this to do with outreach and storytelling? Well, imagine a church plant researching people and their spirituality for three years before deciding how to go forward. Imagine people living with local families and learning about them, looking at the demographics of a population, finding out their concerns before opening a church. Imagine if local people had spearheaded the outreaches in Japan. Imagine how the local churches here could have looked -both in their architecture and organisation- if they’d taken this approach in the 1850’s, when they were first allowed back here, instead of just trying to import their cultural and denominational way of doing things- which is surely rather like Tesco selling marmite in downtown Tokyo.

Tesco is still Tesco. It’s . not changing what it is, just the way it looks. Tesco Express is still a retail store selling food, but it takes the attitude that it needs to get it right for people to want to come: not expect them to ‘just turn up.

By the way, in answer to the obvious question: they don’t sell whale meat…