If Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plan to boost inflation and the economy along with it is to succeed, companies will have to raise employee salaries and wages, otherwise there will be no increase in consumer spending. Earlier this week, a number of automotive companies and electronics makers said they would go along with this plan and announced bigger bonuses, seemingly as a gesture of support for Abe's scheme. However, one company got the jump on all of them, the #2 convenience store chain Lawson. The company's president, Takeshi Ninami, who happens to also serve on the government's Advisory Panel on Industrial Competitiveness, said earlier this month that employees "in their 20s to their 40s" would be eligible for a pay hike of 3 percent, or one percentage point higher than Abe's inflation target.
Ninami told Nihon Keizai Shimbun that Lawson employees in this age group account for 70 percent of the company's workforce. It should be noted that the vast majority of Lawson employees who interface with the public, meaning clerks at Lawson's stores, are not eligible, since they are either hired by the franchise owners or, if the store is company-owned, employed as part-time help (arubaito). Ninami admitted this to Nikkei, but said that Lawson would try to "secure higher incomes" for these workers by implementing "activities to increase profits for our franchisees, starting in March."
In response, Seven and i Holdings, which runs the No. 1 convenience store chain 7-11, and Family Mart, which operates the No. 3 chain, will also boost pay to stay competitive, since there's a danger some of their regular employees might bolt to Lawson if they don't. Ostensibly, however, or at least according to Tokyo Shimbun, the convenience store industry believes it needs to support the Abe plan because retail "is very close to the consumer" and thus must provide an example that could help open tightly closed wallets. Because convenience stores have continued to do well even during the recession, and retail workers tend to be paid less per hour than workers in other industries, CS companies need to take the lead in the hope that other distribution-related firms will also increase wages and, as a result, boost consumption in general.