Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world’s largest retailer, said half the stores hampered by Japan’s strongest earthquake will resume normal operations today as residents struggle to find water, food and other necessities.
A dozen of Wal-Mart’s Seiyu stores in the quake-hit Sendai area will reopen their doors today for full operations after having been limited mostly to relief efforts for two weeks, said Scott Price, Wal-Mart’s Asia chief, in an interview yesterday. Of the remaining 12 stores, 10 will be opened as soon as possible and two may take a “long time” because they’re covered in mud, he said.
Retailers from Wal-Mart to 7-Eleven operator Seven and I Holdings Co are racing to reopen stores and replenish shelves after the March 11 disaster left hundreds of thousands in the Tohoku region, northeast Japan, scrambling for shelter, food and water. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami knocked out more than 1,000 stores in the Tohoku and Kanto regions, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Seven to 9 percent of Japan’s convenience stores are located in the earthquake-hit Tohoku region, with less than half having to close, according to March 16 estimates by Goldman Sachs.
Seven and I, Japan’s biggest retailer, has managed to keep about 95 percent of its 1,454 shops in Tohoku and Ibaraki open, according to Katsuhiko Shimizu, a spokesman for the company. Still, communication with the devastated areas remains difficult, he said.
Tsuruha Holdings Inc, Japan’s third-biggest drugstore chain by market value, had to halt operations at 14 outlets in Tohoku and Ibaraki, spokesman Hiroyuki Fukuuchi said. After the earthquake hit, the company resorted to ad hoc methods to serve customers who needed to purchase supplies, he said.
FamilyMart Co had 585 stores closed in Tohoku as of Saturday, while Lawson Inc have yet to reopen 911 shops in the region, according to spokespeople at the convenience-store operators.
Wal-Mart, whose Japan operations consist of 371 Seiyu outlets nationwide, said it began handing out bottled water and noodles from the parking lots of its stores less than four hours after the earthquake hit. The company said it gave away about US$650,000 of products in the first four days.
“The best service we could provide to our customers was to get our stores open in the affected area where possible, even if it meant just handing out mass amounts of bottled water and instant noodles,” said Price, whose wife’s family is from Sendai. “We were only able to start selling in store in some of these once our engineers had tested the structural integrity of the stores.”
The company also said it would donate US$5 million in cash and kind, on top of donations collected by a fund-raising campaign involving its international operations, from Argentina and Brazil to China.
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