Low table turnover, so how did it become Japan's No. 3?

Order one cup and sit for an hour, and no one asks you to leave.
That is because it has its own way of earning without freeing up seats.

In 1968, a 23-year-old opened a coffee house in western Nagoya. His family ran a rice shop. At a time when taking over the family business was expected, his father let his son go his own way, and the company says that gratitude lives in its name: kome from the rice shop and Taro from his name make Komeda. Starting with the first shop, from 1970 it let neighbors use the same sign as well.

Its slogan is くつろぐ、いちばんいいところ, meaning the best place to relax. It calls itself 街のリビングルーム, the living room of the town. Its formal trade name is 珈琲所コメダ珈琲店. 珈琲所 means a place that sells coffee, and the company explains that 珈琲 appears twice because of the founder's love of coffee.

On February 8, 1977, a 200-seat shop opened in the Nagoya suburbs, with parking for 54 cars. Introduced the same day was シロノワール (Shiro-Noir). The founder named this dessert himself, and it now sells 8.5 million a year. Coffee was brought to the table rather than picked up at the counter, and every cup comes with a bag of 豆菓子 (bean crackers).

Not アサ but モーニング (morning). It came from Ichinomiya, next to Nagoya, in the 1950s: a kindness of coffee shops that served boiled eggs and peanuts to textile merchants who came for business talks. From opening until 11 a.m., order one drink and toast and a boiled egg come with it. When the first shop opened in Yokohama in 2003, a customer asked, "But I didn't order any bread?"

Customers at self-service cafés sit for about 30 minutes and spend 700 yen. Komeda customers sit for an hour and spend 1,500 yen. If people stay twice as long, each seat can serve that many fewer customers. By the usual math, that is a loss.

The answer is in the head office's books. Café franchises usually take 5–8% of sales as royalties. As sales grow, the head office's share grows too. Turnover is the head office's profit. Komeda does not use that math. Its royalty is 1,500 yen per seat per month. For a 90-seat shop that is 135,000 yen a month, about 1.7% if monthly sales are put at 8 million yen. Even if sales double, the royalty the head office receives stays the same. The head office earns its money elsewhere: wholesale, selling coffee beans, bread, and red bean paste to its franchisees. That is why the Tokyo Stock Exchange classifies the company not as a restaurant but as a wholesaler.

Since the head office's share does not grow when franchisees earn more, more people wanted the sign. In 1993 it set up a company dedicated to franchising, and in 2016 it listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange with more than 700 locations. In 2023 it opened its 1,000th shop in Shimbashi, Tokyo. Today there are 1,150 locations, nine in ten of them franchises. This happened while Japan's neighborhood coffee shops, 150,000 in 1981, fell to less than half that number.

Worth adding: crowded shops today sometimes post a 90- or 120-minute time limit. Still, a café where you can stay as long as you like does not make money by freeing up seats.
Perhaps a café people want to return to is a place where they want to stay a long time.