AEON reopens a 44-year-old former Daiei site in Shin-Matsudo as a food-and-drug store

AEON opened AEON Style Shin-Matsudo on 15 July at 3-2-2 Shin-Matsudo in Matsudo City, Chiba Prefecture, according to the company — a new store on a site that has carried a large-format retailer for roughly 44 years.

The site opened as Daiei Shin-Matsudo Store in November 1981 and was rebranded AEON Food Style Shin-Matsudo in August 2019, AEON said. The new store occupies a seven-storey building on a roughly 14,248-square-metre plot, with about 5,160 square metres of sales floor and parking for 727 cars and more than 500 bicycles.

AEON is running the store as a food-and-drug format, pairing groceries with health, beauty and pharmacy departments. The second floor carries fresh fish sourced from Tokyo's Toyosu Market, locally grown vegetables, prepared foods, a bakery and pizzeria, and rotisserie chicken and tempura counters, according to the company. The first floor groups Korean skincare brands Anua, d'Alba and Medicube alongside budget cosmetics lines Cezanne and Canmake, an AEON Pharmacy that fills prescriptions from any clinic nationwide, and baby and pet-care sections. AEON also plans to add online grocery delivery from 27 July.

The format is AEON's now-familiar answer to two pressures at once: drugstore chains that have kept pulling grocery spend out of supermarkets, and a shrinking, ageing local population that a straight food supermarket alone struggles to serve. That is the logic behind pairing the grocery floor with a nationwide-prescription pharmacy and a health-check corner AEON calls its Genki Support Station, in a Chiba suburb well outside Tokyo's densest retail catchment.