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Trend: Maid Cafés
Written By Sven Kilian on Friday, July 29, 2005 at 9:04 PM | In Marketing Trends, Lifestyle Trends, Japan
With an increasing number of restaurants and cafes popping up and disappearing at the same speed the food and drink sector is looking for new ways of marketing and attending to their guests. In Japan it is all about customer service and satisfaction. While the trend last year was to create shops in cafes, this year’s big themes are bars with magic tricks, performances, relaxation corners and games.
The most attention, however, has been drawn by the emergence of so called “Maid Cafes”, where customers are served by waitresses dress up as French maids out of a Manga magazine. Our Tokyo scout went to check them out. He went to the Maid Café “@home”, located on the 5th floor in a store in Akiba (Akihabara Electric Town district in Tokyo) – but was not as impressed as the current hype suggested he should be.
The first thing I noticed was that the girls were not particularly friendly and did not seem to understand much about customer service. But this might be also due to my night out in a hostess club the night before… Just to get it straight for the record…hostess clubs in Japan do not involve any sexual acts!!!
Anyway, back to the Café. After being greeted rather non-eagerly with “okaerinasai goshujinsama” (difficult to translate but kind of “welcome back, master of the house”…coming from ancient times) I was seated. Nearly all tables and sofas were taken. The crowd was very mixed: The school boys seemed especially excited. I tried to figure out why but could not really see the reason. Of course I checked out the girls in their maid dresses and tried hard to get a sexual fantasy out of it. I could not.
Instead I ordered chocolate milk and was handed a booklet and a famous Japanese Gothic-Lolita fashion Magazine. The booklet was a Maid café guidebook…wow…I was amazed how many Maid cafes there already are in Japan. Like many others, @home is decorated and designed in a classroom party style. This is what the interior should suggest. And yes, you feel kind of back in the school days. Why the girls are in maid uniform however I still don’t get. Maybe it is because the school girls with really short school uniform skirts you can see on the street anyway.
When I left the girls mumbled “iterashaimase” which the person that stays at home says to the person that is leaving (eg. for work). Thus opposed to normal greeting rituals the café suggests that you come home on entering the café and leave home (to come back again) on leaving the café.
Exiting the café there was already a big queue waiting in front. I was really surprised how popular this café is, thinking that there is actually nothing particularly special, except for the enormous media response.
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