With both the number of employees and female members declining, yet prices for the Black class are going up—could this be what they call stagflation in the textbooks?

I’m male member Fullerene! Stagflation basically means “inflation during a recession,” right? Since sales usually decline during a recession, I assume the “recession” here means a drop in sales—in other words, fewer offers. But if Universe hasn’t publicly disclosed that, then perhaps the questioner is using the decline in female members and employees as supporting evidence to say, “So you’re raising prices even though sales are falling!” I wonder what the reality is. Are sales actually declining? That aside, since they’ve also started offering online services, the average price per transaction may not have changed much in the first place—or it may even have gone down.

Maezawa from the president’s office here. Thank you for your question. It sounds like the fees were originally standardized nationwide, but outside Tokyo (the Kanto area) and Osaka (the Kansai area), a discount campaign had been left in place and forgotten about. They’ve now simply been restored to their original levels. Also, since there are many members in the Kanto and Kansai areas, I think male members registered with the branches whose fees were restored this time make up around 35%. Looking at it in terms of actual offers, it might even be only 10%. If you think about it that way, I get the impression that you’ve hardly ever received offers from women with Black membership status. Maybe these are the kinds of things people who aren’t actually affected—people who don’t make offers—end up commenting on. P.S. > So, are sales really falling? For some reason, sales have actually been growing steadily, with the usual year-on-year growth rate continuing as expected. It makes you wonder, “Then what was that crisis during the COVID-19 state of emergency?”