Consignment store (East Asia)
small shop with transparent boxes which people rent to sell their products
Consignment store (Chinese: 格仔鋪) is a transformation of flea market, which sets up many transparent boxes in a small shop for people to rent and sell their products. The renters can also treat the boxes as showrooms and display their products or artworks there. This kind of shop was originated in Japan and the concept spread in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau between 2000 and 2005. However, the business environment of consignment shop had deteriorated since 2010.
History
Consignment stores were founded in Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district and Hirai Toshio originated the idea. At that time, second-hand toys and antique toys were mainly sold. The store was popular among young men and white-collar workers in Japan when this concept had just started, and it had aroused the mass media's attention for reporting. Since the consignment stores became really popular in Japan, the idea developed in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. In 2001, the first consignment store in Taipei was established in Ximending (Chinese:西門町). The first consignment store in Hong Kong was set up in 2000 in Central, however, since this selling concept was not well known and accepted by citizens at that time thus the store was closed after a short period of time.
“Consignment store (East Asia)” enters the record as small shop with transparent boxes which people rent to sell their products. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Consignment, store and East can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q11349981. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Consignment store (East Asia)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.