AEON's August operating report carries a line that matters more than any same-store percentage: fourteen locations are still not open enough to count. Twelve AEON Kyushu stores and two AEON Mall shopping centers remain suspended following the explosion at AEON Mall Kumamoto on July 28, and the company excluded all fourteen from its August same-store sales calculations. AEON Kyushu also went back and revised its July same-store figure on the same basis.
AEON formed an external-expert accident investigation committee on August 20 to determine the cause of the blast and draft measures to prevent a repeat. The company said findings from that committee will feed into new group-wide disaster-prevention standards and efforts to improve facility safety, though it gave no timeline for when the panel will report or when the affected sites might reopen.
Set against that, the routine numbers look almost beside the point. AEON Mall's same-store specialty tenant sales came in at 102.7% of last year, helped by cinema, amusement and hobby retailers, and AEON Retail posted its second straight month of same-store growth despite record rain. But those figures come with a caveat: they exclude the 14 suspended locations entirely, and AEON has not said how much revenue those sites would otherwise have contributed.
The unresolved question is not August's sales trend but how long the 14 suspended AEON Kyushu stores and AEON Mall shopping centers will stay closed, and what the accident committee eventually concludes about why the Kumamoto explosion happened.