New Co-op Stores

The Katsura Campus is a campus where fourth-year engineering students and graduate students conduct experiments and research. The campus is divided into two main clusters: the A Cluster and the C Cluster. The A Cluster has had the Katsura A Shop since Katsura Campus opened, but there is no co-op store in C Cluster. The C cluster has labs of the Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Department of Nuclear Engineering. In Katsura Campus, students spend a lot of time. In April 2018, we were able to lease a corner of the Student Affairs building, and we planned to open the store for long hours in order to make it small but useful for the campus. All buildings on campus are secured by student (staff) ID cards. By applying this system to the co-op store, we designed the store to be unmanned.

When the store first opened in July 2018, the hours of operation were 10:30 AM to 6:00 PM. In May 2019, we had the university's security system installed at the store entrance, and had discussions with the university about what hours the store would be open and what to do in case of frequent fraud. We had many concerns about how to deal with problems during unattended hours, but we were encouraged by the Dean of the Graduate School of Engineering at the time to start it as experiment. We started an experiment of unattended operation after noon on June 3, 2019.

About eight months have passed since we implemented the system. There have been no major issues and users are using the system without problem. At the end of the year, we conducted interviews with members of labs. The students said that it is so much more convenient now. They expressed their heartfelt thank you. We also received requests for opening on weekends and early morning hours. We will continue to make the store more responsive to the needs of our members.