Press "Enter" to skip to content

Stingy sex shops striving to cut expenses to the bone

Nikkan Gendai May 21
Nikkan Gendai May 21
A famous anecdote concerning Scotsmen’s supposed propensity for parsimony involves a trooper in the Scots Guards who brings a single used condom into his local apothecary to request that it be recapped.

“Me and the lads in the regiment took up a collection,” goes the punch line.

But at Nikkan Gendai (May 21), nobody’s laughing. Sex shops, which in these hard times are determined to economize on every extra yen, have begun recycling condoms, it insists.

“We use condoms for blow-jobs or anal sex,” says Akina, 23, a worker at a Tokyo image club. “Instead of discarding them, the manager recycles them.

“First he’ll wash them in water, and then sterilize them in alcohol,” she continues. “Then he slips them onto a pestle (which resembles a sawed-off broom handle) and rolls them up neatly. You can’t tell them from new ones.

“Since condoms cost about 100 yen each, the shop hopes to get five uses from each one before discarding,” Akina adds.

Unfortunately, she tells Nikkan Gendai, the wear and tear of use takes a toll on the condoms, and she’s not very happy having to service customers wearing recaps.

“In my mouth, they taste funny,” she grimaces. “And other girls in the shop have told me that while customers were sodomizing them the latex tore and men ejaculated into their anus.”

The shop’s girls have protested, but management has been insistent about using the recaps, telling female employees that recycled condoms are still an effective prevention against disease. And if the girls don’t like it, then tough titty — they can do the customers bareback.

Condoms aren’t the only items subject to recycling these days. The manager of a Shinjuku deri heru (out-call sex service) reveals he’s found a way to extend the lives of those cheap vibrators customers enjoy using on the girls.

It seems that the cord connecting the remote controller to the vibrator shaft usually fails after about one month.

“Since the vibrators’ motors are still okay, we’ll use a soldering iron to re-connect the severed cable and then re-sell the vibrators. By doing this we’re able to cut costs by 60 percent,” he says.

Taking a cue from bars that refill expensive scotch whiskey bottles with cheap domestic booze, the shop also mixes the leftover massage lotion from several partly-used bottles and passes off the refills as new.

In these hard times, thrift is a virtue, even when it applies to vice. (K.S.)

Source: “Kondomu wo surikogi-bo de saisei” Nikkan Gendai (May 21, page 22)