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>coworkers banging on in excitement whenever 7-11 has an Onigiri sale dropping from 110 to 100 yen

Usually it's an up to 150 yen onigiri for 100 yen, so of course they're going to get excited.

Edit: It looks like it is/was an up to 160 yen onigiri for 100 yen! That's a 37.5% discount! [1]

[1] http://seven-eleven-mania-blog.jp/gohankei/5617/

It's still pretty silly, considering the absolute value of the savings.

My personal favorite along these lines is the way that a single building might have 2-3 floors of the same kind of restaurant (say, yakitori), but the one place that is 5 yen cheaper per item will have a line out the door, while the others are half-empty.

Is this a cultural thing? I've never been to Japan so I'm kind of flying blind here but I'd assign that 5 yen as a convenience cost and happily pay that price to avoid the long line. I have a hard time thinking the Japanese people place no value on their time whatsoever...

walmart(lines to get in line) vs. Kroger(generally pretty fast) vs. giant eagle(empty walk right up and pay).

> the problem is young people are too smart to take them up on their pitiful 700 yen per hour offers,

There's a large population of chinese students in Japan who are very happy to work at such rates.

> There's a large population of chinese students in Japan who are very happy to work at such rates.

> which in Tokyo barely cover your transport and lunch costs

Is this another of those things where paying a person an non-livable wage is going to be construed as a Good Thing™? How about we raise the prices so the people serving us the food can, you know, live?

train is extremely cheap in tokyo and eating is cheap as well. with one hour of this kind of work you can pay for both and you just dont work one hour so the rest is profit.

You can eat and commute both ways for under 700 yen?

Did you even read my comment? You don't just work for one hour usually.

Cause that's Socialism(TM)!

Raising prices destroys demand. It's not immediately clear that 5 well employed people and 5 unemployed people are preferably to 10 poorly employed people.

If the 5 who would be unemployed have some superior alternative, why aren't they doing it already? Or would you say they should be forcibly unemployed to combat their laziness in looking for better work (which you apparently think exists)?

Then maybe demand should be lower? If your business can't operate without paying people slave wages, you have no business being in business.

Or, far more likely, the CEO needs to make a few million less so the people who operate his business can EAT.

I'm start from the (perhaps naive) assumption that our intention here is to make people better off.

Whose life is better if the business doesn't exist?

Business that make their money by exploiting people should not exist, because they create the illusion illustrated here: that somehow earning less money than is livable is better than earning none at all. If you don't have enough money to pay your rent and eat, what is the point exactly? You're still screwed, it's just going to take slightly longer.

And from this we then go the side hustles and the app workers and all the rest of the stuff that let us pretend someone working 120 hours a week for pennies is "doing good."

>If you don't have enough money to pay your rent and eat, what is the point exactly? You're still screwed

If this were true, why would people in bad jobs continue to show up for work?

Okay, you've identified that shifting people from precarious existence to outright starvation and homelessness will make others more aware of their plight. How will that help, exactly? Are they going to somehow turn around public opinion on the welfare state? Start a Communist Revolution? Because it seems like they will just be worse off, and we will be more aware, and nothing else will happen.

Reminds me of the bizarre behavior of many co-workers who wait over an hour in line when Dunkin Donuts has free iced coffee day.

> The problem is Japan has been in a deflationary environment for so long that they've forgotten how to bump up a price and turned into a nation of misers.

My understanding is that the blame for this lies squarely with the Bank of Japan. The system was much more stable under the Finance Ministry.