A peek into Japan's convenience stores (Part 2) | Hacker News Reader

A peek into Japan's convenience stores (Part 2)

one-from-nippon.ghost.io

54 pointskizunajp47 comments

Some back story on the Lawson brand in Ohio:

As a child growing up in NE Ohio in the 60’s and 70’s, I used to ride my bike to the local Lawson store to buy candy, gum or a bottle of “pop.” Lawson was generally a clean, small and friendly neighborhood store with a limited selection of items. My parents would stop in on the way home from work or an outing to buy milk and bread or an evening snack. They had very good ice cream, and their onion chip dip was amazing—folks in NE Ohio still miss that dip (although a similar version is available at Circle-K now).

There was a classic Lawson TV commercial for their orange juice. The juice was squeezed in Florida and delivered to Ohio in refrigerated tank trucks “in 40 hours.” The trucks were labeled “Big-O” and the freshness of the juice was a big selling point. Here’s a link to the commercial on YT:

https://youtu.be/B7r6A6YQdtI

I believe most Lawson stores were run by families: husband and wife. My parents had friends who ran one for their entire careers and lived a decent middle class lifestyle.

The Lawson success story in Ohio pretty much ended when Consolidated Foods bought the company. But big changes were happening then anyway. I always found it to be so strange that someone in Japan would buy the rights to the name since it was really just a regional brand. When I went to Tokyo on vacation, seeing the logo on stores that look (and smell) nothing like the originals was a strange experience for me.

Thanks for the article!

Its one of the big three out there, along with 7-11 and Family Mart.

There are other smaller chains as well. I think I saw more MiniStop (sp.?) in Sapporo than Lawsons or Family Mart. But those three are definitely the biggest.

SeicoMart is the one exclusive to Hokkaido. It's great!

Hello HN!

On my previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36110833#36123339) many people encouraged me to write about Japan's convenience stores.

I set out to write and it was so interesting I just _had_ to create a Part 2. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

Thank you!

Be aware, the site says "for subscribers only"

Subscription is free, though.

time and effort are costs

It's gratis, perhaps.

I wish here in the USA we could get convenience stores even close to how good they are in places like Japan and Thailand. Why do they get 7-11: The Good Version?

This was not a small part of my reverse culture shock when I moved back to the US.

Cheap, ubiquitous, and tasty food available 24/7 has a lot of merits. Not to mention there are no blue laws in Japan that limit when alcohol can be sold.

On the bright side, at least I can buy fruit without being super wealthy. What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts, I guess.

What fruit is so expensive in Japan?

Not an expert, but from what I saw: fancy peaches sold individually and melons. These are supposed to be good gifts to bring as a guest.

They're definitely exceptional cases, but in general tropical fruit (mangos, pineapples, even bananas) can be up to two or three times the price you might be used to paying in the US (or even Australia - not sure what it's like now but when I was in the US 15 years ago I remember bananas being especially cheap even in supermarkets - here you generally have to go to dedicated fruit/veg markets to get fresh produce cheaply).

Bananas are cheap in part because they are clones and incredibly predictable in terms of when they will ripen (therefore when to pick them, when to ship them, etc).

Yes but that doesn't explain why they would be substantially cheaper in US supermarkets vs Australian ones (after all, they're all grown here!), or why they're so much cheaper at dedicated produce markets. Apparently you can buy 8 bananas for $1.50 at a US Costco - not sure what Costco prices here are like (I do happen to live near one of the few stores in the country but have never been), but it wouldn't be unusual to pay almost $4 for that many at most supermarkets here, or around $2-3 (sometimes less) at a market, assuming 8 bananas weigh roughly 1kg. I can't find a reliable source for Japanese supermarket prices but my memory was something close to 400¥/kg a few years back, where that translated to ~$5 AUD. Mangoes could be 800¥ each, easily double or even triple the price they are here, and yes, watermelons (even the regular kind) are especially expensive, 1000+¥ for a smallish (~1kg) melon would be considered a bargain. Interestingly they're often grown locally (the super expensive square ones exclusively so), from what I can read, though I gather most are imported.

Bananas shouldn't be used as a baseline. USA supermarkets explicitly use them as a loss leader because they've discovered that nobody comes in to buy just bananas when they want bananas.

There is expensive designer fruit in Japan(I guess that’s a good way to describe it), but there is also regular fruit that is around the same price as in the US.

Regular fruit at a regular cheap grocery store in Tokyo is still 2-3x as expensive as the USA, even in relatively expensive US cities

You can get sushi that's actually good for 80% cheaper than the "California rolls with crap on them" you'll find in most of the USA, though, so it all evens out IMO

>Regular fruit at a regular cheap grocery store in Tokyo is still 2-3x as expensive as the USA, even in relatively expensive US cities

It's also 2-3x the quality and taste. Strawberries in the US have no taste at all; in Japan, they're amazing.

That's more a product of our tolerance for GMOed-to-hell bullshit. Fruit isn't what it used to be in the US-- it seems optimized for water retention these days. The standard watermelon here now tastes like a wet sponge. It didn't used to.

You can come close to Japanese fruit quality just buying organic in the US.

>You can come close to Japanese fruit quality just buying organic in the US.

Sure, and then the cost for American fruit looks very similar to that "expensive" Japanese fruit.

Strawberries in California are fucking delicious, even the half-rotten ones they sell at Target

Me too! 7-11’s food is amazing in Japan (especially the bakery items). In the US they just have junk food and smell like a urinal.

High-trust, high-conscientiousness society.

Look at the average US 7-11 employee. Do you actually want them manhandling your food? We get prepackaged food because we have strict kitchen regulations because the average minimum-wage employee is kinda lazy and has poor hygiene.

The food at Japanese convenience stores is pre-packaged too - it's just much better quality.

In the northeastern USA we had Wawa for a long time which made good food fresh on site. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the employees who prepared it, they're not any worse than someone from Subway or a local gas station chain making a sub. Something happened that was probably cost-cutting and now it's all prepackaged and horrible. I stopped going. Enshittification but for convenience stores?

Not sure especially since the Japanese company 7 and i holdings now owns even the American 7-11 brand.

But having lived in Japan, I also missed some of the North American 7-11 food: pizza[1], hot dogs[2], and slurpees are not available at 7-11 in Japan.

[1] They have pizza bread which is fluffy bread with a sprinkling of onions, corn, tomato sauce and mayo which is not great [2] They have hot dogs but it's fluffy bread with a toothpick-diameter sausage inside. It's a shame because they also sell decent deep-fried on a stick but without the bun

I think it might just be related to city density, you need a lot of people in a small area to make conbinis work. (I know they are in rural areas in japan as well, but my guess is that they are either loss leaders, or are possible because of the amount of infrastructure that is already in place to make them work in the big cities.)

Also, conbinis go well with walking and public transport culture. The USA's car culture with their necessity for big parking lots and lack of walking culture, just don't sound like they'd be very compatible with conbinis, except maybe at gas stations. Though, it is not like Europe has them even though I wish we did (I am guessing this might be down to cost of real estate, workers, and again, city density, some of which also apply to the USA of course).

> Japanese speakers have a penchant for brevity. Long words get shortened to 3 or 4 syllables.

True

> 7-Eleven (“sebun irebun”) becomes “sebu-ire”.

I don’t think so. We, in most cases, use “seven (se-bu-nn)”instead.

Ha this might just expose which part of Japan I'm from :)

If you read Japanese: https://ima.goo.ne.jp/column/article/2059.html

tl;dr: It's shortened differently in different parts of Japan. Sebun in Kanto, Sebu-ire in Kansai.

Hilariously, there is apparently a small number of people who call it "BunBun"

That bento looks amazing for 5 dollars! It really can't be that cheap and look this good.

It is! Not exactly the same bento, but take this one from FamilyMart for example - https://www.family.co.jp/goods/obento/0616225.html

It is 498 yen (3.57 USD) and that is taxes included!

It is.

In my experience the cheapest convenience store bentos in japan are roughly equivalent to slightly better than fast food Japanese in California.

And usually the price is much different too. Like 500 yen, which in America might be $4.50 or so, but the equivalent in America (or California at least) would cost maybe 3x as much.

I joke about it with a Japanese friend I made on one of my trips. There's a Japanese family restaurant chain that has some locations in California (Yayoi). In japan it's just another family restaurant where you can get reasonably priced meals (maybe up to 1500 yen but I haven't been in a few years) and in America the same restaurant easily charges $20-25 for regular meals.

Food tends to be very economical in Japan, at least to me as a visitor.

Restaurant food in America is just hideously expensive, once you factor in the 20% tip that's expected. Even before tip it's very expensive.

It's not just Japan; every developed nation outside North America has much more reasonable prices for eating out.

I live in Western Europe and convenience stores and fast food has become really expensive, except for bread. A 500mL coke and premade salad or other lunch menu can easily set you back €10. McDonalds is almost €15 and even a kebab is usually over €10 now.

$20 takeout or counter pickup lunch is unfortunately a thing in multiple US cities.

On the up side, airport pricing doesn't seem so shocking anymore.

I went to Japan with some friends for 3 weeks, and we just couldn't figure out how these stores are stocked, we didn't see any familymart, 7 eleven or lawson trucks. At some point we just kinda assumed everything was stored frozen in the back, but the article's line: "Lunch is a busy time at the konbini. Konbinis have large scale operations that deliver fresh bentos (lunch boxes) to stores" refutes that assumption.

I guess maybe the trucks they use just aren't branded? Maybe we just were never in the right place at the right time?

The majority of nonperishable items are restocked during the midnight shift. Fresh items do get delivered during the day.

Search for コンビニ配送トラック and you'll see branded trucks doing deliveries.

Glad to see the part 2. Part 1 generated some interest on HN too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277962

Thanks for this. Read parts 1 and 2 and I wish you could still get a konbini bento for 500 yen ;-;

Things have improved in my country since Christianity went out the window and supermarkets were allowed to open on Sunday/Christmas but Japan's 24/7 economy is out of this world!

"Money never sleeps pal"

Japan is not a "24/7 economy". The konbini are 24/7, but they're the only places that are. The trains shut down at ~1AM, and most stores and restaurants close at 9PM or so. 24/7 places are really an exception.

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