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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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

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

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?

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