You Want It, They’ve Got It

It seems that the selling point of the Japanese konbini is that they really cater to provide daily life conveniences for the community. If you are hungry, go buy some snacks at the konbini. Thirsty? Go to the konbini. Need to make a copy or send a fax? Go to the konbini. Is it raining and you’ve forgotten your umbrella at a train station somewhere? Pick up another one at the next konbini you see. Need to deliver or pick up a package? Konbini. The Japanese konbini are also relatively inexpensive, and that is one of the reasons why they are so great.

Aside from the traditional japanese snacks, breads, and ice creams, you can also expect to buy meals ranging from single onigiri to microwaveable yakisoba meals or assorted bento. And they will offer to heat it up for you. Some stores even have oden available in the winter seasons. Of course, you can also find sodas, sports drinks, and teas as well as alcohol. Additionally, they carry other useful items that one may need all of a sudden. For example, shampoos and conditioners, hair brushes, stationary, hygeine products (male and female), cosmetics, small articles of clothing, and cell phone chargers and batteries just to name a few.

They also sell a variety of magazine and manga for anybody to come in and read while needing to kill time, and tachiyomi (reading while standing) at a konbini or manga kissaten has become a popular pastime. This informal service is accompanied by many formal services as well. The konbini also makes it convenient for people to make copies and send faxes, to pay bills and set up money transfers, and buy tickets for events like sports games, and attractions such as Tokyo Disneyland or museums. They have ATM machines for cash withdrawal and the 7-Elevens in Japan are also associated with their own bank, Seven Bank Ltd. Their role in society has become to stand as everybody’s one-stop shop for day to day needs.

Stiff Competition

Recorded statistics from the Japan Franchise Association showed that as of August 2009 there were 42,345 convenience stores throughout Japan. 7-Eleven was leading the market with 12,467 stores, Lawson was in second with 9,562 stores, and Family Mart in third with 7,604 stores. Other major competitors include AM/PM, Circle K Sunkus, Daily Yamazaki, and MiniStop. That total number from 2009 is larger in comparison to the most recently recorded statistics about convenient stores in the U.S. According to the Association for Convenience and Fuel Retailing, the number of convenience stores in America increased to 149,220 as of December 31, 2012. Which marked a 0.7% (or 1,094 store) increase since the previous year.

Many of these companies had their start in the U.S. and are now more prominent in the Japanese market than in the American market. For example, Japan is now 7-Eleven’s largest market with approximately one-third of its stores located in and around Japan. And AM/PM Japan was recently acquired by Family Mart in 2009.

Location, Location, Location

One of my favorite aspects of the Japnese-style konbini is that they are everywhere. The sheer number of konbini that can be found on any given street is impressive. If you can’t find what you want at one of the stores, guaranteed, one of the other ones a block away will have what you want, particularly in more densely populated cities. For example, on the street in between my train station and my dorm building in Hiyoshi, there were five possible konbini that I could choose from: 7-Eleven, Family Mart, AM/PM, Lawson, and a Daily Yamazaki. And that was only on one of the main streets from one of the exits.

The CEO of 7-Eleven Japan has been quoted as having explained that the company’s business model centers on area domination, focusing on one small area and opening numerous stores there. This method of opening in clusters in areas predicted to bring in large revenue helps keep costs at a minimum and increases competition in new areas. Currently, there are no 7-Eleven stores in Shikoku, Japan as can be seen via a search in Google Maps. There are news reports that the company will begin to move in though, and are aiming to open 520 new stores by February 2019 throughout all four prefectures of Shikoku.

You have them in America?

The convenience stores in America are known for selling a variety of drinks, small snacks like candy, chips, Slim Jims, beef jerky, some household goods, hygiene products, and can be commonly paired with gas stations. Also, don’t forget your Big Gulps.

As a personal preference, I think the meals sold at the Japanese konbini taste much better and hold a better variety of foodstuff, but one of the main differences seems to be accessibility. The Japanese konbini are located in areas where it is easily accessible to everybody, and that is not necessarily the case in America. Visiting a konbini in America always seems to require a drive, long walk, or big wait between gas stations on a long car ride.

A long time ago on a family trip to Japan, a topic regarding 7-Eleven came up in conversation at which point my cousin asked, “you have those in America?” And my cousin is not the only one. I have come across more than a few people who did not know that companies such as AM/PM and 7-Eleven were American companies. That is just how integrated the konbini culture has become in Japanese society. Interestingly, even Lawson (the number two konbini operator behind 7-Eleven) started as an American company. J.J Lawson started his store in Akron, Ohio to sell milk in the 1930s, and now that milk jar logo can be seen all throughout Japan. Since then, Lawson Station has opened up a Japanese-style store in Honolulu, Hawaii.

And if my cousin were to ask me now whether or not we had 7-Eleven stores in America, I could still answer yes. However, I would not be able to say that it is still an American company because as of November 2005, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Seven Eleven Japan Co., Ltd and its affiliates. That just goes to show the power and success that Japanese konbini have compared to their American counterparts.

More Konbini Please

I love the Japanese-style konbini markets and I wish more would come to the U.S. If I could, I would work on a petition to bring Lawson Station to my neighborhood so that I would only have a short walk from my house to the konbini whenever I needed everyday items… or milk tea. I find it interesting that although the word “コンビニ” in Japanese is a borrowed, foreign word and that the concept is not of Japanese origin. The “konbini” is a Japanese phenomenon which is found to be very attractive, particularly by foreigners, in my opinion. If you find yourself in Japan, I am sure that the konbini experience will be a part of your stay, and for those living in Japan, I urge you to use your local konbini often. Who knows, maybe you too will even become friends with your local konbini cashiers.

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References:

1. http://www.webcitation.org/5dsuOCKUU
2. http://en.rocketnews24.com/2012/09/18/why-7-eleven-quite-literally-dominates-and-why-you-wont-find-one-in-shikoku-yet/
3. http://theglobalfruit.com/blog/2012/10/01/japan-convenience-stores-expand-as-supermarkets-shrink/
4. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/09/11/business/seven-eleven-plans-shikoku-entry/#.UpZLJRY2lUQ
5. http://corp.7-eleven.com/Newsroom/BackgroundInformation/7ElevenProfile/tabid/164/Default.aspx
6. http://www.fkmit.org/halal-tsukuba/konbini/
7. http://corp.7-eleven.com/Newsroom/BackgroundInformation/7ElevenProfile/tabid/164/Default.aspx
8. http://www.nacsonline.com/AskNACS/Pages/How-many-convenience-stores-are-there-in-the-United-States.aspx

There was the legendary Cucumber Pepsi, and a soda that tasted like Menthol. There are yogurt drinks and sodas with slimy chunks of aloe. Late-night carousers can snag a turmeric-flavored energy drink, while tee-totalers can take some nicotine juice along on that smoke-free train ride.

There are sodas, milk drinks, experimental beers, canned coffees, canned teas, canned tea-coffees, soda-beers, milk-sodas, coffee-milks and coffee-milk-sodas (but as of yet, no coffee-milk-beers).

Most drinks come and go with the seasons. Companies can (and do) throw anything they’ve got onto the shelves when product runs are limited to a few weeks. Whenever the temperature drifts up or down a few degrees, food fans scour konbini shelves for new formulas or pop-up brands before they disappear.

Summer is prime time for scoring a can of Japan’s weirder drinks: Sales of cold drinks rise, and companies race to find the most “refreshing” formula to beat the summer sweats. I popped down to my local konbini to sort out this summer’s batch.

Salty Watermelon Pepsi

I’m a totally voracious consumer of Kit-Kat and soft drink news. When I first heard rumors about this drink on the Internet, I was skeptical but intrigued.

I’ve got a peculiar fondness for flavors that sound kind of revolting. Delicious soft drinks are easy, but it takes an especially whimsical product manager to whip up something truly risky. Take the brilliant tobacco company employee who thought carbonated menthol – a terrible drink, but a beautifully ambitious one.

Salt, watermelon, and Pepsi? Yes, please. Every day I’d scour the konbini shelves. I was distracted by the gruesomely named (and somewhat flavorless) alternative, the low-calorie &lduqo;Pepsi Black Lemon.” Finally, on an ill-timed jaunt to Thailand, a friend Instagrammed a photo of my great white whale.

Unfortunately, Salty Watermelon Pepsi is not a mixture of salt, watermelon and Pepsi. In fact, it’s not Pepsi at all. Much like this winter’s variety, “Pepsi Pink” – a strawberry-milk flavor – the only thing “Pepsi-ish” about it was the carbonation.

Really, it’s a liquified watermelon Jolly Rancher with seltzer. Green melon soda is a fixture of fast-food chains here, so watermelon soda was a pretty tame offering.

The flavor wasn’t even salty. In Japan, and across Asia in general, people salt fruit to bring the sweetness out. It’s also suggested to help if you’re sweating a lot (and we are) – the idea is that you lose salt when you sweat. Traditionally, people here eat salty plums (ume boshi) that are sour and salty. This summer, salt is everywhere – we even have “salty chocolate” Kit-Kats.

Verdict: Too sweet. Would not drink again.

Asahi Red Eye – Tomato Beer

If you love gazpacho but hate that it’s not beer, you’d have been delighted for the six or seven days that Asahi Red Eye was available. It’s literally tomato juice and beer. It’s red. Bits of tomato float around. The slogan may as well be, “We dare you.”

This isn’t the first beer that’s taunted me into drinking it. Last February, “Red Romance” hit the market, a seductive blend of red wine and beer that sold for 100 yen per can. No Valentine’s Day is complete without a cheap, experimental mix of undrinkable wine-beer.

Red Eye is a confusing name. A Red Eye is a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso, or the last overnight flight. It seems like tomato beer is recommended for breakfast, like a Bloody Mary with beer instead of Vodka, or a tomato omelette with beer instead of eggs.

But I was shocked by how much I liked Red Eye. It was sweet and vinegary, a very Japanese flavor combo (I don’t see Japan’s carbonated-apple-vinegar shops taking off in America). The flavor was more tomato than beer, but the tomato had a sharp taste that cut into the beer flavor and made this beer almost dangerously easy to drink.

Tomatoes are valued for their sweetness in Japan, particularly cherry tomatoes, and have a strong summer connotation. A shop in my town was selling cherry tomatoes wrapped in chewy mochi and served cold, which were delicious.

If you come to Japan, you might be able to find a few discount cans of Asahi Red Eye around, but tomato season is waning. Even the mochi shop is switching cherry tomatoes out for grapes. Let’s hope Asahi doesn’t take that as a hint.

Verdict: Pleasantly surprised. Would drink again, if free.

Suntory Espressoda

The pun-derful “Espressoda” is, as the label says, “A twist of bold coffee and refreshing soda.” The cap twisted, excited bubbles rise to the surface, delivering the scent of fresh coffee grounds before mellowing into a light fizz.

Canned coffee is a Japanese vending machine mainstay. The coffee is universally unappealing – I can never escape the (probably imaginary) aftertaste of aluminium, and the scent of coffee residue lingers on your breath for hours.

I expected Espressoda to be canned coffee with bubbles. Shockingly, the coffee base for Espressoda is actually better than the coffee inside most canned coffees, probably because it’s “Espresso.” It’s in a plastic bottle, so there’s no tin-can placebo effect on my taste buds.

The result is a kind of a totally unsweetened root beer. You know how root beer tastes a bit like sarsaparilla with vanilla? Imagine sarsaparilla with coffee, and you’d have Espressoda nailed.

I got through the entire bottle, but not without second-guessing my commitment.

Verdict: Not awful, but unpleasantly confusing. Would not drink again.

Lazy Afternoon Root Beer

Root beer is an endangered animal in Japan. You can find some A&W in import stores, but I have never met a born-and-raised Japanese person (outside of Okinawa, where it’s basically everywhere) who enjoyed the taste of root beer. I’ve even heard it described as “America’s Natto.”

For what it’s worth, only North Americans and Okinawans seem to like Root Beer. It disgusts Europeans as much as it disgusts Asians. No one seems to know why, but most people think it tastes like medicine – which was precisely why I hated Menthol Soda. It was like drinking Vap-O-Rub. I couldn’t get past it.

So it was surprising to find that there’s a company making micro-batches of root beer in Kyushu. Lazy Afternoon is only lightly carbonated, but it’s a creamy brew with what I’d call “deep textures,” if I knew what that meant. And unlike the imported brands, Lazy Afternoon lacks the throat-burning sweetness of High Fructose Corn Syrup.

It also, notably, smells like a richer, deeper root beer than most canned root beers, which may be an attempt to shift it away from the medicine-ey flavors reviled by the Japanese.

Verdict: Will drink again.

For more, check out This Japanese Life!

Header photo by uzaigaijin

Take for example convenience stores. They’re pretty much ubiquitous in both Japan and the United States, but some little differences set them apart. And a lot of the time, those little disparities make a world of difference.

American Convenience Stores

If you’re unfamiliar with American convenience stores, you’re not really missing out on a whole lot. Generally, they’re attached to gas stations, and are seen as kind of scuzzy places.

American convenience stores don’t offer a lot of high-end products, but if you’re looking to buy cigarettes, gum, or three-day-old hot dogs, then they are the place to go.

Thank you, but no.

And convenience store bathrooms? They’re cesspools of disease and filth where superviruses are born. Convenience store bathrooms are places where you might be tricked into thinking syringes are standard issue.

In short, American convenience stores are places I only visit when I need to pay for gas (or have a Slurpee craving). Now Japanese convenience stores, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different.

The Konbini

There are a few things that Japanese convenience stores (or konbinis) have in common with American convenience stores.

First of all, there are a couple of American convenience stores that made it across the Pacific. 7/11, Circle K, ampm, and Lawson all have franchises in Japan. Well, kind of. Japan has absorbed a lot of these companies and made them into Japanese companies

Circle K in Japan

ampm recently got bought up by a Japanese convenience store, and Circle K combined with a Japanese chain called Sunkus. Lawson is now virtually unheard-of in the USA, and the Japanese 7/11 franchise actually got so big that it bought out its parent company.

And that’s not even mentioning all of the homegrown Japanese konbini chains like Family Mart, Ministop, and a bunch of other, smaller chains.

What Makes Them Better

But what sets the konbini part from your average, everyday American convenience store? For one, they do everything.

One Stop Shopping

Not only is there the typical convenience store fare of food, magazines, manga, and other assorted goods, but they sell concert and amusement park tickets. You can pay your bills, withdraw money from an ATM, and use the copier. Some sell clothes and other wares.

Konbini chain Family Mart has even considered getting into the funeral business. If that’s not one-stop shopping, I don’t know what is.

The Food

Konbini food, believe it or not, is actually pretty decent. Unlike the microwave chimichangas you’ll find in American convenience stores, konbini food appears edible and sometimes even fresh.

Not only are there convenience store staples like candy, chips, and soft drinks, but the hot food at a konbini is what makes them shine.

From the cherished onigiri riceballs to bento meals, pre-prepared konbini food isn’t half-bad. Some onigiri are even wrapped in such a way that the seaweed isn’t touching the rice, preserving its freshness and crispiness.

Even the TV-dinner style (not frozen) bento are pretty great (for the price, at least). If you want, you can get your meal warmed up for you in a ridiculously strong microwave. What should take a minute or two takes a fraction of that. I wish I had a microwave like that at home.

Drinks in a konbini aren’t limited to Slurpess and drip coffee, either. They offer hot drinks that are closer to a cafe a than old coffee grounds that are usually offered at American convenience stores. Of course, there’s also all the staples like tea, fruit drinks, and all the standard Coke and Pepsi fare.

Safety

One notable difference between American and Japanese convenient stores is the safety-factor. I read somewhere a while back that 24 hours konbini actually became a sort of safe-haven for women in Japan. If they thought someone was following them, they could go inside one of the brightly lit stores and wait a while before continuing on.

Besides that, though, they just have an overall feeling of “safe” to them. When I go into an American convenience store, I get out as quickly as possible, assuming that at any moment a gun wielding lunatic will be coming in demanding all the money (and then I’d have to use my super powers to save the day, and that’s just inconvenient if you ask me).

Of course, Japan is a generally safe country already, but while we’re comparing I feel like it ought to be brought up.

Loitering

Konbinis also tend to be a great place to loiter. I don’t know about you, but in America you don’t see people standing around for hours reading magazines. Konbini in Japan are a great place to do this. Even if a store clerk minded, they’d be too polite to tell you to leave (they don’t mind, though, everyone does this).

If you’re the loitering type, konbini are a great place to do it at. American convenience stores? Prepare to be yelled at by a grumpy employee.

Oh, And They’re For Everybody!

I think American convenience stores have pretty specific markets. When I envision a US 7/11, I see sketchy middle aged dudes and groups of no-good teenagers (damn kids!) hanging around inside the store.

Konbini, on the other hand, attract a pretty broad audience. They’re seen more as small corner stores for anybody to use. Not to mention, they’re pretty convenient, even when you’re not looking to get cigarettes and booze.

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I would also recommend a write up about konbini from one of my favorite Japan blogs, This Japanese Life. You can check it out here.

Which is your favorite konbini store? What do you like to get there? Tell me in the comments!

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