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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
They've got fake farm stands in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where sun-darkened Mexican dudes sell random cherries and stuff for even more than retail price
Pretty frustrating stuff, haha.
I'd been to actual farmer's markets out in the middle of nowhere, so I was really excited to see one coming into town. Got there and it was $3 for an ear of corn, $20 for a bag of cherries, etc
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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!