On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!
On my trip there with a group of friends we would wake up and head to the local 7-11/Lawson/Family Mart. Even when we went into the countryside for the hot spring baths in Hokkaido there was a Lawson in town. 7-11 had the best food though. I loved those chicken teriyaki egg sandwiches, onigiri and the yakisoba-pan. But those chocolate swirl babkas were clutch. I once wandered in late night and cleared the shelf of them.
IDK man - this is sort of true, but I think you under-estimate how quality and price scale. A Jumbo-Choco-Monaka at 7/11 is still a fantastic value at ¥160 even if you adjust for purchasing power. GDP Per Capita (PPP) is about $85K in the US and about $60K in Japan, but even granting a 2x increase for California then a $2 choco-monaka would be a steal. As it is, I just spent $4.50 for an Its-It about an hour ago and while I am quite a dedicated fan of these things I would have gladly forked over ¥700 for a Chocomonaka if such things existed in California. I realize that people don't live out of 7/11 for their daily groceries and your point has some validity, but the quality/cost is still a great deal relative to what you would get in America.
$85K vs $60K ...to give you some idea the typical wage in Okinawa for a combini job is about $6/hour. I think the income disparity is larger than those numbers suggest.
FWIW Japanese people living there tell me combinis are expensive based on their salaries and I believe them.
IIUC Japanese budgets are different. They spend comparatively less on housing and transportation than Americans. The Anglosphere in general has somehow developed a rather toxic status quo when it comes to that first basic need, with everything else only being slightly cheaper.
I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
> I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
Exactly. Housing and the housing market in Japan is an interesting beast. Based on my limited understanding as someone who has sort-of briefly looked at buying a home in Japan, houses are not really financial investments. For example, compare house prices in Japan (including the land) with a house in Australia.
It's not the exchange rate. It's 30 years of economic destruction and currency devaluation as the end result of horrific spending policies. If Japan doesn't right the ship, they'll sink into middle income territory over the next 30 years. Poland and Greece are now just slightly below them in GDP per capita - and Lithuania is above them (unthinkable circa the mid 1990s).
Realistically Japan is very close to being a second tier economy. It's quite plausible that Croatia and Latvia will pass them on GDP per capita over the next decade. 7-11 Japan would be relatively inexpensive for the citizens of any affluent nation, because Japan is so much poorer than it used to be.
7/11 is still 30-50% more expensive than the supermarkets, so irrespective of how affluent people are, it's a poor choice.
I used 'exchange rate' because not only is the yen weak, but the USD seems pretty strong - I guess it depends on where in the US you are from, but as a Brit, US feels expensive to me, Japan feels cheap, ergo Americans must find Japan even cheaper than I do.
I think tourists just don't know the names of grocery stores, don't see them on social media, and don't expect them to have essentially all the same items as convenience stores (and in even greater variety) because ones back home have disappointing prepared and packaged foods. They also just don't care about wasting money when it already feels cheap.
Unrelated but another tip unknown to tourists is to get cold drinks (even alcohol) at pharmacies instead of convenience stores: their beverage fridges tend to be set much colder.
Thank you. I live in Japan and it is incredibly frustrating to hear people here talk about the exchange rate as if it is some temporary but unfortunate weather condition, rather than the downstream effect of a generation of terrible policy decisions that it actually is
Is it their spending habits and resulting expenditure on infrastructure or is it their currency policies to try to boost exports? Not challenging but asking for clarification.
And now compare not the numbers, but what these countries actually produce, in global sense. Japan produces cars, electronics, medical and precision stuff, cultural exports. And what do Croatia produce? Not even speaking about almost dying Latvia and Lithuania.
Aren't in late stage techno consumerist demographic collapse that many others (Germany, China, yeesh, South Korea) aren't going to suffer from to an even worse degree?
I guess one could point to various policies, especially with pseudo- protectionist benefits given to the Japanese mega conglomerates, which like in Korea are kind of just an extension of the government.
But I wonder if such economic policy fumbling is in an evil outgrowth as people try to deal with the underlying collapse.
> Poland and Greece are now just slightly below them in GDP per capita - and Lithuania is above them (unthinkable circa the mid 1990s)
Re Poland and Lithuania: USSR collapsed in early 90s, and many would have been forgiven for thinking that these countries would continue to live in poverty, which they obviously didn't. Notably, USSR was a donut empire where the peripheral regions were richer and more educated than the heartland. That's also why the collapse of USSR started there. Sarah Paine talks about that.
Convenience stores have gotten more expensive but they've always been an expensive option in Japan. It's always been much cheaper to go to grocery stores or other such alternatives to get the same items.
And how had the Japanese inflation / cost of living changed over the last 10 years or so? I went there in 2015 and now hearing this I'm strongly thinking about paying another trip there...
I mean, back then 1 EUR bought 135 yen and now it's 185, and I already remember restaurants to be pretty cheap for the average quality, while hotels/apartments sucked a bit - especially in room size.
I wonder how 7/11 in the US will change now that the Japanese version bought out the US version. Will we actually have hot and prepared food like Japan? I doubt it, seems the supply chain infrastructure just isn't there.
7/11 Japan really benefits from urban density, which in turn makes the distribution of fresher food and smaller footprint stores much more of a factor.
The distribution network even shows up in maps. There will be clusters of 7/11 in Japanese cities which is more efficient than spreading them equally.
As others have mentioned, 7/11 in the US has been owned by 7/11 (Japan) for quite a long time, now.
There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.
It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.
But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.
There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).
Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.
5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.
Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."
As someone who remembered 7/11 commercials as a kid in Texas in in the 80s, I thought they had completely died out in the USA until I spent a summer at a university in Mexico and there was a local 7/11 which was surprisingly nice. But unless they up their game in the USA, I see all the typical gas stations we grew up with as fading due to changing standards. Buc-ee's started in a tiny Texan town where some relatives live and now stretches from Colorado to Virginia to Florida. In addition to the vast amenities, including delicious fresh barbecue and salads, they have clean bathrooms and treat employees well. There's no going back (I hope), and I'm surprised they're not in California yet, though I guess California has stuff like EddieWorld. I recognize that this leaves an opportunity for smaller gas stations to try to improve to offer good-enough service since Buc-ee's focuses on larger stores, but my hope is that the elevated standards will trickle down to forcing smaller ones to raise standards. Seems like 7/11 would be well-positioned to adopt that strategy to become that dominant smaller store, if they're paying attention.
The stores in Hawaii are certainly nicer and more full-featured than the ones on the US mainland, but the stores in Japan and Taiwan are still light-years ahead.
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
Badly. Until a few years ago there was a franchise-wide rule that no food could be discounted even if it was close to expiry, so either the staff/owners bought them and ate it themselves, or it went in the dumpster.
Giving expired food to homeless people is not really a thing there either.
Convenience stores changed a lot around 2010 when they started real time tracking Every Damn Thing. Even in the mid 00s staff ate, took home, or gave away whatever they wanted to from the expired pile.
I was merely answering your question about how Japan deals with it (by trashing it, mostly). I guess the US could do that but unlike Japan, I'd expect people to break into the dumpsters and steal the food out of it. The trashing of food might offend people more in the US.
In terms of geography though, Japan has an extremely efficient and well developed cold chain and the country is pretty much a line from north to south. The US is clearly more spread out and significantly larger than Japan. That causes problems with both delivering the food to stores and (as other people have mentioned) efficiently moving waste to food banks.
People and customs related to food are not primarily geographic in nature. Japan is a strongly ordered society, not a roiling chaotic mess like the US. When people run into trouble they often hide their shame and starve themselves rather than beg for food. And it isn't like the network of food banks in the US was easy to set up or keep running.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
That's kind of what I was leaning towards. It's a problem that needs solved, but it's not necessarily hard to solve, nor does it need solved in advance.
It's the kind of problem can often very nearly resolve itself.
Here in the States, I've seen what can happen at the end of the night at a busy Little Ceasers in a not-great part of town. They've got a lot of unsold pizzas, already boxed, that they simply need to get rid of so they can close up and go home.
So they walk out the back door with armloads of pizzas and... casually give them away to the people who are waiting out there. It's a very calm and surprisingly tidy process that goes by quickly. This happens at the same time every night.
The only apparent cost is whatever it takes to maintain the base amount of humility required to let this happen instead of dutifully marching the pizzas over to the dumpster and tossing them in.
This routine is almost certainly an invention of evolution, instead of planning.
Did you try one? Egg sandwiches really aren't my thing but I've always wondered if the US version comes close to the quality of the Japanese version even if some of the details (like presence of bread crust) differ.
The local stores in Japan and Taiwan are really nice. 7/11 and Family Mart are these pleasant places where you can see schoolchildren sitting chatting and eating. That’s not something you’d see in San Francisco.
You’ll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
For what it's worth, this is commonplace in Australia too. I feel like you're describing a general safe country thing. I've lived in Japan so I know it's probably one of the safest places in the world, but I feel like what this thread describes is more US/Canada/some Euro countries being particularly dangerous, and not Japan being uniquely safe.
Canada is not particularly dangerous, but it has a horrible case of being drowned out by American culture (which strongly influences Canadians' subjective perceptions of their environs), and having the same kind of problematic urban planning as the United States.
I think it's more high-trust than high-safety. Most American cities (and certainly suburbs) are quite safe, and have only been getting safer over the past decades.
And yet we are constantly bombarded with fearmongering around children getting kidnapped on every street corner, every hour of the day.
I'll absolutely agree that a place like Tokyo is safer for a child on their own than NYC or SF, but the gap isn't as wide as the mainstream media would seem to suggest.
Or walk home from school, or the playground, or wherever they are going from, through the middle of what in any NA city would be described as 'downtown', and would get CPS dispatched on speed-dial.
Can confirm what others have posted, i tried some random snacks/sweets in some of the 711 stores in Japan and they were really good, for some reason I was not expecting it to be so good.
I ate a lot 7/11 onigiri as a poor grad student exploring Tokyo on a long layover once... they're truly wonderful little stores. (They also are one of the few places you can use an ATM, very useful given how cash based Japan is)
He can be proud of the legacy he built, which is something many American founders cannot say with a straight face.
This is a bit out of date. These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards, just in time for Japan to finally switch to electronic payments in a big way (in particular PayPay).
Yes. The payments landscape has shifted pretty dramatically in Japan over just the past 3 years. It used to be that you had to worry about getting cash, IC cards, refilling said IC cards, going to an actual bank with your passport, etc. Now all you need is an iPhone (although I hear Android phones from outside Japan still can't use suica).
I was in Japan recently and did find that my non-Japanese Pixel phone wasn't allowed to use the mobile Suica app, even though the hardware supports it. Some nerds on XDA figured out the mechanism preventing it[0], and if you're rooted it seems like you can run a Magisk module to patch the region check in the PixelNfc component[1].
I guess it's down to licensing for the FeliCa smart card system or something? I will say, as a privacy person, I'm pretty jealous of the ubiquity of IC card payments there. You can buy the card at a kiosk with zero KYC and top it up with cash at the same kiosk. Since it's a stored-value system, it works offline, and you get the convenience of paying with a card with nearly all of the anonymity of paying with cash.
This will remain the case as long as Sony continues to charge Android manufacturers heavy licensing fees for the FeliCa chip needed for Suica/Pasmo.
However, major Japanese cities are increasingly allowing credit card tap to pay for transport, Osaka Metro is already 100% on board and Tokyo has started trials. There's a long tail of minor companies that will likely take forever though.
Tokyo Metro, Toei, Keikyu, and others have rolled it out across a significant chunk of their lines at this point.
You can get to a significant portion of the network... So long as you don't have to take a JR train.
My only complaints about Contactless Cards from Visa/Mastercard/etc. Is that they're significantly slower than FeliCa. I can sprint through a gate with my Pasmo; I have to stop with my Visa.
For Visa, the closest transaction processing happens in Colorado. So they're slooooooow.
Disclaimer: Fmr Visa, current PayPay employee. I hate payments.
Android doesn't support suica for public transport but you can still use Google Pay most of the time. Except when you randomly can't! Unlike other countries you still need to take a credit card (and maybe even some cash) as backup.
Android does support suica/felica, and many (most?) phones have the hardware for it, but most manufacturers will only pay the licensing fees for it for their Japanese SKUs, leaving other SKUs with a software lock.
"Unlike other countries you still need to take a credit card (and maybe even some cash) as backup"
"still"
I take a reliable CC and cash any fucking day over Apple and Google Pay or any shit payment "app" like Revolut which simply blocks you out of your account if on a device they seem to not like / that is not attested, while preventing browser-based usage.
You stupid tech bros. Appps, apps, apps, everything via an app.
Even the Tokio metro paper tickets via cash work well. No phone needed!
My wife has a US-bought iPhone, and we tried to load some money onto a digital Suica card. The hardware is there, but the system wouldn't accept any of the credit cards or her debit card that she had registered with Apple Pay.
An Indian friend of mine (who lives in the US) told me it's similar to when he visits family in India; none of the digital transit cards work for him because the system won't accept his US payment cards.
(I have an Android phone which has the right FeliCa hardware, but it's disabled in software so Google doesn't have to pay the licensing for it.)
Visa and (to an extent) Mastercard have been known to block transactions from their foreign-issued credit cards to digital Suica and PASMO cards. US issued Amex and Discover cards (at least prior to the latter's acquisition by Capital One) use JCB's merchant network in Japan, and thus receive the same treatment as any other JCB-branded card.
Given that my friends with iPhones were having more trouble than me with a visitor Suica, the phone advantage isn't a major one.
Also, non-Tokyo transit systems often support VISA tap and pay.
A visitor Suica card (that you can buy at the airport and refill with cash in seconds), a VISA, and cash (that you can get at any ATM with a debit card) is 100% sufficient for travel in Japan.
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The cash part of it is non-negotiable, though. Many merchants are cash-only. Presumably, handling large amounts of cash works fine in a society where the risk of getting robbed at gunpoint is actually zero [1], and where the police are ready to use very persuasive methods to maintain that 99% conviction rate.
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The real frustration is that buying rail tickets online inevitably triggers an extra layer of VISA verification (2fa code through SMS or email), which usually works fine, but has already shat the bed for me once, requiring a chat with my card's CS rep. Which fucking sucks when you don't have a phone # that works.
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[1] While the risk of some cutpurse ganking your wallet is so near-zero, it's a rounding error.
There are still significant gaps. I was heading from Narita to Shinjuku about a year ago, and after I got off the Narita Express, I realized my Pasmo card (which I hadn't used in about 8 years) didn't have enough on it to get me the rest of the way. There were two ATMs I could find in the (reasonably-sizeable) train station, and neither accepted my US-issued VISA debit card. I had to walk down the street to -- of course -- a 7-Eleven to use the ATM there.
During the rest of my week and a half there, I saw plenty of other ATMs that appeared identical to the ones in the train station that didn't work for me.
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards
I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.
ATMs from the major banks (SMBC, Mizuho, Yuucho, etc.) are still extremely picky about supporting US cards. Most will do it... for an egregious fee.
Kombini ATMs are better about this, but 7Bank ATMs remain the gold standard with no fees outside of whatever the bank itself charges. LawsonBank is OK, but few/far between. Enet (at a lot of kombinis) are terrible.
> The company's forays into Internet marketing began with a bookselling partnership with Softbank and a book wholesaler in 1999; most books are paid for and picked up at local Seven-Elevens. The next year he engineered a $375 million partnership with NEC, Nomura Research, and Sony, called 7-dream.com, that promised to offer 100,000 products and services over the Internet.
I was living in Japan around 2008 and remember buying concert tickets and picking them up a conbini after purchasing online. I don't remember whether it was a 7 Eleven or Lawsons, but maybe it was a result of this.
I lived in a city with the highest density of 7-11s per capita. There was a 7-11 at almost every street corner. 7-11s in the US are day and night from those in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Can you imagine you could pay your utility bills, print documents, fax and even have a full wifi cafe experience all under one roof? In Japan, Lawson is probably more popular though.
Here is decent video on Youtube that goes into the history of the company, and why 7-11s are so different in the US and Japan (tldr: it's the core culture/infrastructure differences):
I learned today that 7/11 in Japan wasn't a pure licensing play but a technology enabled business model disruption of large grocery stores and mom-and-pop convenience stores. The launch of 7/11 Japan introduced: franchising, JIT inventory management, and centralized POS terminals to the Japanese retail market. The linked article explains this in more detail.
I almost never go to a 7/11 in the US but every time I go to Japan I visit a 7/11 at least once a day. No matter where you are in Japan there's likely a 7/11 within walking distance and besides the usual assortment of drinks and snacks you can get quick full meals there of high quality.
Conbini meals only register as "high quality" to you because your comparison point (e.g, American 7-11) is an abysmal excuse for food. The food is, in reality, not that special.
The first few years in Japan I loved combini food because of the novelty. Then you realise it's still processed crap loaded with chemicals and usually nutritionally poor (lots of rice, very little veg or protein) barely better than supermarket "ready meals" (or bento/souzai) and more expensive.
This hot take, along with the "oh you can get better chicken than FamiChiki almost anywhere in Japan", drives me _nuts_, even as I live in Tokyo.
Yes! There are better options available if I want to sit down for a meal, or even just wait for a couple of minutes for someone to fry me a piece of chicken to order.
That's _not the point_! Both the SEJ meals, and FamiChiki, are _fantastic_ for what they are — available in literally tens of thousands of locations across the country, and available _instantly_, 24/7.
They're both _not that special_ if you compare them to a "real" restaurant (though, and I will die on this hill, FamiChiki is hands-down better than a good ~80% of chicken I would get in a restaurant in my home country; but that's a somewhat different conversation).
But if you compare them with convenience store meals available elsewhere in the world (especially in the broadly understood West), they still _are_ pretty damn special.
(And don't get me started on the 7-11 frozen pizzas from Da Isa. Those, reheated in a Balmuda also clear a good 75% of "real" pizzerias back home, and not because pizzerias in Berlin or Warsaw are particularly bad!)
It is not a hot take. I lived in Japan for quite some number of years and I'm back there regularly for work and to see friends. I know what I am talking about.
You live in Tokyo, you know damn well that you can receive silent judgement for being "that guy" who mostly eats at the conbini.
> But if you compare them with convenience store meals available elsewhere in the world (especially in the broadly understood West), they still _are_ pretty damn special.
What part of my original comment flew over your head? We said the same thing.
I think you could make a relatively uncontroversial argument that pizzerias in Germany or Poland on average are pretty bad, but if you made that claim about Berlin or Warsaw _specifically_, I wouldn't take you seriously.
Wondering if there's a better reference article for this. The current link goes to a page with so many adverts that I saw no actual content on my phone screen.
The fact that people in the current year still don't use ad blockers baffles me. Even on mobile, use Firefox with uBlock Origin and/or DNS66 or AdAway for OS wide blocking, or even just set dns.adguard-dns.com in your phone DNS settings.
It is bizarre, isn't it? My web experience has been broadly cleansed of ads for about as long as we've had a web to experience.
These days, Firefox on Android indeed works great, and so does uBlock Origin. It's a superb combination on the desktop, and also on my pocket supercomputer.
On iOS, I browse with Safari and the free AdGuard extension (from the app store) does quite well.
These mobile browsers even work well for watching videos on Youtube without inserted ads.
They accomplish this cleansing at the cost of at most a few minutes of my time to set them up when a new device comes into the mix. It's a fantastic bargain.
People have choices, and I don't know why anyone would choose to see ads.
On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!
On my trip there with a group of friends we would wake up and head to the local 7-11/Lawson/Family Mart. Even when we went into the countryside for the hot spring baths in Hokkaido there was a Lawson in town. 7-11 had the best food though. I loved those chicken teriyaki egg sandwiches, onigiri and the yakisoba-pan. But those chocolate swirl babkas were clutch. I once wandered in late night and cleared the shelf of them.
They are expensive by Japanese standards. Assuming you're American, you're benefitting massively from the exchange rate.
IDK man - this is sort of true, but I think you under-estimate how quality and price scale. A Jumbo-Choco-Monaka at 7/11 is still a fantastic value at ¥160 even if you adjust for purchasing power. GDP Per Capita (PPP) is about $85K in the US and about $60K in Japan, but even granting a 2x increase for California then a $2 choco-monaka would be a steal. As it is, I just spent $4.50 for an Its-It about an hour ago and while I am quite a dedicated fan of these things I would have gladly forked over ¥700 for a Chocomonaka if such things existed in California. I realize that people don't live out of 7/11 for their daily groceries and your point has some validity, but the quality/cost is still a great deal relative to what you would get in America.
$85K vs $60K ...to give you some idea the typical wage in Okinawa for a combini job is about $6/hour. I think the income disparity is larger than those numbers suggest.
FWIW Japanese people living there tell me combinis are expensive based on their salaries and I believe them.
IIUC Japanese budgets are different. They spend comparatively less on housing and transportation than Americans. The Anglosphere in general has somehow developed a rather toxic status quo when it comes to that first basic need, with everything else only being slightly cheaper.
I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
> I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
Exactly. Housing and the housing market in Japan is an interesting beast. Based on my limited understanding as someone who has sort-of briefly looked at buying a home in Japan, houses are not really financial investments. For example, compare house prices in Japan (including the land) with a house in Australia.
It's pricier than a supermarket, but still decently good value even in Japanese terms.
It's not the exchange rate. It's 30 years of economic destruction and currency devaluation as the end result of horrific spending policies. If Japan doesn't right the ship, they'll sink into middle income territory over the next 30 years. Poland and Greece are now just slightly below them in GDP per capita - and Lithuania is above them (unthinkable circa the mid 1990s).
Realistically Japan is very close to being a second tier economy. It's quite plausible that Croatia and Latvia will pass them on GDP per capita over the next decade. 7-11 Japan would be relatively inexpensive for the citizens of any affluent nation, because Japan is so much poorer than it used to be.
7/11 is still 30-50% more expensive than the supermarkets, so irrespective of how affluent people are, it's a poor choice.
I used 'exchange rate' because not only is the yen weak, but the USD seems pretty strong - I guess it depends on where in the US you are from, but as a Brit, US feels expensive to me, Japan feels cheap, ergo Americans must find Japan even cheaper than I do.
I think tourists just don't know the names of grocery stores, don't see them on social media, and don't expect them to have essentially all the same items as convenience stores (and in even greater variety) because ones back home have disappointing prepared and packaged foods. They also just don't care about wasting money when it already feels cheap.
Unrelated but another tip unknown to tourists is to get cold drinks (even alcohol) at pharmacies instead of convenience stores: their beverage fridges tend to be set much colder.
Thank you. I live in Japan and it is incredibly frustrating to hear people here talk about the exchange rate as if it is some temporary but unfortunate weather condition, rather than the downstream effect of a generation of terrible policy decisions that it actually is
Probably more accurate to say the bubble period was the weather condition and the current rate is more of an equilibrium.
Is it their spending habits and resulting expenditure on infrastructure or is it their currency policies to try to boost exports? Not challenging but asking for clarification.
And now compare not the numbers, but what these countries actually produce, in global sense. Japan produces cars, electronics, medical and precision stuff, cultural exports. And what do Croatia produce? Not even speaking about almost dying Latvia and Lithuania.
Aren't in late stage techno consumerist demographic collapse that many others (Germany, China, yeesh, South Korea) aren't going to suffer from to an even worse degree?
I guess one could point to various policies, especially with pseudo- protectionist benefits given to the Japanese mega conglomerates, which like in Korea are kind of just an extension of the government.
But I wonder if such economic policy fumbling is in an evil outgrowth as people try to deal with the underlying collapse.
> Poland and Greece are now just slightly below them in GDP per capita - and Lithuania is above them (unthinkable circa the mid 1990s)
Re Poland and Lithuania: USSR collapsed in early 90s, and many would have been forgiven for thinking that these countries would continue to live in poverty, which they obviously didn't. Notably, USSR was a donut empire where the peripheral regions were richer and more educated than the heartland. That's also why the collapse of USSR started there. Sarah Paine talks about that.
Convenience stores have gotten more expensive but they've always been an expensive option in Japan. It's always been much cheaper to go to grocery stores or other such alternatives to get the same items.
And how had the Japanese inflation / cost of living changed over the last 10 years or so? I went there in 2015 and now hearing this I'm strongly thinking about paying another trip there... I mean, back then 1 EUR bought 135 yen and now it's 185, and I already remember restaurants to be pretty cheap for the average quality, while hotels/apartments sucked a bit - especially in room size.
From my experience prices have gone up (relative to salaries) however the weaker yen means you won't notice it.
YT channel @japaneats is easily my favorite for seeing what's available in 7-11 japan.
Having spent a significant amount of time in Japan, 7/11 there is an experience the rest of the world needs to know.
I wonder how 7/11 in the US will change now that the Japanese version bought out the US version. Will we actually have hot and prepared food like Japan? I doubt it, seems the supply chain infrastructure just isn't there.
7/11 Japan really benefits from urban density, which in turn makes the distribution of fresher food and smaller footprint stores much more of a factor.
The distribution network even shows up in maps. There will be clusters of 7/11 in Japanese cities which is more efficient than spreading them equally.
https://conbini.kikkia.dev/
Besides the context in the other comments, they pushed the Japanese fresh food angle in a media blitz pretty hard last year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/business/7-eleven-ceo-ste...). Egg sandwiches seem to be the most reliably available in the contiguous states, but you can also spot egg rolls and onigiri. They're also now bracing to close hundreds of stores and reopen a fraction of that number to match the new model: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2026/04/17/7-eleven...
It's been fully owned by the Japanese company for over 20 years
As others have mentioned, 7/11 in the US has been owned by 7/11 (Japan) for quite a long time, now.
There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.
It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.
But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.
There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).
Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.
5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.
Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."
Their accomplishments here are very impressive.
As someone who remembered 7/11 commercials as a kid in Texas in in the 80s, I thought they had completely died out in the USA until I spent a summer at a university in Mexico and there was a local 7/11 which was surprisingly nice. But unless they up their game in the USA, I see all the typical gas stations we grew up with as fading due to changing standards. Buc-ee's started in a tiny Texan town where some relatives live and now stretches from Colorado to Virginia to Florida. In addition to the vast amenities, including delicious fresh barbecue and salads, they have clean bathrooms and treat employees well. There's no going back (I hope), and I'm surprised they're not in California yet, though I guess California has stuff like EddieWorld. I recognize that this leaves an opportunity for smaller gas stations to try to improve to offer good-enough service since Buc-ee's focuses on larger stores, but my hope is that the elevated standards will trickle down to forcing smaller ones to raise standards. Seems like 7/11 would be well-positioned to adopt that strategy to become that dominant smaller store, if they're paying attention.
7/11 has had hot prepared food for decades in the US. Pizza, meat pies, rollers, and those hot dogs
7/11 Japan has been running the stores in Hawaii for ages, just look there.
The stores in Hawaii are certainly nicer and more full-featured than the ones on the US mainland, but the stores in Japan and Taiwan are still light-years ahead.
It's not like the corner store isn't a thing in places like New York and Chicago.
Is that sector ripe for consolidation?
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
You can just throw food in the garbage.
hey, this is actually Not Good
How is this waste dealt with in Japan? Why can't whatever-that-is be implemented in the US?
Badly. Until a few years ago there was a franchise-wide rule that no food could be discounted even if it was close to expiry, so either the staff/owners bought them and ate it themselves, or it went in the dumpster.
Giving expired food to homeless people is not really a thing there either.
South Korea has extremely strict food waste laws and a pretty well developed systems of convenience stores. I wonder how things are handled there.
Convenience stores changed a lot around 2010 when they started real time tracking Every Damn Thing. Even in the mid 00s staff ate, took home, or gave away whatever they wanted to from the expired pile.
If that works (badly) in Japan, then why can't it work (just as badly) in the US?
What new impediment does the geography bring to the table?
I was merely answering your question about how Japan deals with it (by trashing it, mostly). I guess the US could do that but unlike Japan, I'd expect people to break into the dumpsters and steal the food out of it. The trashing of food might offend people more in the US.
In terms of geography though, Japan has an extremely efficient and well developed cold chain and the country is pretty much a line from north to south. The US is clearly more spread out and significantly larger than Japan. That causes problems with both delivering the food to stores and (as other people have mentioned) efficiently moving waste to food banks.
People and customs related to food are not primarily geographic in nature. Japan is a strongly ordered society, not a roiling chaotic mess like the US. When people run into trouble they often hide their shame and starve themselves rather than beg for food. And it isn't like the network of food banks in the US was easy to set up or keep running.
It can, but probably not in advance.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
That's kind of what I was leaning towards. It's a problem that needs solved, but it's not necessarily hard to solve, nor does it need solved in advance.
It's the kind of problem can often very nearly resolve itself.
Here in the States, I've seen what can happen at the end of the night at a busy Little Ceasers in a not-great part of town. They've got a lot of unsold pizzas, already boxed, that they simply need to get rid of so they can close up and go home.
So they walk out the back door with armloads of pizzas and... casually give them away to the people who are waiting out there. It's a very calm and surprisingly tidy process that goes by quickly. This happens at the same time every night.
The only apparent cost is whatever it takes to maintain the base amount of humility required to let this happen instead of dutifully marching the pizzas over to the dumpster and tossing them in.
This routine is almost certainly an invention of evolution, instead of planning.
7/11 has always had hot pizza, fried chicken, rollers, etc in my area?
Would be great if we could get oniguri in US 7/11s.
I was in 7/11 in the US and they sell egg sandwiches.
coincidence?
Did you try one? Egg sandwiches really aren't my thing but I've always wondered if the US version comes close to the quality of the Japanese version even if some of the details (like presence of bread crust) differ.
An egg sandwich is not the sort of thing I'd trust from 7-11. I'd be thinking of that Futurama episode with the worms the whole time I was eating it.
Many don't realize 711 was started in Dallas, Texas (by Joe C. Thompson). 711 is an interesting part of American and Japan culture
The local stores in Japan and Taiwan are really nice. 7/11 and Family Mart are these pleasant places where you can see schoolchildren sitting chatting and eating. That’s not something you’d see in San Francisco.
You’ll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
I’ve seen little children take the subway alone in Japan. Its a completely different environment
For what it's worth, this is commonplace in Australia too. I feel like you're describing a general safe country thing. I've lived in Japan so I know it's probably one of the safest places in the world, but I feel like what this thread describes is more US/Canada/some Euro countries being particularly dangerous, and not Japan being uniquely safe.
Canada is not particularly dangerous, but it has a horrible case of being drowned out by American culture (which strongly influences Canadians' subjective perceptions of their environs), and having the same kind of problematic urban planning as the United States.
I think it's more high-trust than high-safety. Most American cities (and certainly suburbs) are quite safe, and have only been getting safer over the past decades.
And yet we are constantly bombarded with fearmongering around children getting kidnapped on every street corner, every hour of the day.
I'll absolutely agree that a place like Tokyo is safer for a child on their own than NYC or SF, but the gap isn't as wide as the mainstream media would seem to suggest.
It's not just kidnapping though. You also need road safety, or some level of pedestrian safety.
By far the most dangerous thing for kids, is traffic. And in many places that is the delimiter of their freedom.
Or walk home from school, or the playground, or wherever they are going from, through the middle of what in any NA city would be described as 'downtown', and would get CPS dispatched on speed-dial.
> but unattended children not so much.
But that's down to larger cultural differences. Japanese schoolchildren probably get less supervision overall than their US counterparts.
Can confirm what others have posted, i tried some random snacks/sweets in some of the 711 stores in Japan and they were really good, for some reason I was not expecting it to be so good.
Apparently, the three 7-Eleven stores with the highest revenue are all located in Denmark[0], two of which are located at Copenhagen Central.
[0] https://www.retailnews.dk/article/view/1178986/6000_kunder_o... (Danish)
Doesn’t surprise me. Had a layover in Copenhagen and they charged $7 for a coke.
I ate a lot 7/11 onigiri as a poor grad student exploring Tokyo on a long layover once... they're truly wonderful little stores. (They also are one of the few places you can use an ATM, very useful given how cash based Japan is)
He can be proud of the legacy he built, which is something many American founders cannot say with a straight face.
Rest in power sir.
This is a bit out of date. These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards, just in time for Japan to finally switch to electronic payments in a big way (in particular PayPay).
Yes. The payments landscape has shifted pretty dramatically in Japan over just the past 3 years. It used to be that you had to worry about getting cash, IC cards, refilling said IC cards, going to an actual bank with your passport, etc. Now all you need is an iPhone (although I hear Android phones from outside Japan still can't use suica).
I was in Japan recently and did find that my non-Japanese Pixel phone wasn't allowed to use the mobile Suica app, even though the hardware supports it. Some nerds on XDA figured out the mechanism preventing it[0], and if you're rooted it seems like you can run a Magisk module to patch the region check in the PixelNfc component[1].
I guess it's down to licensing for the FeliCa smart card system or something? I will say, as a privacy person, I'm pretty jealous of the ubiquity of IC card payments there. You can buy the card at a kiosk with zero KYC and top it up with cash at the same kiosk. Since it's a stored-value system, it works offline, and you get the convenience of paying with a card with nearly all of the anonymity of paying with cash.
[0] https://xdaforums.com/t/global-pixel-device-unlock-felica-su...
[1] https://github.com/jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel
This will remain the case as long as Sony continues to charge Android manufacturers heavy licensing fees for the FeliCa chip needed for Suica/Pasmo.
However, major Japanese cities are increasingly allowing credit card tap to pay for transport, Osaka Metro is already 100% on board and Tokyo has started trials. There's a long tail of minor companies that will likely take forever though.
Tokyo Metro, Toei, Keikyu, and others have rolled it out across a significant chunk of their lines at this point.
You can get to a significant portion of the network... So long as you don't have to take a JR train.
My only complaints about Contactless Cards from Visa/Mastercard/etc. Is that they're significantly slower than FeliCa. I can sprint through a gate with my Pasmo; I have to stop with my Visa.
For Visa, the closest transaction processing happens in Colorado. So they're slooooooow.
Disclaimer: Fmr Visa, current PayPay employee. I hate payments.
Android doesn't support suica for public transport but you can still use Google Pay most of the time. Except when you randomly can't! Unlike other countries you still need to take a credit card (and maybe even some cash) as backup.
Android does support suica/felica, and many (most?) phones have the hardware for it, but most manufacturers will only pay the licensing fees for it for their Japanese SKUs, leaving other SKUs with a software lock.
Okay, I'd be curious what phones have support for it enabled. I thought the chips were only installed on iPhones!
"Unlike other countries you still need to take a credit card (and maybe even some cash) as backup"
"still"
I take a reliable CC and cash any fucking day over Apple and Google Pay or any shit payment "app" like Revolut which simply blocks you out of your account if on a device they seem to not like / that is not attested, while preventing browser-based usage.
You stupid tech bros. Appps, apps, apps, everything via an app.
Even the Tokio metro paper tickets via cash work well. No phone needed!
Well you'd hate Japan then since everybody is using PayPay. Which is an app and not even a standard like Google Pay or Apple Pay.
Sorry, complaints about our payment policy are handled through the Complaintly app, which is available for Apple and Android devices.
> You stupid tech bros
You realize you're posting this on Hacker News, yes?
My wife has a US-bought iPhone, and we tried to load some money onto a digital Suica card. The hardware is there, but the system wouldn't accept any of the credit cards or her debit card that she had registered with Apple Pay.
An Indian friend of mine (who lives in the US) told me it's similar to when he visits family in India; none of the digital transit cards work for him because the system won't accept his US payment cards.
(I have an Android phone which has the right FeliCa hardware, but it's disabled in software so Google doesn't have to pay the licensing for it.)
Visa and (to an extent) Mastercard have been known to block transactions from their foreign-issued credit cards to digital Suica and PASMO cards. US issued Amex and Discover cards (at least prior to the latter's acquisition by Capital One) use JCB's merchant network in Japan, and thus receive the same treatment as any other JCB-branded card.
Given that my friends with iPhones were having more trouble than me with a visitor Suica, the phone advantage isn't a major one.
Also, non-Tokyo transit systems often support VISA tap and pay.
A visitor Suica card (that you can buy at the airport and refill with cash in seconds), a VISA, and cash (that you can get at any ATM with a debit card) is 100% sufficient for travel in Japan.
---
The cash part of it is non-negotiable, though. Many merchants are cash-only. Presumably, handling large amounts of cash works fine in a society where the risk of getting robbed at gunpoint is actually zero [1], and where the police are ready to use very persuasive methods to maintain that 99% conviction rate.
---
The real frustration is that buying rail tickets online inevitably triggers an extra layer of VISA verification (2fa code through SMS or email), which usually works fine, but has already shat the bed for me once, requiring a chat with my card's CS rep. Which fucking sucks when you don't have a phone # that works.
---
[1] While the risk of some cutpurse ganking your wallet is so near-zero, it's a rounding error.
There are still significant gaps. I was heading from Narita to Shinjuku about a year ago, and after I got off the Narita Express, I realized my Pasmo card (which I hadn't used in about 8 years) didn't have enough on it to get me the rest of the way. There were two ATMs I could find in the (reasonably-sizeable) train station, and neither accepted my US-issued VISA debit card. I had to walk down the street to -- of course -- a 7-Eleven to use the ATM there.
During the rest of my week and a half there, I saw plenty of other ATMs that appeared identical to the ones in the train station that didn't work for me.
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards
I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.
Most let you use them, the post office and 7-11 had the lowest fees
I would still call this accurate.
ATMs from the major banks (SMBC, Mizuho, Yuucho, etc.) are still extremely picky about supporting US cards. Most will do it... for an egregious fee.
Kombini ATMs are better about this, but 7Bank ATMs remain the gold standard with no fees outside of whatever the bank itself charges. LawsonBank is OK, but few/far between. Enet (at a lot of kombinis) are terrible.
Disclaimer: Former Visa, current PayPay employee
> He can be proud of the legacy he built, which is something many American founders cannot say with a straight face.
Please don't use an obituary to make a nationalistic swipe on HN.
American founders aren’t necessarily more malicious on average.
They just end up rewarded after doing shady tricks more often. Whereas in any other country being too devious too often is fatal.
I guess the archetypal example on HN would be Microsoft or Oracle.
> The company's forays into Internet marketing began with a bookselling partnership with Softbank and a book wholesaler in 1999; most books are paid for and picked up at local Seven-Elevens. The next year he engineered a $375 million partnership with NEC, Nomura Research, and Sony, called 7-dream.com, that promised to offer 100,000 products and services over the Internet.
I was living in Japan around 2008 and remember buying concert tickets and picking them up a conbini after purchasing online. I don't remember whether it was a 7 Eleven or Lawsons, but maybe it was a result of this.
I lived in a city with the highest density of 7-11s per capita. There was a 7-11 at almost every street corner. 7-11s in the US are day and night from those in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Can you imagine you could pay your utility bills, print documents, fax and even have a full wifi cafe experience all under one roof? In Japan, Lawson is probably more popular though.
Japanese 7-11 is a fascinating story.
Here is decent video on Youtube that goes into the history of the company, and why 7-11s are so different in the US and Japan (tldr: it's the core culture/infrastructure differences):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3EH4VmxMAo
I was amused today when Morty was praising 7-eleven in s0901.
I learned today that 7/11 in Japan wasn't a pure licensing play but a technology enabled business model disruption of large grocery stores and mom-and-pop convenience stores. The launch of 7/11 Japan introduced: franchising, JIT inventory management, and centralized POS terminals to the Japanese retail market. The linked article explains this in more detail.
Here's a fascinating video I enjoyed that explains how their business model worked (only) in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3EH4VmxMAo
Pour out a little Big Gulp.
Might be appropriate with a Pokari sweat or 196, but would love to try a Japanese take on big gulps.
I read the entire article, including such gems as
> Suzuki was always known for being hard on staff
and I'm left wondering: Why is any of this interesting to someone who is not in Mr. Suzuki's family or circle of friends?
I almost never go to a 7/11 in the US but every time I go to Japan I visit a 7/11 at least once a day. No matter where you are in Japan there's likely a 7/11 within walking distance and besides the usual assortment of drinks and snacks you can get quick full meals there of high quality.
https://thisis-japan.com/7-eleven-japan-guide-2025/
Conbini meals only register as "high quality" to you because your comparison point (e.g, American 7-11) is an abysmal excuse for food. The food is, in reality, not that special.
The first few years in Japan I loved combini food because of the novelty. Then you realise it's still processed crap loaded with chemicals and usually nutritionally poor (lots of rice, very little veg or protein) barely better than supermarket "ready meals" (or bento/souzai) and more expensive.
It's the honeymoon effect I guess.
This hot take, along with the "oh you can get better chicken than FamiChiki almost anywhere in Japan", drives me _nuts_, even as I live in Tokyo.
Yes! There are better options available if I want to sit down for a meal, or even just wait for a couple of minutes for someone to fry me a piece of chicken to order.
That's _not the point_! Both the SEJ meals, and FamiChiki, are _fantastic_ for what they are — available in literally tens of thousands of locations across the country, and available _instantly_, 24/7.
They're both _not that special_ if you compare them to a "real" restaurant (though, and I will die on this hill, FamiChiki is hands-down better than a good ~80% of chicken I would get in a restaurant in my home country; but that's a somewhat different conversation).
But if you compare them with convenience store meals available elsewhere in the world (especially in the broadly understood West), they still _are_ pretty damn special.
(And don't get me started on the 7-11 frozen pizzas from Da Isa. Those, reheated in a Balmuda also clear a good 75% of "real" pizzerias back home, and not because pizzerias in Berlin or Warsaw are particularly bad!)
> This hot take
It is not a hot take. I lived in Japan for quite some number of years and I'm back there regularly for work and to see friends. I know what I am talking about.
You live in Tokyo, you know damn well that you can receive silent judgement for being "that guy" who mostly eats at the conbini.
> But if you compare them with convenience store meals available elsewhere in the world (especially in the broadly understood West), they still _are_ pretty damn special.
What part of my original comment flew over your head? We said the same thing.
They are not that special when judged on merit.
> not because pizzerias in Berlin or Warsaw
Well kinda actually. In countries with good culinary, even basic konbini food can be better than more "serious" restaurant in bad culinary countries.
I think you could make a relatively uncontroversial argument that pizzerias in Germany or Poland on average are pretty bad, but if you made that claim about Berlin or Warsaw _specifically_, I wouldn't take you seriously.
Alternate link: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/asia/711-japan-founder-dies-i... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263423)
NYT Obit https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/business/toshifumi-suzuki...
Wondering if there's a better reference article for this. The current link goes to a page with so many adverts that I saw no actual content on my phone screen.
No ads here on desktop or mobile with ublock origin.
The fact that people in the current year still don't use ad blockers baffles me. Even on mobile, use Firefox with uBlock Origin and/or DNS66 or AdAway for OS wide blocking, or even just set dns.adguard-dns.com in your phone DNS settings.
It is bizarre, isn't it? My web experience has been broadly cleansed of ads for about as long as we've had a web to experience.
These days, Firefox on Android indeed works great, and so does uBlock Origin. It's a superb combination on the desktop, and also on my pocket supercomputer.
On iOS, I browse with Safari and the free AdGuard extension (from the app store) does quite well.
These mobile browsers even work well for watching videos on Youtube without inserted ads.
They accomplish this cleansing at the cost of at most a few minutes of my time to set them up when a new device comes into the mix. It's a fantastic bargain.
People have choices, and I don't know why anyone would choose to see ads.
every time I have to deal with a stock Chrome on stock Windows, I marvel at the amount of outright abuse normies are able to endure.