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Philip Patrick
The dark side of Japanese convenience stores
4 June 2026, 11:33am
A 7-Eleven store in Toyama, Japan (Getty Images)
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Philip Patrick
The dark side of Japanese convenience stores
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Japanese cities can disappoint. Visitors stroll around hoping to be awe-struck by the dreamy spectacle of clip-clopping Geisha in their wooden geita, or barreling sumo wrestlers, or high-stockinged ninja girls (à la Kill Bill), and all against a Blade Runner backdrop, only to be confronted with mostly unremitting blandness. The constants are these: concrete, plastic, more concrete, more plastic, endless construction (one crappy shopping complex or mansion block replacing another), confusion, and noise. It can all seem dizzyingly homogenous.
The defining feature of the Japanese city these days is the ubiquitous convenience store or "konbini," the scaled-down supermarkets/post offices/banks/…whatever the customer requires it to be. There are 7500 in Tokyo alone (one for every 1800 people) and 56,000 in the whole country, with some regional variation but three dominant chains: 7-11, Lawson, and Family Mart. Konbini are everywhere, and unlike every other business in Japan, branches never seem to close, though new ones are constantly springing up.
I hate konbini; they are soulless, ‘non-places’
Normally, konbini are too bland, too boring, too familiar to be worth consideration or comment, but the recent death of the "visionary" businessman Toshifumi Suzuki at the age of 93, has focused minds here on the konbini’s cultural and societal role. For it was Suzuki who introduced and refined the concept from its original home in the US (where a form of the convenience store had existed since the 1920s) and made it palatable for Japanese tastes. While not exactly a household name, Suzuki had arguably more influence on Japanese households than almost anyone else in the last 50 years.
It all began on a business trip in the early 70s when Suzuki noticed the success of the 7-11 convenience stores and decided it might work in his native Japan. He faced widespread ridicule, the idea of one-stop shop mini markets in a country used to speciality family-owned ("mama papa") stores seemed well… un-Japanese. It was assumed the venture would fail.
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But Suzuki got the money together, as well as government backing (24-hour general stores were seen as a lifeline to remote communities). He opened his first franchise in 1974 in Toyosu, Tokyo, with the very first customer purchasing an 800-yen umbrella (roughly the same price today, by the way). And the rest is history, an endless expansion of an endlessly evolving phenomenon. A key moment was when the parasite consumed the host: Suzuki’s company bought the American parent and formed Seven & I holdings in 2005.
Why did it work? In a not very surprising word – convenience, but not just for the customer, but also for the retailer. The hitherto standard but tortuously complicated Japanese distribution system had forced shop owners to keep prices high, but the konbini model allowed for a much closer relationship with distributors and a smoother product flow. And contrary to the expectations of many, customers decided they liked the idea.
Slowly, imperceptibly, konbini grew, not so much in size, but in product offer. A breakthrough was the stocking of onigiri (rice balls), a Japanese staple imbued with almost magical import that was previously assumed only to be producible at home. To see them on shop shelves seemed like a miracle.
Soon, hot comfort food became available, including fried chicken, steamed buns, and, for the intrepid "oden" which is radish, fish cakes or tofu swimming (often for quite some time) in a dashi broth.
Services were next: ATMs were installed, as were photocopiers; concert tickets could be bought; bills could be settled and digital wallets topped up. All the fussy, tangly little tasks that used to take hours and trips to several locations could now be managed in one location.
Today’s konbini are in a state of permanent flux. By applying the Japanese kaizan (continuous improvement) corporate model, more common in engineering, and utilizing real-time customer data to feed into product selection, Suzuki enabled the shops to progress constantly and yet remain, eerily, the same (the look and the atmosphere never change much).
3000 products are stocked with 100 new items a month, yet somehow it...