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Here's a timely article talking about the difference between 7-Eleven stores in North America versus Japan, and why the Canadian company, Alimentation Couche-Tard, wants to buy the Japanese company for $47 billion:
So far, owner Seven & i Holdings Co. hasn’t been able to replicate that success at its 13,000 US and Canadian stores, better known for their constantly rolling hot dogs and 30-ounce soft drinks than their fresh food or their ability to inspire effusive posts from social media influencers. The Tokyo-based company, which has been closing underperforming North American stores faster than it’s been opening new ones, is now the target of a $47 billion takeover bid by a Canadian rival that says it can do a better job translating that overseas magic to the market.
I have no idea if this will happen, but Couche-Tard has been trying to buy the company since 2005. If successful, this will create the largest convenience store operator in the world. It will also go down as one of the largest foreign takeovers in Japan. (On a related note, Couche-Tard tried to buy French grocery chain Carrefour SA in 2021, but that was blocked by the French Finance Minister.)
What is clear, though, is that there's an obvious user-experience gap between the stores in Japan and the stores in Canada and the US. As we talked about here, convenience stores in Japan serve solid food and act very much as community hubs. I didn't know this until right now, but in Japan, people also use these stores to do things like send parcels and pay utility bills, and top chefs regularly judge the food.
However, this is based on a supply-chain network that is, at least right now, unique to Japan:
In Japan, which is much smaller, the chain relies on a robust supplier network, where inventory and food preparation take place at more than 150 factories churning out breakfast, lunch and dinner. Product lineups and displays change quickly based on consumer tastes, with each store responsible for analyzing the sales of every product and adjusting orders to reduce waste and control inventory. It’s a management method known as tanpin kanri, which was even taken up as a Harvard Business School case study. “Japan’s convenience stores’ food preparation central kitchens and logistics infrastructure would be more challenging to establish and operate efficiently over vast areas in the US,” Boston says.
There appears to be universal consensus that the key to unlocking additional value is more fresh food and overall better offerings. And presumably Couche-Tard is of the opinion that it will be a better operator and that it can figure out whatever supply chain is needed. Time will tell. But I find it interesting that all of this is arguably about creating a kind of "local corner store" that better serves people's needs.
Cities used to have these in spades. But then we zoned them away, scaled everything up, and optimized around rolling hot dog cookers and big gulps. So in many ways, this story is about a return to fundamentals. It's about figuring out a way to serve quality products to local neighborhoods, in a globalized world. That sounds simple enough, but it's clearly not easy.
Cover photo by Lisanto 李奕良 on Unsplash
In my recent post about "takeaways from Japan" I spoke about a willingness to experiment and be playful with the built environment. I said that quite often people design homes around what they want, as opposed to what they think might broadly appeal to the market. So today, let's look at an example. Below is a site on the outskirts of Tokyo, about an hour from the center of the city. The architect — Kamakura Studio — describes it as being situated in a "new town" where about 75% of the residents have moved in within the past decade. And like Japan as a whole, problems of aging and population decline are expected in the future.
Using Google Maps to get rough dimensions, the site looks to be somewhere around 8m wide by 11m deep. So this is not a huge site compared to what you might find in the suburbs of other cities, but it's certainly a very workable set of dimensions. Also noteworthy is the fact that the area has no sidewalks. This is common throughout Tokyo. Ordinarily, this would imply a suburban mental model. But in practice, Tokyo's streets actually feel very pedestrian-friendly. And that's because they tend to be narrow and the entire city is oriented mostly around rail.
What was ultimately developed on the site is this (House F):
Totalling 169 m2, the first floor of the house serves as an office for the architect and as an open space for the local community. The firm opens up the space to people who may want to stop in for coffee (or just hang out) and for movie nights. There's even a "plant-sharing network" on the terrace where dozens of households supposedly contribute and participate. On the second and third floor of the house are the domestic quarters. Here there are two generous bedrooms, study spaces, and multiple balconies, one of which provides access to a rooftop terrace.
It's a highly livable house, but it's also designed to meet a particular set of ambitions. I mean, look at the above coffee window. And this is one of the really cool things about domestic architecture in Japan. (If any of you are familiar with how the zoning would work for a site like this, I'd love to understand that.)
Project images via Kamakura Studio
The traditional narrative when it comes to NIMBYs is that these are individuals acting out of self-interest. Quintessentially, these are people who own their home and do not want development "in their backyard" out of fear that it might negatively impact the value of their property and/or have a negative impact on their local community.
But in reality, anti-development sentiment is likely more nuanced than this. In a recent working paper called "The Symbolic Politics of Housing," researchers at UC, Berkeley and UC, Davis show that anti-development sentiment is not always just about self-interest; rather, it can be predicted by how people feel about certain "salient symbols."
This is based on something called "symbolic politics theory" and it works like this: We all have positive and negative associations with certain "symbols." Often these are developed early in life. And so how we might feel about a development or a particular land use policy, depends on the symbols attached to it and whether we like them.
Here's an example.
Consider two identical apartment developments happening in your neighborhood. The first is being developed by faceless "Wall Street investors" and the second is being developed by a nice local entrepreneur who also happens to be of the exact same ethno-cultural group as you.
If you don't like people on Wall Street and you don't want them profiting from the development, the research suggests that you are more likely to oppose the first development, even though it's the same as the second one, and maybe even if it runs counter, in some way, to your own self-interest. You just don't like the symbol attached to it.
This is also why people who live in cities tend to be more pro-development on average. It reinforces symbols that they already like; ones associated with cities, density, and urban living. This is fascinating, but it also complicates matters. Because it means that strong opinions are not just being formed based on measurable impacts. It's also a question of symbols and feelings.