Show HN: Interactive map of the convenience store "turf war" in Japan
conbini.kikkia.devTechnologies used: Leaflet (frontend) Turf (Geojson generation and Voronoi generation)
I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common.
I haven't worked much with web frontends before, so feedback is welcomed. I also have some ideas to maybe expand upon, like making the territory calculations based on streets and other geographical features rather than just beeline distance.
The site isn't tested too much on mobile yet, but should be ok.
Currently the frontend code and geojson files can be found at the public repo: https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars. I will upload the backend code soon as I am cleaning it up and reorganizing it.
On my recent first trip to Japan, I couldn't believe the number and quality of 7-Elevens/Family Marts/Lawsons.
You're never more than a five-minute walk from one in Tokyo, and they've got good stuff.
Unfortunately, a side effect of the devaluation of the yen is that food quality at conbinis has decreased as they try to maintain price points. I recently spent a few weeks in Tokyo and there was noticeable difference in quality versus a few years ago.
The best part is when you realize the conbinis actually have some of the lowest quality stuff. Not because it’s bad, but because the rest is just that much better :)
I visited Tokyo a few months back, and while the convenience stores seemed nicer than equivalents in America, I also wasn't particularly impressed. I think if I had just encountered them I'd be impressed, but the internet has hyped up the convenience stores of Japan so much I thought they'd blow me away. They're nice, they're good, but not amazing.
They are amazing, compared to anything in America. That's why they're amazing: you have to think about who's calling them "amazing", and where they came from.
It's like visiting Japan, and going to the restroom. If you just came from America, the experience is truly amazing, because 1) the restroom is clean, and 2) the restroom has privacy (no gaps around the doors, no giant gaps so people see your feet and pants pulled down), and 3) random stuff in the restroom isn't broken, and finally 4) there's a washlet.
If you came from a country where stuff is clean and kept in good order, and the bathrooms are pretty nice, then the Japanese bathroom would not be so amazing, except maybe for the washlet. But coming from America, where most of the features of Japanese bathrooms I listed above are not the case for most bathrooms, the Japanese bathroom is an amazing experience.
Basically, things in Japan are how you'd expect a well-run civilized society to be, so when you come from a place that is poorly run and not as civilized as it claims to be, then things in Japan do seem amazing for a while.
I concur. I’ve been to Japan 11 times in the past 15 years, including an eight-month stay in 2010. Japanese convenience stores are nice, and they’re certainly nicer than their American counterparts, but when it comes to food, whether pre-packaged or prepared, I’ve found better deals for food at grocery stores. Granted, konbini prices are reasonable, and it’s hard to find grocery stores in central Tokyo locations like Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Akihabara; a konbini is much easier to find, and you can’t beat the 24/7 schedules of konbini compared to the restricted hours of grocery stores. However, in the residential parts of Tokyo there’s usually at least one grocery store near a train station.
I must say, though, that the Family Mart konbini near the hotel I stayed at two months ago was amazing for being able to order off Amazon Japan and picking up deliveries there. This is something I wish I discovered many trips ago.
In general, though, I concur with your assessment; konbini in Japan are nice but they’re not mind-blowing.
The deep fried chicken cutlet from 7-11 for $1 is everything I want in a retail establishment
I had a similar experience in Thailand. The amount of 7-Elevens there is incredible. I remember being at one 7-Eleven, and noticing that there was another 7-Eleven visible just across the street.
At first I struggled to make sense of the numbers in the circles. Surely there can't be 10,110 locations in a space the size of the SF Bay area? But yes, yes there are...
One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.
In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office units above. This gives the density a different feeling, because commercial/dining space extends upward.
In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four floors.
Makes it hard to believe Americans when they claim their city is "very dense" when it is mostly single story buildings surrounded by parking lots.
In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four floors.
Chicago used to have a number of "vertical malls." I think Water Tower Place (7 floors) and The Shops at 900 (7 or 8 floors, IIRC) are the only ones left. Unless you also count smaller places like Block 37 (4 floors).
Some are now shadows of their former selves. Some sit empty (Chicago Place), or in various stages of redevelopment.
Right? Our only truly dense city seems to be New York City. Almost everything else is not even close.
Manhattan is dense. The city is still a wide area with many low density apartments and single family homes.
THIS! I was just talking to a city council member about my trip to Japan and how this level of density (multiple stores in the same location vertically but not horizontally) Had some interesting effects on walkability, sales tax revenue per sq mile, and mixed use residential.
ADA law in the US financially prohibit this. Once you need an elevator, the costs go though the roof for the building. Elevator design, installation, inspection and repair are incredibly expensive and eat up a lot of square footage on every floor.
Have you been to Japan? Elevators are quite common, and in most of the buildings with multiple levels and restaurants on higher levels.
Elevators are smaller there. But I think the cost of building is lower there, for a variety of reasons, which makes this more feasible.
Oh, interesting point. So when I see a marker on every block in places, that doesn't mean you can just walk off the street into them, they might be upstairs?
Convenience stores are almost always ground floor. I can only think of times where there is a mezzanine or similar that they might be on an upper floor. They are always placed to have high foot or vehicle traffic.
Exceptions would be places like railway stations, where there might be more people on a different level.
Japan is _dense_ in the major cities. As someone from London, not exactly a quiet village, it's on a completely different level.
I'm reminded of some stat (which I haven't verified) that there were ~15k tripadvisor restaurants in London (a "large" city). There were 65k for Hong Kong... Tokyo had 80k
Granted, Tokyo is very large. I got a bit burned out in my first two trips because hauling from one side to the other constantly to hit different sites is kind of exhausting but yes as another comment mentioned - it's totally normal to find restaurants on floors 1 through 10+++ so you can stack a lot of restaurants vertically. Within the city I was told not many people cook and a friend living there told us a lot of apartments don't even have a kitchen beyond a tiny heater for cooking instant noodles or simple stuff.
This is cool. One of the things I miss most after my trip to Japan is 7-Eleven/FamilyMart. So many nice snacks and drinks, and you never need to walk more than two minutes to find a store. I liked the onigiri a lot.
Japan made me want walkable cities in the US. I'd love it if I could just stroll down my street and pick up melon bread and Boss coffee in the morning.
>Japan made me want walkable cities in the US.
Yeah, me too. But I realized in about 2 seconds that getting walkable cities in the US within my lifetime is a pipe dream, so instead I just sold my car, packed my stuff, and moved to Tokyo instead.
Can I email you? I'm aiming to do the same.
Sorry, I don't have an email address posted here. Basically, it was pretty simple: look for job ads that fit my skills, and which didn't require Japanese fluency. There's a fair number of companies here hiring for such positions. Then I applied, did a video interview, and got hired. There's a bunch of job boards where you can find such ads: gaijinpot, tokyo-dev, japan-dev, linkedin, etc.
For anyone else whose only experience with Japanese convenience stores is the Yakuza games wondering which one Poppo is supposed to be:
> Poppo appears to be based on two of Japan's leading convenience store chains, Lawson and FamilyMart, as evidenced by most of the outlets in the series being placed in locations that correspond to branches in the real world.
> I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons
There's a Lawson-heavy area about a twenty-minute walk from where I live in Yokohama. The three convenience stores closest to me, though, are 7-11. One reason for this clustering, I suspect, is deliveries. Convenience stores are carefully designed for logistical efficiency, and having stores close to each other must shave a bit off the distance traveled by delivery trucks.
You might consider adding Aeon My Basket stores to your map, too. They have sprouted up all over the Tokyo region in recent years. They are positioned as small supermarkets rather than kombini, but their size, locations, and product overlap with kombini puts them in competition with Lawson, 7-11, etc., too.
This brings back memories of life in Kawasaki. I used to live in Kawasaki nearly 15 years ago for eight months, and I still visit regularly, twice a year in fact since the pandemic ended. I was an intern at Fujitsu and lived in a company dorm. Within a two-minute walk from my dormitory was a My Basket, where I did much of my shopping. It didn’t have the largest selection of food, but it carried the essentials and was very close. It was closer to me than the nearest konbini, a Seven Eleven that was three minutes away :).
Seven minutes away was a larger grocery store called Maruetsu, and ten minutes away from my dorm room was Musashi-Nakahara Station, which had a grocery store (I forgot the name) about the same size as Maruetsu. What I loved about these latter two grocery stores was the nice selection of hot foods, especially around lunch time when many workers from Fujitsu and other nearby companies went to buy hot bento. I still remember the ¥300 bento from the grocery store inside the train station. It was tasty and was reasonably filling.
For those too afraid to ask, 'konbini' is short for 'kon-bi-ni-en-su-suto-a' which means 'convenience store'.
Another entry in the long list of “words and phrases you translate by saying the thing in English while trying to sound as racist as possible”.
The Hotelling game seems related:
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6840/2020sp/note/scribe...
https://www.eco.uc3m.es/~mmachado/teaching/oi-i-mei/slides/4...
IIRC the conclusion is that it’s optimal for stores to be positioned at extremes relative to each other (e.g. at two ends of the city) but the socially optimal situation is actually for them to be positioned closer together.
I wonder if that explains why neighborhoods end up mostly containing one kind of store? Other explanations might just be it’s simpler to stock your stores if they’re closer together.This is really excellent UI.
One suggestion.
When zooming in, eventually the stores turn into a uniform blue dot. A light blue icon.
I'd like to see the individual icons keep the color of the convenience store when zoomed in.
Know the map color changes, but it isn't as obvious as the icon.
There is bit of a disjoint in how my eye is tracking the colors where some icons are still a color of the store, but some have turned blue.
Good feedback, I will see what I can do. I agree, I originally wanted to also use logo based icons.
Why do you write 'conbini' instead of 'konbini' in the usual romanization form?
For the todōfuken I would leave out the suffixes (mostly 'ken') in the English labels, except for Hokkaidō obviously.
'Conbini' is a loan word from English meaning 'convenience store.' Please forgive the originators of the word for spelling it so they can understand as Convenience starts with the letter 'c.'
'Convenience' also has 've' instead of 'bi', but that's not relevant. The loanword is コンビニ. When romanizing Japanese (or any other language) the etymology of a loanword has no influence on the romanized form (konbini).
Interesting! 7-Eleven, Family Mart and Lawson are all in Thailand too, but I think 7-Eleven is overwhelmingly dominant, eg on my street in a 100m radius there were three 7-Elevens to just one FM and one Lawson.
Update: some stats, it's not even close... ~200 Lawson in Thailand, ~200 Family Mart (now Tops Daily), and 14,000 7-Elevens. Guess I just spent a lot of time in places with Lawson and Family Mart. This also means the 7-Eleven population density is about the same in Japan and Thailand, around one per 5k people.
I need to see if I can modify this to finally make my ‘inaka or not’ map by determining the distance to the closest combini.
I can’t quite use this one as the radius for every store seems to be a bit large.
Ill post the backend code to the github soon, and there you could easily change the diameter of influence each store has.
What is "inaka or not"? A google search just pulls up an athletic clothing brand.
It means "countryside or not"; that is, measuring whether a location really counts as being in an urban vs a rural area.
I thought the difference was:
Inaka: the bus comes every two hours.
Not: the bus comes every ten minutes.
There used to be so much more variation in convenience store chains... you had Sunkus, Everyday, Cocos, Ai shop, Poplar and so on.
I think Daily Yamazaki is still hanging on in some places? Might have been interesting to add to this map since there are zero where I live but on road trips I'm surprised when I pass by somewhere where there are a lot of them
Love this! I just got back from Tokyo and was thinking something similar about what determined the density of which brands. Nice work!
The colors, while legible, are breaking my eyes. Other than that, great visualization. Fanastc work.
The legend or somewhere else on the page should show the aggregate circle percentages of Japan.
From where did you get all the locations?
I’ve been wanting to plot that data for fun for a while.
I appreciate that the map renders the regional name and character set of the territories
That’s the OpenStreetMap default.
Thank you for doing this. TIL about Seicomart and its absolute dominance in Hokkaido
Where did you get the data?
Looks like a map of the Tokugawa bakufu
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