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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's pricier than a supermarket, but still decently good value even in Japanese terms.
In our local 7-11 I can find the exact same carton of milk as sold in the supermarket, and the price is also exactly the same. So it depends. Some of the other stuff sold there is more expensive, but somewhat surprisingly it isn't that more expensive, so if I need butter or yoghurt or tea in a hurry then it's no big sacrifice to stop at the closer 7-11 instead of adding the extra five minutes (of walking) to go to the supermarket instead.
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.
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.
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.
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. Thatâs not something youâd see in San Francisco.
Youâll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
Iâve 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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you. I really think that big-chain gas stations need to race to the top, not the bottom. If what I usually hear is true -- that they can make some money on gas but the real profit center is inside the convenience store -- then making the stores and their offerings maximumally appealing should be a top priority.
Here in Ohio (the former(?) home of Speedway) things are looking up. We've got Casey's and Racetrac, each with generally-tidy stores and usually a decent selection of tasty, hot food. We've got Sheetz and Wawa expanding, with always-tidy stores and an outstanding selection of fast, made-to-order food. And as of April, we also have Buc-ee's: That place can be a destination in and of itself just for the brisket sandwiches and Beaver Nuggets, but the wall of hot sauce and the beef jerkey bar pull quite a lot of weight as well.
That leaves plenty of room at the bottom for the locally-owned bodega. These places are trash, there's usually no prepared food, and I do not wish to see the bathroom (ever), but they serve their neighborhoods' needs. It's easy to walk over there and buy whatever (I just got back from visiting the one down the road, in fact), and the bodega man is a genuinely-friendly dude who remembers his regular customers and is responsive to whatever they want him to stock. Despite the clear limitations, a good local bodega is a thing to be treasured.
But I don't see 7/11 making moves in that direction -- at least here in the States. They're moving so far down-market that they're approaching the bodega space, but they're doing this by shedding all of the redeeming qualities they may have once had. They're both blind and unresponsive to customer needs, and they don't care. That's all bad.
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.
Many don't realize 711 was started in Dallas, Texas (by Joe C. Thompson). 711 is an interesting part of American and Japan culture
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.
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 â 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.
There's also an ATM in every 7-11 in Japan where you can withdraw cash with a foreign credit card. That used to be very difficult most places, until the last few years. Some years ago I could only count on the post office (which by law needed at least one ATM which worked with foreign cards), and 7-11. Low charges as well, or none, depending on card type.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
American founders arenât 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.
>They just end up rewarded after doing shady tricks more often. Whereas in any other country being too devious too often is fatal.
The market is adjusting apparently given the Mangione case and the Kimberly-Clark distribution center fire.
> 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.
>Please don't use an obituary to make a nationalistic swipe on HN.
I'm American.
Please don't tone police me, especially if you're going to call me something I'm most certainly not, especially since eighteen other people apparently found my comment useful.
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