Often, several stores belonging to the same chain are located in close proximity to each other so that goods can be distributed more cheaply and frequently. This strategy is known as dominant policy (ドミナント政策, dominanto seisaku).[1]
[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%89%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8A%E3...
These Japanese YouTubers decided to play a game, they got off a station earlier than their home and to walk home from there, but whenever they pass a Conbini they'd have to pick 6 items and roll a dice and buy that item from the 6. There's a lot of stores...
I'm sorry but that video is literally unwatchable! What in the world is happening with the audio/subtitles?
Youtube ruins videos with godawful AI-generated autodubbing if it detects a video in a language that differs from your locale. You can access the original audio from the settings cog.
It doesn't even respect the locale of the user interface, but uses IP geolocation and sends you HTML containing the video titles in the language it "knows" you want... And there is no setting to change this.
Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.
YouTube is literally unusable without browser extensions or a third-party app
I learned English when I was a child because all the media I wanted to consume were not translated into Dutch.
Makes you wonder if universal translators ever become the norm people will still bother to learn foreign language.
I would! Learning Japanese has been a mind-stretching experience.
And there's just some passages of literature that you can't translate. Or rather, you can but it just doesn't work, simply because the target language doesn't let you structure or rhyme in the same way as the source language. Every language has a potential for generating unique literature simply because each language has a unique vocabulary + sentence structure.
I'd love to see this for Taiwan. I'm here now (on my Nth trip where N >= 11), and my impression is that 7-11 is the clear winner in all the cities I've been to, followed by Family Mart and then some stragglers like Hilife and OK Mart (it's ok).
My personal favorite is probably Family Mart, because they have multiple very delicious vegan rice balls to choose from.
I thought Japan had a lot of convenience stores, and then I went to Taiwan.
Yeah, it's quite difficult to walk for any length of time without encountering one, usually a 7-11. They're everywhere. And they actually have some decent food. It's a bizarre thing to experience for an American like myself.
This is great, but it doesn't differentiate between "Natural Lawson" and "Lawson", which my partner and I have dubbed "Unnatural Lawson".
Man-made Lawsons beyond my comprehension!
I don’t think it would be fair to differentiate it though. The point of the map is to show popularity / reach of each of the bigger brands.
What’s the source for combini locations?
I’ve actually been interested in that data for a back burner project for some years now.
I assume that querying OpenStreetMap for shop=convenience will return reasonably complete data. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop=convenience
Pretty cool stuff! Side note, it’s always fun to see Japan-related content getting to the front page around this time, as the people in NA are asleep. Would be curious to see HN userbase %s by continents.
This gets asked from time to time. It's somewhere in the realm of 45% NA, 35% Europe, and the remaining 20% relatively evenly split between Australia/Oceania, India, Asia (excluding India) and SA. Japan makes up around 1-2%
I would really like to know some stats about the Voronoi cells, like average size, largest and smallest...
yes! and population numbers!
In the US, 7-11 has started selling Japanese style egg salad sandwiches. I haven’t been brave enough to try one yet.
What makes this "Japanese style"? Is it the mayo and the sweetened bread?
I just meant that they are supposed to be very close to the sandwiches they are well known for in Japan.
Ahhh man it'd be so cool to see this for Thailand! My kids live there with their mom and one of the things that surprised them is the overall dominance of 7-Elevens there. They'll be several on the same block. I wonder if it's like that all over Thailand or only where they live?
Here's a similar analysis for Hong Kong: https://khwongk12.medium.com/7-eleven-vs-circle-k-5964b8f008....
I live in Japan. This is great! Though with all the overlay it’s hard to pinpoint my neighborhood. A gps loc button or the ability to temporarily turn off the colors would help! Thank you for making such a fun thing :)
Yes - hard to see e.g. city labels on the map under all the pie charts.
I wonder if this information would be a useful addition to a geoguessr player’s toolbox.
This is fun, but I would separate specialized outlets. For example Lawson and Lawson 100 are not the same.
A few years ago, I was in Wroclaw and it was full of convenience stores.
Where I stayed, you could go to a store and from there see the next one already.
very cool, would be interested to see this approach applied to other markets
Nice concept but struggled to find my area. Short of search or using my location it would be nice to have a line overlay (lines which go underground are obscured currently).
It took quite a while for the overlay to appear. Be patient if you want to see the data.
this is very cool! I love how responsive the interface is.
There's a lot more than these 6 brands. You have New Days, Daily Yamazaki, and the competition of mini markets as well such as My basket...
All of those are included on the map. You can see them by hovering over a prefecture for a count of each brand within it, or by zooming in. Nonetheless there is also a disclaimer on the info panel specifically addressing this: "This is a pretty surface level analysis of all locations of conbini in Japan. (Only the top few brands)".
Went to japan for a few weeks last year, never saw anyone in the states who went talk about Daily, saw a few and popped in and was surprised by all the breads! pretty dang tasty
There was no war until a map was presented lol
It's just a name, but those franschises would likely consider it a real fight for prime real estate and customer base, each aiming to overtake the others.
Sorry but this seems like vibe coded slop
You cant search or change language
Idk what is the goal here, but maybe some analysis with graph would be better, like who has the most territory or something like that? You also might need to disclosure how you got this data
I thought you were being unfair, but I don’t think you’re wrong anymore.
https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars/commit/b8ea5e5a9351c23...
Wut, how does that look like AI?
I can't help but giggle slightly at the effort put into presenting not just the term, but also both the japanese and japanese-romanized forms, considering that it's just an entirely literal translation of a basic business strategy. Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo.
When I was in Poland, I was shocked by the number of Żabka convenience stores. They didn't look quite like Japanese combinis (from what I've seen online), but were leagues ahead of the typical North American convenience stores. They were on every corner, sometimes you could look down the street and see multiple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBabka_(convenience_store)
That explains why there's a crossing where you can see 7 Family Marts in Shin-Imamiya...
Seizon Senryaku!