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.
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.
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.
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%
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
This is fun, but I would separate specialized outlets. For example Lawson and Lawson 100 are not the same.
I do have the data to do that, I struggled with colors and overlap/readability. With how much interest the sites been getting this year maybe I should do a v2
I wonder if this information would be a useful addition to a geoguessr player’s toolbox.
It took quite a while for the overlay to appear. Be patient if you want to see the data.
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
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
this is very cool! I love how responsive the interface is.
Lmao I never thought I'd see a site I made pop up here, other than when I posted it maybe a year ago or so. Thanks I'm glad y'all like it :)
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
Hey there I made the site about a year ago or so because I noticed around my apartment is only Lawson's, so I got curious to see and find how common those types of places are. I used ai for CSS since I can't stand it. But this was a project mostly to learn and play with leaflet
I thought you were being unfair, but I don’t think you’re wrong anymore.
https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars/commit/b8ea5e5a9351c23...
If you are referencing the size of the initial commit that's 99.9% geojson. 56k conbinis takes a lot of lines. Since I was using this as a project to learn leaflet, there is also code I copy pasted from plugin getting started sections and what not. Also some plugins were old and unmaintained so I opted to just put them statically in my assets so I could also modify them easily as needed.
No it’s the single large commit of, not just the data, but the rest of the logic in conjunction with it. You did not appear to use any version control in the development of your app, yet you use it to maintain the app. That’s a AI “smell”.
As an aside, we used to use the term “code smell” back in the day when trying to trace the source of problems in an app. The “smell” would tend to lead you to the bad code.
It doesn’t guarantee this is purely AI generated. It’s just weird, and when held up to the rest of the git repos of the last two years, it gives the appearance of AI generated.
The “slop” part is debatably unfair still, but having an app be AI generated tends to mean little effort was put into the up front requirements analysis before a selection of functionality made.
Again, just generalizations on my part. If it makes you feel better, I’m working on an AI generated app to quantify the amount of times someone’s work is dismissed as “AI slop” so I can present a case to the moderation team to get the HN guidelines updated to discourage ONLY calling something slop without any evidence of it.
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)
Yes, however this approach is what killing Żabka franchisees in similar way as Subways in the US. If one store is profitable enough to stay alive, another one emerges in a very close proximity, resulting in both stores cannibalizing each other profits and the risk regarding losses is being put entirely on small franchisees rather than the big company.
That makes sense. Zooming into Warsaw (or most other cities) on the Żabka map, it's unbelievable how many there are:
https://www.zabka.pl/znajdz-sklep/
Seizon Senryaku!
That explains why there's a crossing where you can see 7 Family Marts in Shin-Imamiya...