Why Scotland needs Japanese style 'konbini' stores

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My daughter has a good friend who is half Japanese. Whenever Emily returns from a visit to family there, we are regaled with the stories of the meals she has had from the corner shops.

Forget wagyu beef and bluefin tuna sashimi - from onigiri rice balls, obento lunch boxes and karaage fried chicken, her tales of the delicious snacks she has picked up there only cement my need to visit Japan.

Known as “konbini”, corner shops are a quintessential cornerstone of Japanese society, offering substantial hot meals and snacks as well as packaged groceries and toiletries.

Now, just as luxury supermarket Waitrose looks to expand its network in Scotland through a chain of small format convenience stores, the Japanese firm behind the convenience store brand 7-Eleven is set to be sold off to a Canadian rival, sparking fears in the country for the future of the beloved shops.

If the £23 billion deal goes ahead, the chain will be bought by Alimentation Couche-Tard, based in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, which has its own unique convenience store culture in the form of the “dépanneur”.

As a one-time teenage resident of Québec, I remember the “dép” fondly, which like the Scottish corner shop, is an often scruffy small store selling drinks, chocolate bars and lottery tickets, where we all headed in our school lunchbreak. Despite its exotic sounding name (which in French from France, apparently translates as a handyman, rather than the Québecois use of the term), it does not have the romance of its Japanese counterpart.

In Japan, the konbini culture has been immortalised in Japanese film and literature, not least in award-winning novella Convenience Store Woman, which took the world by storm after it was released internationally in 2018.

“A convenience store is not merely a place where customers come to buy practical necessities,” says main character, convenience store worker Keiko Furukura, in the opening pages of the book. “It has to be somewhere they can enjoy and take pleasure in discovering things they like.”

Many Japanese fans of the konbini worry the Couche-Tard takeover might see the stores changed to be more like their North American counterparts, with financial synergies forcing owners to cut the iconic hot food offerings in Japan. Canadians, however, seem keen that the Japanese snacks may appear in their 7-Elevens.

Although now a mainstay of Japanese retail habits, the 7-Eleven chain actually originated in the US and opened its first store in Japan 50 years ago in Tokyo, where the first item sold was a pair of sunglasses. 

However, the concept took off in Japan to such a level that it was not long before the Japanese branch of the firm took over the American arm. Today, the brand has 85,000 outlets across 20 countries and territories, with around a quarter of those situated in Japan. While other Japanese convenience stores are available, the 7-Eleven is by far the largest brand.

Instead of losing the Japanese model to Québec’s dép, we’d do better to expand the konbini concept across the world.

The jaw-droppingly good value Boots meal deal and the ever-evolving range of M&S packaged sandwiches are icons of their own here - but I bet if we popped a few onigiri in a corner shop, they’d do well too.