Why The U.S. Can’t Copy Japanese 7-Eleven | AB Explained

If you ever visited Japan, chances are you've noticed and walked into a 7-Eleven at least once.

Because it's a brand you instantly recognize, you go in expecting the usual stuff, snacks, drinks, something quick to grab and head out.

But a few minutes later, you start noticing something and you get confused.

They're selling all kinds of food you've never seen in American 7-Elevens.

And somehow it tastes better than what you would normally get at a lot of restaurants.

And then, the obvious question hits you, Isn't 7-Eleven supposed to be an American company?

So why does the Japanese 7-Eleven feel so much better than the American version?

That confusion seems almost universal and viral-worthy.

On YouTube and TikTok, you can find creators from all over the world filming themselves inside Japanese 7-Eleven, trying the famous egg salad sandwich, bento boxes, and Japanese-style breads.

And those videos pull in millions of views.

Here is what I found interesting.

Everyone just talks about how amazing the food is, but no one really seems to be asking about how Japanese 7-Eleven ended up becoming this way in the first place.

And that question appears to be pretty important right now because by many measures, American 7-Eleven has been under real pressure.

After a failed mega merger attempt, store closures and uneven growth, the company's own leaders have been talking openly about needing a turnaround and trying to become more like Japanese 7-Eleven, even as they prepare to spin off the US business in an IPO.

But is that really something you can even copy?

When we did our research, we discovered that there were many different forces that came together to transform Japanese 7-Eleven into what it is today, a convenience store model that set the bar so high that other countries and even local competitors are left wondering how they could ever catch up.

Some of what we found might surprise you.

So watch until the very end and decide for yourself whether the Japanese version of 7-Eleven can easily be replicated, not just in the US, but in your own country as well, wherever you're watching this from.

To understand how they got here, though, we have to go back to the beginning, to the very first Japanese 7-Eleven, and the moment when a simple licensing deal accidentally created a completely different future for the brand.

Before we deep dive, we often get asked how we are able to do such deep research across so many Asian countries.

A big part of it is that we spend a lot of time digging into local context.

Cultural differences between the West and East are huge, but so are the information gaps within Asia itself, driven by language barriers and algorithms tailored to different countries.

That's why we use CyberGhost VPN as one of our research tools.

CyberGhost encrypts 100% of your Internet traffic traffic and reroutes it through secure servers in over 100 locations, which means no one, not your Internet service provider, not your workplace or school, and not even CyberGhost themselves, can see what you're doing online.

This becomes especially important when you're on public WiFi in airports, cafés or hotels, some of the easiest places for your data to get intercepted.

But with CyberGhost turned on, everything you do is protected inside a secure encrypted tunnel.

And because my work often requires as far as accessing new sites and platforms from different parts of Asia, CyberGhost also lets me switch my virtual location instantly.

So even if a site is geo-blocked, depending on where I'm traveling, I can still get the information I need, and I can use it on up to seven devices at the same time.

As a bonus, CyberGhost also unlocks geo-restricted content on more than 40 different streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus.

Right now, CyberGhost is offering our viewers an 84% discount, plus four extra months for free.

And it's all backed by a 45-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it completely risk-free.

It's already trusted by over 38 million users worldwide, with more than 20,000 excellent reviews on Trustpilot.

So just scan the QR code or click the link in the description to grab the special offer and start protecting your digital life today.

Back to the deep dive.

Picture this.

It's Tokyo in the early 1970s.

The economy is booming, salarymen are working late, but if you miss supermarket hours, your options are basically vending machines, tiny liquor stores, or nothing at all.

There's no such a thing yet as what Japan will later call a Konbini, a true 24-hour convenience store network on every corner.

Meanwhile, in the US, the story begins decades earlier.

In 1927, there was a company in Dallas, Texas, called Southland Ice Company.

Back then, most American households didn't have fridges, so that was the company's entire business model, selling ice.

But soon, the company noticed something simple but important.

If customers were already coming by to buy ice, why not sell them a few basic groceries as well?

Milk, bread, eggs, you know, everyday essentials.

As more of Southland's ice docks started doing this, they gradually evolved into a chain of small retail outlets.

Around 1928, these grocery selling outlets were given their own name, totem stores, basically places where you could tote or carry your daily necessities home.

Then in 1946, the totem stores were rebranded as 7-Eleven to reflect their new operating hours concept, 07:00 AM to 11:00 PM, seven days per week.

You know, I'll be honest, I didn't realize that 7-Eleven was literally named after its operating hours.

But, duh, kind of obvious if you think about it.

And if you didn't know, well, now you do.

At the time, those extended hours were considered revolutionary compared to typical store hours, which usually close around 5:30 or 06:00 PM.

From there, the model kept evolving, eventually moving towards 24-hour operations in the early 1960s, starting with a store in Austin, Texas, that stayed open all night in 1963, and proved so successful that the around-the-clock format spread across the chain.

By then, many 7-Eleven were selling coffee, snacks, cigarettes, and everyday essentials 24/7, all built around a car-driven American lifestyle.

So when a Japanese retail executive named Masatoshi Ito, who ran a fast growing supermarket chain called Ito-Yokado, visited the United States in the early 1970s and saw the 7-Eleven model firsthand, he was struck by how different it-felt from traditional Japanese retail.

To him, it revealed a huge gap back home and a major opportunity.

In 1973, Ito-Yokado signed a licensing and area franchise agreement with the Southland Corporation, the US owner of 7-Eleven, and in November that year, created a dedicated subsidiary called York Seven Co. Ltd.

The deal gave York Seven, which would later be renamed 7-Eleven Japan, the exclusive right to develop and operate 7-Eleven stores in Japan.

They could use the 7-Eleven name and trademarks and tap into the company's operating know-how in exchange for franchise fees in compliance with the American side's basic brand and operational standards.

Now, this is where it gets interesting.

Inside the new subsidiary, 7Eleven Japan, there was a relatively young manager named Toshifumi Suzuki, who was put in charge of the whole 7-Eleven project.

No one knew it at the time, but he would go on to become the first President of 7-Eleven Japan, and later Chairman and CEO of the whole Ito-Yokado Group, which would eventually be renamed as Seven & i Holdings, with the "i" coming from Ito Yokado.

More on this a bit later because the company structure becomes really interesting.

Anyway, Suzuki is often described in Japanese media as the godfather of the konbini.

Turns out, Toshifumi Suzuki was the one that convinced Ito Yokado to pursue the licensing deal, negotiated directly with the American side, and then became the first President of 7Eleven Japan when the subsidiary was created.

Under his leadership, the company introduced the franchise model into Japanese convenience retail and began building a radically different operating system behind the scenes, one that would eventually turn Japanese 7-Eleven into a business more profitable and admired than the original American chain.

From the American side, this was basically, "Okay, here's the brand, here's the basic playbook, go open some stores in Japan."

But from the Japanese side, it became, "Let's completely re-engineer how this business works for dense cities, small homes, and insanely demanding customers."

demanding customers." On May 15th, 1974, the first Japanese 7-Eleven opened in Tokyo, run by a 24-year-old former liquor store owner who converted his family store into a franchised 7-Eleven.

So it was technically a franchise from day one.

The Japan headquarters supplied the brand, systems, and logistics, while the store owner, the franchisee, ran the shop on a revenue sharing basis.

We can get into how the franchise agreement itself differs in Japan from the American model a bit later.

But it's not an exaggeration to say that 7-Eleven stores exploded across Japan, and they didn't spread randomly.

They spread in clusters.

Instead of building big, expensive news stores from scratch everywhere, 7-Eleven Japan mostly converted existing neighborhood shops into franchised 7-Elevens.

A lot of them were small, family-run liquor stores and general shops on good locations that were already part of the community.

Headquarters brought the brand, the standardized store layout, and the supply network.

The local owner brought the building and the right to use the site, whether they owned the land outright or leased it, plus their knowledge of the neighborhood.

For many struggling shop owners, turning into a 7-Eleven was basically a lifeline.

That's one of the big reasons 7-Eleven Japan could scale so quickly.

They didn't have to gamble on totally new sites.

They were upgrading corners that already had foot traffic, then surrounding them with more stores in the same area.

So deliveries, promotions, and brand awareness all became more efficient.

By 1980, just six years after that first Tokyo store opened, 7-Eleven Japan already had over 1,000 stores nationwide.

By 1983, they had more than 2,000.

And by then, 7-Eleven was well on its way to becoming a household name in Japan.

And of course, with that kind of success comes competition.

Lawson entered the Japanese market in the mid-1970s, opening its first convenience store in Osaka Prefecture in 1975, only about a year after 7-Eleven's debut.

FamilyMart grew out of the Seiyu supermarket group in the late 1970s and began rolling out its own franchise-based convenience model in the early 1980s, quickly expanding in both urban and suburban areas.

So by the mid-1980s, you already had three major players racing to grab the best street corners and insert themselves into people's daily routines: breakfast on the way to the train, lunch near the office, late night snacks on the way home.

And among those three, 7-Eleven was leading in both store count and sales per store.

From there, the numbers just kept climbing.

7-Eleven Japan passed 10,000 domestic stores in 2003.

Today, there are over 21,000 7-Eleven stores in Japan alone, almost a quarter of all 7-Eleven stores in the world.

Remember Ito-Yokado? The parent company that brought the 7-Eleven brand to Japan, and also one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country?

Ito-Yokado was supposed to be the main business, with 7-Eleven Japan just a new experiment in convenience retail sitting underneath it.

But it was increasingly becoming obvious where the real growth and profits were actually coming from.

The convenience retail market was killing it.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the original parent company of American 7-Eleven, Southland Corporation, had run into serious trouble.

After aggressive expansion and mountain debt, Southland filed for bankruptcy in 1987.

To keep the company afloat, Ito-Yokado and 7-Eleven Japan stepped in as part of the restructuring, and by 1991, the Japanese side controlled roughly 70% of the American 7-Eleven business.

Fast forward to 2005, seeing the 7-Eleven Japan had become the group's clear growth engine, Ito-Yokado reorganized itself into a holding company called Sevem & i Holdings, placing 7-Eleven Japan, Ito-Yokado Supermarkets, and Denny's Japan under one umbrella.

Oh, yeah, Ito-Yokado, or more specifically, Toshifumi Suzuki, the godfather of the konbini and the CEO of 7-Eleven Japan, had also been responsible for bringing Denny's to Japan in the early 1970s around the same period he pushed to bring in 7-Eleven.

Here's the ironic part.

Around the same time in 2005, as Seven & i Holdings was being formed in Japan, the group also increased its stake in the US business, by then already renamed from Southland Corporation to 7-Eleven Inc. From 70% to 100%.

In other words, they went from majority owner to full owner.

That move made the American 7-Eleven Company a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese group under the Sevem & i Holdings umbrella.

So the licensee I can see in Japan that originally just borrowed the American brand, eventually became the global parent of the original American chain.

The fact that the whole 7-Eleven brand is now effectively owned and controlled by a Japanese conglomerate, rather than a US company, it's something I had no idea about until I looked it up.

But suddenly, it feels a lot more credible when you hear the American 7-Eleven saying that they want to be more like the Japanese 7-Eleven.

On paper, they might actually be able to pull it off because the Japanese side is literally calling the shots at the corporate level.

But the real question is, can they really copy the Japanese model in the US, or are there deeper structural and maybe cultural forces that just cannot be replicated?

Let's take a closer look.

Okay, so let's just list out what makes the Japanese 7-Eleven so much better than the American 7-Eleven.

First of all, the food is amazing.

Shelves are constantly stocked with fresh bentos, sandwiches, onigiri rice balls, and salads delivered several times a day, many of them made locally and replaced within hours rather than days.

The egg sandwich in particular is famous for its crustless soft white bread and silky egg salad made with Japanese Kewpie mayo.

It's 7-Eleven's perfected take on Tamago Sando, a simple egg sandwich that became a post-World War II comfort food in Japan long before it ever went viral globally.

And what sets the 7-Eleven version apart is how consistently fresh and soft they manage to keep it, which I'll get into in a bit later.

The stores themselves are bright, super clean, and perfectly organized.

But what really defines Japan 7-Eleven is just how useful it is.

You can pay your utility bills or taxes, print official documents and government forms, buy concert and event tickets, ship or pick up parcels, and grab genuinely good coffee and desserts all in one place.

On top of that, 7-Eleven Japan is constantly rolling out limited time and seasonal products, including exclusive drinks and sweets in collaboration with brands like Starbucks, along with its own sakura and strawberry dessert lines that never show up in U.S. stores.

Some 7-Eleven Japan stores are even officially designated as disaster support stations under Japan's National Disaster Response Framework.

They're equipped with backup power, emergency supplies, and dedicated fuel and logistics resources so they can keep operating and help residents during earthquakes or blackouts.

The company even offer temporary free WiFi access during major disasters, helping people contact family and access emergency updates when networks are disrupted.

Then there are the softer insights you only get from talking to locals.

Did you know that 7-Eleven and other convenience stores have effectively "privatized" trash collection?

In many Japanese cities, public trash cans were removed after the 1995 Sarin gas attacks for security and public safety reasons, which is why visitors are often shocked by how there are practically no trash cans on the street.

In practice, that means if you need to throw something away, you just go into a convenience store like 7-Eleven and do exactly that, often even without buying anything as locals do.

From that perspective, 7-Eleven Japan has evolved into a kind of de facto waste-handling infrastructure and has become so embedded in everyday life that it's hard to imagine the city functioning the same way without it.

That being said, in tourist-heavy areas, there's now pushback.

Some convenience stores put up sign saying trash cans are for items bought there only, partly because of overflowing rubbish from non-customers and confused tourists.

The point is, this total integration of food, logistics, and daily services works because of the sophisticated system behind it.

To understand that system and why Japanese 7-Eleven feels more like urban infrastructure than retail, we need to start with a map, not of the whole country of Japan, and not even all of Tokyo, but of a single neighborhood.

Here is the map of Shibuya, where within roughly a one kilometer or about two thirds of a mile radius of Shibuya Crossing alone, you can find more than 100 convenience stores.

If you've ever visited Tokyo, you know this is true.

There are multiple 7-Elevens and competitors like FamilyMart and Lawson, sometimes appearing on the same block.

And with so many convenience stores packed so close together, you just can't help but wonder, do these places even have enough customers to make any profit at all?

Herein lies the genius and innovation of 7-Eleven Japan, because what we now see was purely by design, driven by a unique business strategy that was the first of its kind in the convenience store world.

When you're trying to expand the franchise brand and increase the number of stores, how do you go about doing that?

The natural inclination is to identify prime locations with a lot of foot traffic, more or less independently, right?

Conquer new territory, extend the footprint, go after new cities and untapped markets.

That makes sense, and to be fair, it's how a lot of franchises still expand today.

But 7-Eleven Japan had very different and deeply counterintuitive ideas.

Instead of spreading stores thinly across the country, they implemented what is now referred to as an area-dominance strategy, deliberately clustering 50 to 60 stores in a tightly defined area so that those outlets collectively gain economies of scale in distribution, brand recognition, and customer habit.

In practice, that means tightening the radius between stores so that the brand can slash delivery costs, share sales and inventory information across nearby locations, and make its logistics increasingly precise.

Think about it.

If your stores are close together, one delivery truck can make multiple stops in a single trip, delivering smaller batches to several outlets more often.

This keeps shelves fresh without carrying excess stock.

And that's a big reason why the average Japanese 7-Eleven is packed with an ever-changing lineup of ready-to-eat meals and freshly made items. But that's not all.

Shorter delivery routes create faster feedback loops.

What sells, what doesn't, what needs to be adjusted by the next morning.

The information system that coordinates these deliveries linking point of sale data from every register with supplier orders and real-time store forecasts became the real secret sauce of Japanese 7-Eleven success.

To give you a sense of how sophisticated this machine really is, Japanese 7-Eleven doesn't just think in terms of products.

It thinks in terms of time.

Shelves aren't stocked the same way all day.

Breakfast items go out in the morning.

Lunch bento boxes peak around noon.

Light meals and snacks rotate in during the afternoon.

Hot foods and comfort items show up late at night.

In some stores, the same shelf space will hold completely different products three or four times in a single day.

That's why the food feels so fresh, even though space is limited.

The store isn't even trying to sell everything to everyone at once.

It's trying to sell the right thing to the right customer at the right hour.

This time-based rotation also keeps waste low because products are designed and delivered with very specific selling windows in mind.

That constant rotation also allows Japanese 7-Elevens to carry fewer products that you might expect.

Instead of endlessly adding more items and clustering the store, 7-Eleven Japan deliberately limits how many products each location carries at any given time.

Fewer products means faster decisions for customers, simpler operations for staff, and much clearer data about what's actually selling.

Over time, that discipline turns a store into something that feels curated rather than chaotic.

You know, while we were doing our research, I couldn't help but notice that this area dominance strategy used by Japanese 7-Eleven looked oddly familiar.

It reminded me of another company that tried to win through saturation and visibility, Starbucks.

In the early 2000s, you couldn't walk five minutes in a major US city without passing the green siren logo.

But as Starbucks expanded rapidly across the US and into China, the same strategy began to backfire.

Sales per store dropped, and eventually, Starbucks had to close hundreds of locations.

So why didn't Starbucks saturation model work as well as 7-Eleven Japan's cluster strategy?

It comes down to what each company was built to optimize.

Each Starbucks location was designed to deliver a full self-contained cafe experience, which came with heavy fixed costs, large spaces, skilled labor, and high rent.

Sure, Starbucks could capture some minor logistical efficiencies by shipping beans and pastries on shorter routes, but those savings were negligible compared to the massive in-store expenses, especially when nearby cafés started splitting the same customer pool.

In other words, Starbucks's density created more overhead than opportunity.

Each Japanese 7-Eleven, on the other hand, runs lean.

Most stores are compact, employ only a few staff members, and plug directly into the same centralized logistics and data system.

The closer the store sits, the more those share routes and distribution networks pay off.

Deliveries get cheaper, and shelf restocking becomes faster.

In short, for 7-Eleven, clustering compounds efficiency.

For Starbucks, density only amplifies overhead.

So hopefully by now, you understand how Japanese 7-Eleven manages to keep those egg sandwiches always so fresh and fully stocked.

Like it's this living, learning supply chain disguised as a convenience store network.

And now that 7-Eleven Japan is layering AI on its data platform for things like product planning and store operations, its ability to predict what each neighborhood will want is getting sharper every year.

Now comes the billion-dollar question, could this Japanese version of 7-Eleven actually work in the US?

And if there's a fighting chance, what would it take to make it work?

Right now, the struggle is real for 7-Eleven Inc, the American 7-Eleven that by now you should recognize as the North American subsidiary of 7-Eleven Japan.

Recent results show that growth in the US has fallen short of expectations, with the company citing inflation and weaker consumer demand for discretionary snacks and high-margin prepared foods.

Unlike Japan, the US 7-Eleven business is also heavily dependent on gasoline sales, a reliance that grew even deeper after the 21 billion acquisition of Speedway, a major gas station chain in 2021.

This means U.S. 7-Eleven earnings are now highly exposed to lower fuel margins and volatile oil prices.

So against that backdrop, efforts are on the way for US stores to replicate the Japanese fresh food model.

But that raises a more fundamental question.

Is Japanese-style 7-Eleven clustering even possible in the United States, the kind of setup where a single delivery truck can loop through a dozen stores in one short run, all within a few miles.

The short answer is not really.

First of all, in the U.S., the convenience store didn't evolve as neighborhood infrastructure.

It grew out of the gas station.

It's a stop, not a destination.

A place where you swing by while filling up, grabbing a soda, or buying a lottery ticket.

Everything about the American convenience store format assumes customers arrive by car and only visit occasionally.

That car-centric geography shapes the entire business model because stores are spread far apart to capture drivers across wide suburban and rural areas.

This means that deliveries have to be built around long routes and large drops.

Core products like beverages and packaged goods are typically replenished on weekly cycles, and even fresh items move through regional distribution networks that often cover huge territories.

Don't get me wrong.

Daily fresh deliveries do exist at many U.S. 7-Elevens today.

In fact, a dedicated fresh food network now delivers to the vast majority of U.S.

and Canadian stores each day, with box trucks often making around a dozen or more stops on long overnight routes.

In Japan, by contrast, chilled and warm foods can be delivered to the same store multiple times within a single day from nearby distribution centers.

The difference is literally night and day.

I suppose you can get closer to the Japanese model in a few dense pockets of the U.S., places like Midtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago.

And 7-Eleven has experimented with more food-forward urban formats in those kinds of environments.

But outside of these rare exceptions, the country's car-centric geography makes that level of logistical density exactly that, the exception, not the rule.

Second, the competition landscape is completely different in Japan versus the United United States.

When you look at Japan's convenience store market from the outside, it looks like cutthroat competition.

I mean, you've got 7-Eleven, Family Mart, and Lawson, three giants that together control over 90% of the market, often sitting within a few hundred meters of each other, sometimes even on the same block.

But here's the twist that's not obvious to the public.

Japan's convenience store competition isn't really a zero-sum game.

Unlike in the U.S., where competitors treat each other like mortal enemies.

Japan's Big Three behave as if they're building something together.

To be clear, they absolutely compete and compete fiercely, racing to innovate with better food, cleaner stores, and faster checkouts, and friendlier service.

But they also quietly cooperate to grow the convenience market as a whole.

In Japan, competition doesn't destroy the market, it strengthens it.

And part of this cooperative balance comes from Japan's business culture.

The principle of coexistence and coprosperity runs deep, and 7-Eleven Japan explicitly uses that phrase to describe how it works with franchisees.

The attitude extends beyond a single brand.

When one competitor elevates the customer experience, the others usually follow.

Everyone's reputation improves, and the whole category wins.

From our research, we even uncovered an interesting detail.

Former Lawson CEO, Genichi Tamatsuka, and former FamilyMart President Takashi Sawada both came out of the same corporate training ground at Fast Retailing, the company behind Uniqlo, where each held senior management roles before moving into convenience retail.

Now, that does not mean they were colluding.

That would be illegal.

But it does mean they shared a common management culture and mindset, respected each other as rivals, and were focused on growing the industry as a whole.

That mindset shows up in subtle but powerful ways.

Shared distribution best practices, similar price points, and almost universal expectation of tidiness, reliability, and good manners.

Basically, you'll never see Japan's convenience chains engaging in a price war by slashing prices or cutting corners.

Now, contrast that with the United States, where competitors fight a fragmented zero-sum war.

Every chain guards its turf, its data, its supply lines.

And that's the key difference.

In Japan, density builds synergy.

In the US, density breeds conflict, which means the kind of coordinated learning loop that powers Japan's cluster strategy never even gets a chance to exist.

But if you thought the contrast in competition was stark, the gap in how franchise agreements work is even bigger.

On the Japan side, the franchise contract is explicitly designed to bind each store into the wider system, not to leave it operating as a lone wolf.

7-Eleven Japan uses a simplified gross profit sharing model.

Roughly 40%+ of a store's gross profit is paid to headquarters as a royalty, often referred to as the 7-Eleven charge, and the remainder goes to the franchisee.

On the U.S. Side, however, the entire system sits on a different foundation.

Franchise and employment laws are built to protect local franchisee's independence, and culturally, operators see themselves as entrepreneurs first.

"Hey, I'm my own boss."

"I know this shop best, and HQ shouldn't micromanage me."

That makes it extremely hard to roll out a Japanese-style agreement where headquarters tightly control pricing and/or operations in exchange for deep profit sharing.

You might get a few willing partners in very specific urban markets, but doing that at scale across the U.S. Would be very hard.

It would still be considered a franchise in legal terms, but it wouldn't feel like a typical American franchise relationship, and it would require far stronger upside for franchisees in exchange for giving up so much operational freedom.

Can you see the pattern here?

What's missing from much of the mainstream coverage of this debate is culture, and that cultural difference is reflected even in the labor model.

In Japan, convenience stores are built around a large, flexible pool of part-time workers, students, retirees, and increasingly foreign workers from Southeast Asia who are willing to work short shifts, follow standardized procedures, and rotate tasks throughout the day.

Training is tightly structured, expectations are clear, and while turnover isn't low, it is predictable and manageable.

That makes it far easier to run stores with frequent food preparation, constant shelf rotation in late night or 24-hour operations without blowing up labor costs.

In much of the US, by contrast, convenience stores operate in a far tighter labor market.

Wages are higher, staff turnover is more unpredictable, and staffing shortages routinely force stores to reduce hours, limit food offerings, or shut down kitchens entirely.

Even if you imported Japan's logistics, data systems, and menu, you'll still be trying to execute them with a labor model that is less flexible, more expensive, and far harder to standardize at scale.

But to top all of this off, once you zoom out, there's this much broader pattern emerging that goes beyond franchise contracts and competition or even labor market.

In Japan, the whole system is layered on top of a high trust, high compliance society.

People tend to follow rules.

Public spaces are respected, and there's strong social pressure not to make trouble for everyone else.

That environment makes it far easier to run 24-hour unmanned or lightly staffed stores, keep aisles spotless, and stock-shelved with ready-to-eat items without constantly worrying about shop lifting, vandalism, or drug use in the bathroom.

In much of the U.S., operators have to plan for security cameras, locked cases from theft, loitering, and sometimes serious safety issues as part of the basic operating reality.

So even if you imported the Japanese system, you would still be dropping them into a society where trust in strangers is a lot more.

Social norms are more flexible, to say the least, and the cost of guarding the store, both physically and psychologically, is significantly higher.

I just want to make it clear that does not make one country good and the other bad.

But it does mean that the Japanese 7-Eleven model that depends on a certain level of public trust and order that you cannot simply overcome with a better sandwich.

In the end, it remains to be seen just how success successful the American 7-Eleven's transition towards a more Japanese-style model will be.

The upside is real.

Better food, smarter logistics, and tighter use of data can absolutely make the U.S. Chain more resilient.

But for that to work, leadership will have to really take into account everything underneath the surface of Japan's 7-Eleven success, the geography, the franchise incentives, the competitive norms, and the level of social trust.

It's also worth noting that even the Japanese 7-Eleven model is no longer running on easy mode.

As Japan's population shrinks and ages, the same profit sharing structure that worked so beautifully is now increasingly leading to scenarios where headquarters can stay profitable while individual franchisees struggle with longer hours, rising labor costs, and thinner margins.

Franchise groups and journalists in Japan have already highlighted hidden losses for store owners, fights 24-hour operations, and cases where the fixed royalty formulas make it very difficult to keep up with rising costs.

On top of that, Japanese customer expectations keep rising.

People now want healthier options, digital payments, parcel pickup, and on demand delivery, all from a tiny store that is supposed to be spotless, safe, and open late.

That puts more pressure on staff, on systems, and on franchisees' already thin margins.

Experiments with unmanned or semi-manned formats may ease labor pressure in some locations, sure, but they introduce new headaches around technology liability and the loss of the human convening hospitality that made the format so beloved in the first place.

So if there is a lesson here for American 7-Eleven, it's probably not that the U.S.

should try to become Japan's 7-Eleven. It can't.

Japanese 7-Eleven didn't succeed by copy-pasting the American model.

It succeeded by rebuilding the business from the ground up for Japan's own realities and constraints.

And that may be exactly what the U.S. operation needs to do now, not by importing egg sandwiches or bento boxes, but by designing an American system that borrows the spirit of what worked in Japan.

I'm talking about tight feedback loops, online incentives, and respect for both the neighborhood and competition, while being brutally honest about the constraints of U.S. geography,

labor and franchise laws, and culture.

If American 7-Eleven can do that, it has a shot at becoming the best version of itself on its own terms, creating a genuine win for customers, franchisees, and the brand at the same time.

If you found this video insightful and felt like you learned something new, be sure to subscribe to Asian Boss and let us know in the comments which part you agree or disagree with.

By the way, don't forget to click on the link in the description to get the special discount CyberGhost VPN is offering.

Again, I just want you to protect your data, and this app will do exactly that while you browse and also give you full access to all the blocked content on the internet for only $2 a month. So check it out.

You know, it's not easy to do all this deep research, especially because we're not franchise law or convenience industry experts.

But that's exactly why we try to interview locals as much as we can and take our fact-checking seriously.

That's also why sharing this video and engaging with our content really matters, because the more support we get, the more we are able to go out there and do even deeper, more thorough research.

Speaking of more engagement, I just want to hear from you, not just through comments.

I actually want to talk to you and ask questions.

So I'm just going to throw out a topic because I'm genuinely curious about this.

Japan has this infamous salaryman culture where everyone runs crazy hours and goes drinking afterwards, right?

At least that's the stereotype.

I'm wondering if that culture is changing or has already changed.

So if you have any experience working in Japan, even as a foreigner or student, I want to hear from you.

We are selectively inviting a small group of people to take part in a livestream discussion.

If you feel comfortable showing your face and speaking English, and you have relevant personal experience, stories or insights to share with a global audience on Japanese war culture, you should apply so we can brainstorm and fact-check for our next explainer video.

If this sounds like something you'd like to participate in, just fill out the form in the description and submit a short video introduction of yourself.

Just speak directly to the camera in selfie mode like this, and keep it simple.

Tell us who you are and why you think your perspective would add value to this conversation.

I'll personally review every submission, and we'll only move forward with this livestream format if we find participants who genuinely bring insight to the topic.

Of course, I'm Stephen Park.

Thank you for watching all the way until the end.

And as always, stay curious.