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Posted by zdw 1/6/2026

Conbini Wars – Map of Japanese convenience store ratios(conbini.kikkia.dev)
133 points | 59 comments
mstngl 1/12/2026|
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...

arghwhat 1/12/2026||
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.
Rendello 1/12/2026|||
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)

kkusz 1/14/2026||
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.
Rendello 1/14/2026||
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/

hyfgfh 1/12/2026|||
Seizon Senryaku!
rjh29 1/12/2026||
That explains why there's a crossing where you can see 7 Family Marts in Shin-Imamiya...
netsharc 1/12/2026||
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...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yT32QAyv6s

curiousgal 1/12/2026|
I'm sorry but that video is literally unwatchable! What in the world is happening with the audio/subtitles?
anonymous908213 1/12/2026||
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.
netsharc 1/12/2026|||
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.
andy99 1/12/2026||
Big tech has changed over the last bit to trying to tell us exactly what and how we should think - or maybe more precisely to see thought as “friction” and want to remove it all together. This is a very minor example in the scheme of things, but I see it everywhere now.
shalmanese 1/12/2026||
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.
andy99 1/12/2026|||
Why wouldn’t you just ask them, and particularly for media like this that has a native language, default to that? I don’t want software to think for me about what I want to see, if I want something different I’ll change it.
shalmanese 1/12/2026||
You're going down the first question of a deep rabbithole that eventually lands you to where every major tech company has landed.
deaux 1/12/2026||
Got it, "maximizing ad revenue " it is.
deaux 1/12/2026|||
Yet this implementation that Youtube uses is in the bottom 1% of worst ones. Strange how roughly every other website/app does a better job at it.
netsharc 1/13/2026||
It's probably Microservices(TM)... The black box responsible for rendering the HTML is some other black box to the UI or whatever. The UI offers you locale options, but the renderer that fetches video titles hasn't been configured to respect this, probably uses locale from geolocation and some overpaid genius said "always use machine translation if locale doesn't match video title language"...

The homepage of google.com is also localized. I remember noticing that even when requesting and getting the English locale, the tooltip for the doodle was still in my region's language... wahey!

anal_reactor 1/12/2026||||
YouTube is literally unusable without browser extensions or a third-party app
AniseAbyss 1/12/2026|||
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.

MarsIronPI 1/12/2026||
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.

Intermernet 1/12/2026||
This is great, but it doesn't differentiate between "Natural Lawson" and "Lawson", which my partner and I have dubbed "Unnatural Lawson".
notpushkin 1/12/2026|
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.

autarch 1/12/2026||
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.

axus 1/12/2026|
I thought Japan had a lot of convenience stores, and then I went to Taiwan.
autarch 1/12/2026||
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.
tokioyoyo 1/12/2026||
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.
wongarsu 1/12/2026|
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%
wodenokoto 1/12/2026||
What’s the source for combini locations?

I’ve actually been interested in that data for a back burner project for some years now.

yorwba 1/12/2026|
I assume that querying OpenStreetMap for shop=convenience will return reasonably complete data. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop=convenience
carlob 1/12/2026||
I would really like to know some stats about the Voronoi cells, like average size, largest and smallest...
froh 1/12/2026|
yes! and population numbers!
criddell 1/12/2026||
In the US, 7-11 has started selling Japanese style egg salad sandwiches. I haven’t been brave enough to try one yet.

https://www.7-eleven.com/products/fresh-chilled/egg-salad

n4r9 1/12/2026|
What makes this "Japanese style"? Is it the mayo and the sweetened bread?
criddell 1/12/2026||
I just meant that they are supposed to be very close to the sandwiches they are well known for in Japan.
computerfriend 1/12/2026||
Here's a similar analysis for Hong Kong: https://khwongk12.medium.com/7-eleven-vs-circle-k-5964b8f008....
tramtrist 1/12/2026|
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 :)
ximeng 1/12/2026|
Yes - hard to see e.g. city labels on the map under all the pie charts.
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