Japan’s conbini are beloved — a lifeline for the country’s overworked parents and hungry salarymen as well as a must-see experience for tourists.
But they weren’t always so welcome. In the decades since the first outlet was opened in 1974, the now nearly 60,000 convenience stores have been accused of a variety of offenses: crushing mom-and-pop stores, contributing to rural decline, and accelerating a loneliness problem. According to the critics, they are “strangely cold and unfriendly places” that have destroyed the shotengai, Japan’s traditional, cozier shopping streets.
Toshifumi Suzuki, who died last week at the age of 93, was known as the “father of the conbini.” He brought the 7-Eleven chain to Japan, radically overhauling the concept to local tastes and then re-exporting that model abroad. His success came from knowing when to ignore the critics. And his death not only invites a second look at the legitimacy of those complaints but, amid parent Seven & i Holdings Co.’s ongoing struggles, serves as a reminder of the merits of an unconventional approach.
“Looking back now, everything I did was opposed,” Suzuki said in an interview in 2019, explaining his philosophy. “When I proposed something and people went against it, I thought: This is worth doing, this’ll succeed.”
Suzuki had to overcome internal opposition to even get 7-Eleven off the ground. He first encountered the US convenience store concept in the late 1960s as a manager at Ito-Yokado Co., which would become the “i” in Seven & i. His insistence that it would work in Japan went against the received wisdom of the day, shared by his company’s president, that Japan’s small retailer-focused distribution system was ill-suited to a model that needed scale.
Suzuki overcame that opposition. But he also had to adapt the model and turn the convenience store into the conbini. He did that with a relentless focus on quality, accessibility and usefulness, which he said were crucial to such small stores. Under his leadership, 7-Eleven became the place where Japanese did everything — from financial services, with stores adding bill payments in 1987 and ATMs in 2001, to caffeinating, with more 7-Elevens serving coffee in Japan than Starbucks has locations in the US.
His innovations extend beyond the store itself. He changed the way Japanese people eat, not just by making conbini food taste good, but through his introduction of onigiri rice balls in 1978. Until then considered a homemade food, taken on trips or for farmers in the field, it’s now an iconic staple of the diet, with 7-Eleven alone shifting more than 2.1 billion every year.
Suzuki said that his was the first chain store in the world where individual owners placed orders in response to customers’ needs, rather than having headquarters allocate inventory. And since he stepped down in 2016, the industry is still looking for its next big hit; tellingly, the English version of the chain’s history page ends that same year.
That last chapter of Suzuki’s life was no less dramatic, ousted in a boardroom fight backed by activist investor Dan Loeb. The American accused Suzuki of plotting to install his son as his successor, something the then-chief executive denied. The conventional wisdom saw his dethroning as a victory for corporate governance reform, hailed by one investor as “the day Japan was saved.”
Yet since his departure, Seven & i has looked strategically unsettled, ensnared with activist investors and takeover bids. It eventually implemented most of Loeb’s demands, boosting dividends and divesting much of its non-conbini assets. Yet a decade on, even as the Nikkei 225 has more than quadrupled, Seven & i’s shares have risen less than a fifth. Ryuichi Isaka, the executive Loeb backed when Suzuki sought to remove him, was himself dethroned last year.
None of this means Suzuki was always right, or that Japan’s companies should be run as monuments to their founders. And we don’t know what would have happened if Suzuki had remained.
But Seven & i’s rough decade complicates the easy narrative that removing Suzuki was modernization at work. It’s a reminder that the received wisdom deserves scrutiny, too — that investors and outside directors don’t always know better than the builders who, like Suzuki, create something that made daily life better, one onigiri at a time.
Suzuki’s career, and Seven & i’s decade since, suggests that instead of working to satisfy financiers companies should prioritize thinking outside the box. “If everyone agrees something is good, that means anyone could have thought of it,” Suzuki said. “So it isn’t really worth doing, and won’t succeed.”
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Granted, the Japanese version is more extensive, with recent innovations including fresh-made tea and smoothies.
Consider that around the same time Loeb also argued for Sony Group Corp. to divest much of its entertainment sector — currently core to a strategy that has boosted its stock to record highs.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief.
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