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Convenience Stores vs Supermarkets and Department Stores

October 16, 2007
By Ken Worsley


I’ve been writing about this for months, but this chart still has me fascinated:

Click to see a full size version.

I’m not sure if it’s more of a comment on the national diet, the strength of convenience stores, the lack of product differentiation at supermarkets, the overpricing at department stores, the sheer convenience of convenience stores, strange chartmaking, or some mutant combination of all that and more…

From the Bank of Japan’s October 2007 Monthly Report of Recent Economic and Financial Developments.

Filed Under Consumer Spending, Department Stores, Retail 

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5 Responses to “Convenience Stores vs Supermarkets and Department Stores”

  1. ioh on October 16th, 2007 8:27 am

    In my neighbourhood, around 40.000 people in osaka, there was only one tiny supermarket and now is closed. Everyone has to go to the combini for everyday shopping!!

  2. Ken Y-N on October 16th, 2007 8:41 am

    Ken, quite frankly it looks like lying with statistics to me!

    The two Y axes both have a common point of 100 in 2005, but they have different offsets, so they appear to intersect in 2001! What is the relative value of sales from all locations? Are the figures per store, or overall?

  3. Joe on October 16th, 2007 8:51 am

    Perhaps it’s improvements in distribution of products to convenience stores. I’m constantly finding things which I never imagined would pop up in a kombini. The 7-Eleven by my old apartment even had a dry cleaning drop box, which I sorely miss (no need to wait for Saturday so I can make opening hours at the corner laundry).

  4. Greg L. on October 16th, 2007 9:56 am

    What a weird graph. What’s the point of having a different scale for convenience stores than for supermarkets and department stores? If all three lines were plotted using the left hand scale and it began at zero instead of 90, then convenience store sales growth would currently be about the same as the other two instead of appearing to be three times greater. I would hazard a guess that the actual (not nominal) sales at supermarkets and departments sales are still considerably higher than those at convenience stores.

    The more I look at this chart, the more it confuses me! Given that it’s a chart showing growth with 2005 as the base year, then really it’s showing that sales growth at all three has more or less levelled off over the last three years. No?

    I could be reading this all wrong though!

  5. Ken Worsley on October 16th, 2007 1:03 pm

    Yeah, Greg…it’s absurdly confusing. I was looking at it in the pdf for a while, wondering if I should have 3D glasses on. Sorry I can’t look up the exact numbers now, but interms of monthly sales, convenience stores and department stores are close, with convenience stores narrowing the gap. Supermarket sales, at over a trillion yen per month, dwarf them both.

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