Move comes as one in four municipalities in Japan has no bookstore.

Japan has a lot of convenience stores, but in general, there are some similarities you can count on regardless of which one you walk into. Odds are the counter will be more or less in front of you, with cases selling things like fried chicken and steamed buns. Along one of the back walls will be shelves of drinks, generally with hop options at one end. And running along the front wall, just inside the windows, you’ll usually find a long rack of magazines.

That last one is about to become a much less common part of the convenience store landscape, though, as several thousand stores will, as of this spring, no longer be selling magazines.

In March, Tokyo publisher and distributor Tohan will be taking over magazine distribution business for convenience store chain Family Mart’s roughly 16,000 branches in Japan, as well as rival Lawson’s approximately 14,000 branches, from former distributor Nippon Shuppan Hanbai (also known as Nippan). However, after reviewing the business viability of supplying the stores with printed materials, Tohan has decided that it’s prohibitively unprofitable to keep servicing them all, and so it will be ending distribution to a total of roughly 10,000 stores in March, or a third of all the two chain’s domestic branches. Lawson has subsequently said that magazine sales will cease at 3,000 of its stores (around 20 percent of its total) in March, and Family Mart says it will be doing the same at thousands of its locations at the same time.

The most obvious reason for the reevaluation is decreased demand for print media as consumers increasingly turn to digital sources, and Tohan also cited warehousing and delivery costs among its reasons for shrinking is convenience store distribution network. However, the decision threatens to exacerbate a worrying situation in which residents of certain parts of Japan have no local retail access to print media. According to a study by the Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, as of March of last year 28 percent of municipalities in Japan had no bookstores whatsoever, making their convenience stores one of the few remaining options for those looking for non-digital print media. With delivery costs being part of Tohan’s decision, it’s likely that stores in rural or otherwise remote areas are most in danger of having their distribution services terminated, and they’re also likely to be located in areas without bookstores nearby.

The print-to-digital shift in reading styles isn’t the only factor at play here, either. Currently, weekly magazines are required to be on shelves on their on-sale site nationwide, regardless of the extra time and complications involved in delivering to more remote convenience stores. In addition, magazines are not allowed to ship in the same truck containers as food items, preventing potential efficiencies from combining cargos headed to rural stores. Easing of such regulations could help keep print media flowing to convenience stores, and Lawson is also looking to expand its system of allowing customers to order individual copies of books and magazines to be shipped to their local branch for pickup using the chain’s in-store kiosks.

Meanwhile, 7-Eleven, Japan’s largest convenience store chain with over 21,000 branches, says it has no current plan to scale back magazine availability, saying that as readers today have fewer places where they can buy print media, it’s become even more significant that the chain provide such products. So for now shoppers can rest easy that they’ll be able to pick up some magazines along with their chocolate gummies.

Source: Sankei Shimbun
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