It’s amazing how one gooey brown liquid can be so mouth-watering, and another not at all.
7-Eleven (Page 12)
Forget Christmas, tis the season for all things Star Wars! In Japan, convenience store chain 7-Eleven is leading you on a quest for new Star Wars merchandise.
Does that beautiful breakfast look like it came from the kitchen of a high-class ryokan inn or loving Japanese family? Guess again – it’s all from 7-Eleven!
Convenience stores around the world are known for stocking everyday items like toiletries, magazines, snacks and soft drinks.
But in Japan, the konbini is also a place to send and receive deliveries, buy movie and theatre tickets, and pick up a life-sized Eva doll and Evangelion SIM-free smartphone.
Zeitaku is one of those lovely Japanese words that sounds as elegant as its meaning. As the word for luxury, it conjures up images of high-class ryokan accommodations with private outdoor rotenburo baths, multi-course kaiseki meals served by elegant ladies dressed in kimonos and extravagant purchases at department stores on the Ginza shopping strip.
While most of those luxuries are, sadly, out of reach for many of us, there’s one affordable item that comes to mind when Japanese people are looking for a bit of zeitaku when a friend decides to visit or as a treat after a long day. That small symbol of luxury is the rich, creamy ice cream of Häagen-Dazs, and now they’re releasing an amazing new chestnut and azuki red bean Japonais flavour to add a bit of class to the upcoming fall season.
Back where I come from, it wasn’t uncommon to pick a grape off its stem and pop it right into your mouth without a second’s thought. The very idea of peeling a grape was something along the lines of a diva demanding a bottled-milk bath while dining on a bowl of only red-colored Skittles.
However, in Japan, where many varieties of grape have thick or rubbery skins, peeling them is pretty much standard. In fact, whenever I eat a grape with its skin intact, I’m stared at as if I had just plucked a live spider off the wall and ate it.
That’s probably why 7-Eleven can get away with marketing their frozen bags of grapes as having “edible skins” here.
With the Tokyo Olympic Committee (TOC) officially cutting ties with Kenjiro Sano’s much maligned emblem, one obvious question is on everyone’s lips: What does this mean for that oden poster made by the 7-Eleven in Musashikoganei, Tokyo?
Some of you may recall that this particular franchise had made a poster promoting their oden sale which bore a striking resemblance to the former Olympic emblem. After a request was made to the TOC, they had denied the poster’s commercial use and likeness to their intellectual property. However, now that the emblem will no longer be used, is the poster back in play?
Up until fairly recently, convenience stores may have not been your first thought when it came to procuring a cup of hot coffee. But in the past year or so in Japan, the likes of 7-Eleven and Lawson have begun offering some really great tasting and affordable fresh coffee options with the help of nifty self-service machines positioned near the register. Sure, there are plenty of bottled and canned coffee options in the back, but there’s something about holding a steaming cup of joe in your hands and being able to smell that coffee aroma that makes it hard to resist.
Now, a mysterious new black cup has made an appearance alongside the regular clear iced coffee cups sold in 7-Eleven stores. Get ready for a classic coffee flavor with 7-Eleven’s new iced cafe latte.
If you are unemployed and living in Japan, we may have found a perfect job for you. No experience is necessary, it’s a pretty safe gig and you won’t have to do anything too difficult. You will, however, be a savior, a hero, and a knight in shining armor for one overworked, stressed-out, and understaffed, 7-Eleven store manager in Tokyo.
Beginning on Friday, May 22, 7-Eleven stores across Japan will finally team up with the wildly popular Attack on Titan franchise to bring you a special lottery with all sorts of winnable prizes! Be sure to check out the details as well as an amusing new promotional video after the jump.
![The defrosted reality of 24 frozen meals at Thai 7-Elevens [Photos]](https://soranews24.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/03/2015-03-07-thai-711-14.jpg?w=640 "The defrosted reality of 24 frozen meals at Thai 7-Elevens [Photos]")
The frozen food section at the local convenience store may not hold any lofty culinary treasures, but it does hold the key to saving time and energy after a long day. All around the world, people value frozen foods for their convenience and, sometimes, their deliciousness.
But can you really trust the picture on the front of the package to be what comes out of the microwave? One Thai netizen went on a quest to demystify the frozen food section of Thailand’s 7-Elevens and posted photos of 24 heated up meals to see how they compared to people’s expectations.
Convenience stores are easily a part of everyone’s daily lives in Japan. So long as you’re in an urban area, you’re probably never more than a five-minute walk away from one. More commonly known as “conbini” in Japanese, they really are just as handy as their name suggests. Need to pay a bill or for an online purchase? Do it at the conbini. Want to print some photos or scan something? Get it done at the conbini. Late-night alcohol- or munchies-run? TO THE CONBINI!
While some convenience store chains can only be found in certain regions, others can be found nationwide. After opening its first stores on Friday, March 6 in Kouchi Prefecture, 7-Eleven only has three more prefectures to go until they’ve got the entire country covered.
There are many “symbols of Japan”–from Mt. Fuji to Akihabara, the country has numerous faces to the outside world. But regardless of what comes to mind when you think of the country, there’s a good chance that you’ll stop by one of its many convenience stores on the way to your destination. In many ways, the army of small shops that squat on half the corners from Hokkaido to Okinawa are the perfect symbol of the country. But it looks like the convenience stores of Japan are now facing a serious problem: They can’t find enough employees!
For a Westerner in Japan, breakfast is just incorrect. If North Americans living in Japan had to pick the one thing they miss most about home, a lot of them would probably scream, “Breakfast food!” Traditional Japanese breakfast is completely different and usually consists of rice, fish and miso soup. It’s boring, lacking in any real taste and basically good for you, unlike our favorite breakfast dishes. Of course, some places serve a “Western-style” breakfast, but that usually includes ham that they call “bacon”, in other words, facon! Get outta here you fake bacon!
So when 7-Eleven dropped this “Eggs Benedict Sandwich” onto its shelves, we figured it couldn’t possibly be worse than any other breakfast food out there, or could it? Better prepare yourself Eggs Benny, we won’t play nice. Get ready for the toughest food review yet!
Last summer, we thought the heat might have been getting to the executives at 7-Eleven. Sure, offering two-meter (six-foot, seven-inch) tall Evangelion statues as special promotional prizes was a cool idea and all, but did they really expect anyone to pony up the 1,836,000 yen (US$16,000) they were asking for the 25 more giant figures they was selling outright?
Well, not only did all 25 of those Eva statues find homes, they sold out in just two minutes. Emboldened by that success, 7-Eleven has teamed up once again with the hit anime franchise to release the most expensive item the convenience store has ever sold: the Evangelion car.
If you’ve ever experienced an Asian summer, you’ll know how unbearably hot and humid it can be. In Thailand, where summer temperatures often stay above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees F) and can reach 100% humidity, keeping body temperatures down becomes a priority not only for people, but for our furry friends as well.
Clever canines know to beat the heat by hanging outside local convenience stores, where there’s shade, a cold surface to lie on, and best of all, a steady flow of traffic to open the automatic doors, releasing precious, steady gusts of cool, conditioned air. But there’s more…
It’s no secret that there’s a lot of overlap between hardcore anime fans and frequent convenience store customers. With so many animated series to collect and watch, how are you supposed to find the time to cook, let alone the cash for a meal out at a fancy restaurant?
So in order to draw in as many otaku with the munchies as possible, Japan’s competing convenience store chains have been partnering up with hit anime series. So while Lawson is giving away dozens of different Attack on Titan goodies, 7-Eleven is countering with just one type of prize: a gigantic Evangelion figure.
Hot on the heels of an announcement that cold and sugary foods are bad for your body, Asahi announced that they are releasing their coldest sugary drink to date. I’m willing to take the risk however, because summer in Japan can suck pretty hard and a sub-zero beverage would definitely hit the spot.
This new drink called “Mitsuya Freezing Cider,” turns to ice the moment you pop the cap. Sounds great but Asahi seems to have surprised netizens a little with their unique distribution plans.
Earlier this week, netizens in Japan started going nuts about a new range of popcorn on sale at 7-Eleven. Unlike in some countries, 7-Eleven Japan takes great pride in regularly launching new, limited-edition snacks, and more often than not they’re surprisingly tasty. The response its latest product garnered, however, was ludicrously enthusiastic.
When netizens got wind of the “amazingly delicious” new caramel and (curiously) cheddar cheese flavoured popcorn on sale at their local Sebun, people apparently started bulk-buying, resulting hundreds of tweets going out bemoaning a lack of stock and pestering 7-Eleven – who then added fuel to the fire by acknowledging that the snack was indeed hard to come by – and demanding to know where they could get it.
Curious to find out what all the fuss was about, we procured a couple of bags and sat down to conduct a little taste test. I can tell you right off the bat, though, that the super-amazing mecha-delicious popcorn pretty much everyone in Japan – including our own Japanese staff – is raving about really isn’t worth all the hype.
We’ve already talked about Japan’s penchant for limited stock and limited-time seasonal items, but I’m starting to get the impression manufacturers and retailers are playing us for fools. Zipping down to the grocery only to find that at least some of the basic items you wanted are sold out is a common headache in Japan, as if retailers are hoping we’ll all be like, “Oh man, white bread must be really trendy right now. Guess I’ll buy five loaves next time.”
Convenience store chain 7-Eleven is downright diabolical about this kind of stuff, with a constantly shifting roster of goods that seem to come and go arbitrarily, which Japanese consumers have apparently picked up on because they’re currently in a crazy purchase panic over 7-Eleven’s delicious new Premium Popcorn.
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