The Conbini World Cup
The Quest for Greatness
To celebrate the World Cup (congrats, Argentina and Lionel Messi!) we have launched the Conbini World Cup. Here’s the deal:
4 divisions — Hot Box, Meal, Beverage, and Snack
16 items in each division seeded 1 through 16 by awesomeness
Knockout matches via daily Twitter polls
There can only be one winner.
The top seeds in each division are:
Hot Box Division — Famichicki
Beverage Division — Pocari Sweat
Snack Division — Black Thunder
Meal Division — Tuna Mayo Onigiri
Download and complete your own Conbini World Cup bracket here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kyKhbq6h-8Qe_RWgavOBb34pHgVkIr2nznjbp8eeszY/copy#gid=0
And keep track of all the results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NiAOum_dh0k0p4I6IgHyLRtUrEHqHxccBeGcJdHde90/edit
Early Results
Round 1 is nearly in the bank and we’ve already seen some astonishing upsets. At the top of the “holy shit” list, Umeboshi Onigiri fell to Makunouchi Bento. And it wasn’t that close.
Umeboshi Onigiri is a pillar of the conbini. It would be on the Mount Rushmore of conbini items. How did it fall in Round 1? I suspect it’s taxonomy. We put it in the Meal Division. Is an onigiri a meal? I think ‘yes’. It’s the perfect meal whether you’re at work, hanging at home, or on the go. But many probably see it as a snack. Meanwhile, Makunouchi Bento is indisputably a meal. But questionable classification is hardly a good reason to take down an icon! But here we are. We will enter Round 2 without Umeboshi Onigiri.
Another huge surprise was Curry Rice defeating Cup Ramen, also in the Meal Division.
Cup Ramen and Curry Rice are both unquestionably meals. Poor classification did not cause cup ramen’s defeat. Are we to conclude that more people like conbini Curry Rice and Cup Ramen? There’s no doubt that Curry Rice is a legendary Japanese meal. We all know it. We all love it. But what we all know and love is home-cooked curry rice. Or school lunch curry rice. Or the curry rice they serve at the top of mountains in those huts. It’s not conbini Curry Rice. Is it? Have I been missing out? Is a microwaved dirty diaper BETTER than one of mankind’s greatest food innovations? No. It’s not.
But that’s the way it goes in the Conbini World Cup. It’s goodbye Cup Ramen. And hello Round 2 for curry rice.
Follow and participate in the tournament on Twitter!
Christmas Cake
Christmas season brings conbini Christmas Cake. Aside from pachinko, there are two industries managed by organized crime in Japan: pizza and cake. How do we know this? Pizza and cake are priced like precious metals. Uranium costs less than Japanese strawberry shortcake.
But mom and dad are on the hook every year. And we’ve broken down the numbers so they can get the most bang for their buck.
While all conbini serve up a slew of creative cakes, our analysis considers just the standard strawberry shortcake. This is because they’re all more or less the same — cake, whipped cream, and strawberries. The graphic above shows the Big Three’s offerings in the order Lawson, FamilyMart, 7-11.
Because dimensions of each cake differ our metric for an apples-to-apples comparison is yen per cubic inch of cake. The Big Three list their cakes’ diameter and height. From fourth grade math we all know volume of a cylinder is equal to pi * height * radius^2. Here’s how the numbers breakdown.
FamilyMart clearly gets the most bang for your buck. HOWEVER, FamilyMart DID NOT list the cake’s height. So, we used last year’s height. If FamilyMart’s height was on par with its competitors, then the picture looks like this:
FamilyMart is still the winner but the margin is not as wide.
It’s important to note that this analysis does not consider quality. It’s quite possible the Lawson cake is much better than FamilyMart’s, especially considering Lawson’s Uchi Café series, which is the best sweets series in the industry.
But the story of the year is inflation. For nearly three decades Japan has seen no inflation or even deflation. Well, the Bank of Japan’s radical monetary policies seem to be hitting the conbini Christmas Cake scene hard. Just look at how the yen per square inch numbers compare to last year:
7-11 and Lawson are jacking up the prices! FamilyMart looks steady, but again, that assumes the cake’s height has not changed. If height is comparable to their competition, then FamilyMart would see more than 100% increase in price per square inch! That is shocking.
Item of the Week
All I want for Christmas is the PomPomPurin character cake from 7-11.
Get More Hot Conbini Action
That wraps up this week’s newsletter. Keep in touch with all your conbini needs through:
🐥❤️Spread the conbini love ❤️🐥