Of course, it’s possible the goal was never really to be convenient anyway.
Convenience is supposed to be what makes a convenience store a convenience store, but what exactly is it that makes a convenience store convenient? Is it the ease of access, knowing that there’s one nearby and open 24 hours for whenever you feel the need to pop in and pick something up? Is it prices that, while maybe aren’t the absolute lowest around, are cheap enough that you don’t feel the need to go out of your way to save just a few yen more? Or is it a large selection of items, bringing things you probably would otherwise have to go to multiple shops for all together under one roof?
Sure, those might be more philosophical musings that are usually running through our head on our convenience store excursions, when we’re usually grappling with more bite-sized ruminations such as “Fruit sandwich or matcha sweets?” But the essential nature of convenience is something we couldn’t help thinking about after our visit to the brand-new flagship store of Japanese convenience store chain Family Mart in downtown Tokyo.
It’s called Famima Park Azabudai, with “Famima” being the fan nickname for Family Mart among Japanese-speakers, and it’s part of the chain’s 45th anniversary celebration Next Family Mart Project, which seeks to go beyond the conventional bounds of convenience stores. To help achieve that ambition, Family Mart called in fashion designer NIGO to serve as the store’s creative director and contracted interior designer Masamichi Katayama’s Wonderwall design studio to contribute to the look of the interior sales spaces and architecture.
And yeah, the place does have a sleek, fancy feel to it, and it even has its own mascot character, shaped like the letter F.
But when our ace reporter Mr. Sato stopped by on July 13, three days after Famima Park Azabudai’s grand opening, it was kind of tough to appreciate those aesthetics because of how crowded it was. “This place has already become a sightseeing attraction,” he reports, noting a constant stream of tourists from overseas while he was at the shop. “It was so crowded that you couldn’t enter or exit the shop smoothly.”
OK, so that’s one mark against the convenience you’d hope for at a convenience store, but what about the other kinds of convenience it might offer?
The shop is divided into three sections. The first, right when you walk in the doors, is the Popup Corner, which has some Famima F-letter items.
Next is the Convenience Wear Area. This is where you’ll find items in Family Mart’s growing apparel line, which started out as urgent-need socks, underwear, and undershirts, but has now expanded to include legitimate outerwear too.
Famima Park Azabudai even has a few exclusive Convenience Wear items, most noticeably jeans. Being a pretty regular wearer of denim himself, Mr. Sato had been planning to pick up a pair for the novelty factor, but when he went to grab a plastic-bagged pair of pants off the rack…
…he saw that they’re priced at 5,990 yen (US$37) after tax!
For comparison, that’s about 1,000 yen more than Uniqlo charges for a pair of jeans, and the gap gets even wider if Uniqlo is having one of its frequent sales. To be fair, the quality of Family Mart’s clothing has come a long way in recent years, and Famima Park Azabudai does have a changing room where you can try items on before deciding to buy them. Still, Mr. Sato isn’t sure he wants to pay a premium for clothes from a convenience store, and so again, this aspect of Famima Park Azabudai didn’t feel so convenient to him, since the price was high enough that he’d prefer to go look for a better deal somewhere else.
He was happy to get to see the newly redesigned packaging for Family Mart’s Famichiki boneless fried chicken, which is in a case not too far from the cash register in the Kiosk Corner area…
…but the chicken itself is the same as what they serve at any regular Family Mart branch, and even the packaging is scheduled to make its way to the rest of the chain starting this week.
Overall, to Mr. Sato it felt like most of what the store had in stock were items that are also available at other branches of Family Mart or at competing chains, and it’d be easier to do that since he could get what he wanted without having to squeeze through the crowds at this fancy Famima. And even when he finally found something unique and intriguing, the exclusive Convenience Wear jeans, they were priced too high to be an impulse buy, making them at best one out of multiple places he’d need to check before making a decision if he were in the market for some new denim.
Mr. Sato’s favorite part of Famima Park Azabudai is actually the Famima Stand takeout window on the building’s exterior.
Yeah, it’s got the also-available-at-any-other-Family Mart Famichiki, but with a handy, quick takeaway service style. What really had Mr. Sato happy, though, was the big lineup of black tea drinks. These aren’t available at normal Family Mart branches, and you have your choice between Earl Grey and jasmine teas, served hot or iced, and either straight, with milk, as peach tea, or, for iced teas only, as a citrus tea. You can also add tapioca/boba for an extra 150 yen, and you can choose a level of sweetness from among four teas ranging from “no sweetness” to “very sweet.”
Mr. Sato opted for a large Earl Grey with tapioca and regular sweetness, which came to 480 yen. At most specialty tea shops, a takeaway drink like this would easily cost more than 500 yen, and could even be bumping up against the 1,000 yen line, especially in the trendy, affluent part of Tokyo where Famima Park Azabudai is located. It tasted great too, and Mr. Sato is keeping his fingers crossed that the tea drinks make their way to the whole Family Mart chain someday soon.
But he still couldn’t shake the sense that while Famima Park Azabudai is technically a convenience store, it doesn’t really offer much in the way of convenience. As discussed above, while there’s nothing wrong with the product selection, it also didn’t feel special enough to warrant putting up with the crowds when they were mostly items he could get somewhere else too, and the exclusives didn’t offer the sort of value for money that was going to make him pull the trigger on a purchase. As a matter of fact, looking around at the other shoppers, Mr. Sato realized that while there was a lot of energy and excitement in the air, very few shoppers actually seemed to be actively buying all that much.
Really, more than anything else Famima Park Azabudai, at least right now, feels like a showroom for stuff you can buy at Family Mart, and that’s quite possibly something the company feels is more important than this specific branch’s sales revenue. If Famima Park Azabudai gets people looking at and thinking about things that they end up buying at a different Family Mart a day or a week later, and it’s not bleeding money in the process, then odds are the corporate headquarters is OK with the situation.
In a bit of a parallel, though the store is called Famima Park Azabudai, it’s actually not located within the boundaries of the Azabudai neighborhood, and is instead just a bit inside the adjacent neighborhood of Toranomon. While they’re both considered stylish and fancy parts of town, Azabudai has a little more artistic cachet in many people’s minds, which is likely why it was chosen to be part of Famima Park Azabudai’s name. Just like how Azabudai and Toranomon are both nice places, so too are convenience stores and showrooms, and it’s going to be interesting to see if customers enjoy this new Famima as showroom enough to offset its shortcomings as a store that offers convenience.
Shop information
Famima Park Azabudai
Address: Tokyo-to, Minato-ku, Toranomon 5-2-10
東京都港区虎ノ門五丁目2番10号
Open 24 hours
Website
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