Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Calling time on Japan’s alcoholics
When Japanese civil servant Yoshiyuki Takeuchi started to lag his colleagues at work, he joined a growing number of his countrymen looking for solace from their problems in the bottom of a glass.
“People who started after me would go further in their careers just because they finished college. I tried to stop that sense of ‘why always me?’ by drinking,” said the 50-year-old, who quit university as his family couldn’t afford it.
With liquor consumption growing sixfold in the last 50 years in Japan to match the country’s economic affluence, alcoholism has become an increasing — but poorly grasped — problem in a nation where booze is readily available from convenience stores, where evening television is awash with liquor ads and where bonding with workmates is typically done over a few cold ones.
Economic losses from drinking problems top 6.6 trillion yen ($73 billion) a year and some 800,000 people, or 0.6 percent of the population, are estimated to be alcoholics. The rate is smaller than the United States or Europe, but is rising as more women and elderly become addicted to drink.
Despite the growing number suffering from the condition, alcoholism is not seen as a disease and there is no systematic approach to dealing with it. Methods of prevention and intervention are usually viewed as lacking in Japan, and even medical professionals often fail to understand that merely fixing physical ailments caused by alcoholism won’t stop patients from drinking.
Katsuya Maruyama of Kurihama Alcoholism Center, a leading hospital for treating alcohol dependency, said Japan is overly tolerant when it comes to drinking too much. “There is no proper teaching on how alcohol can be dangerous, so no one knows alcoholism as a disease,” he said.
Convenience stores high on drugs?
Takeshi Niinami was a frequent visitor to the drugstore Walgreens in the United States when he was studying at Harvard business school about 20 years ago, buying food and household items in addition to medicine there.
“I wished we had stores like that. It would have been so convenient,” said Niinami, now CEO of Lawson, Japan’s second-largest convenience store chain.
Niinami is finally seeing his wish come true, announcing last week that Lawson will team up with Japan’s No. 1 drugstore chain Matsumotokiyoshi to jointly open outlets that combine drugstores and convenience stores after the government introduced less rigorous restrictions on selling most over-the-counter medicine earlier this year. Niinami sees offering medicine as key in his store makeover efforts to appeal to the older generation.
Still, some recent media coverage on the topic would make you think pharmaceuticals are going to be readily available at your nearby ”combini” in a flash, which looks highly doubtful. In fact, it’s unlikely we’ll see drugs on the shelves at the majority of the country’s 42,000-plus convenience stores, at least under the current regulations.
Sales clerks will have to take exams to qualify to sell medicine, even though the qualification is a lot easier to get than a pharmacist’s license. They will also be required to have a year’s experience working with another qualification holder.
Even if the drug sales are enough to cover the additional labour costs — I’m sure these qualified store clerks will be paid more than regular part-time workers — I bet more than a few store owners will find it hard to secure enough qualification holders to man their stores 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Examination for clerks just to sell flu and cold drugs? Isn’t that going a bit too far? Most consumers do know how to read the label and the instruction.
Tempest in a bento box
The shelves of Japanese convenience stores are filled with neatly packed “bento” box meals. But ever wonder where they go when they reach their “sell-by” date? You should, because Japan chucks away a staggering 19 million tonnes of food a year – more than three times the amount of world food aid at 6 million tonnes.
The issue of food thrown away at “kombini”, or convenience store, recently grabbed the headlines here. Strict health laws mean many unsold items must be thrown out at the end of the day, and it’s each franchise store — not the store chain itself – that bears the cost of this waste. In all, about 70 percent of the leftovers from the food industry are recycled into animal feed and fertilizers, and much of the rest quietly rots in land-fill.
To minimise their losses from all this waste, some Seven-Eleven Japan stores have been trying to cut prices on items nearing the end of their shelf-life, apparently against the company’s wishes. It sounds like a common-sense solution, but it has lifted the lid on quite a scandal in the kombini world, which has so far largely avoided cut-throat price competition as shoppers allow for the price gaps compared with supermarkets in return for the convenient locations and longer operating hours of the stores.
And what was the result of the discount attempt? Japan’s anti-monopoly watchdog said Seven-Eleven had illegally pressured its franchise stores not to cut the prices of bento box meals and other food by implying it would cut its contracts with stores not complying. The Fair Trade Commission also ordered Japan’s largest convenience store chain, a unit of listed Seven & I Holdings, to halt such practices.
The FTC order could mean price battles will grow between different chains and even among different franchises within the same chain. Such concerns sent shares of convenience stores tumbling earlier this week. Seven-Eleven said it may appeal the FTC’s findings, but a day later it said it would pay for 15 percent of the cost of wasted food from its franchise stores.
Photo credit: REUTERS/Stringer
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