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The story
7-Eleven announced that starting September 8, it will cut prices on two of its signature hand-rolled onigiri, “Charcoal-Grilled Silver Salmon” and “Loaded Spicy Mentaiko,” from ¥232 to ¥213. On the thread, some suspected collusion after Lawson and FamilyMart cut prices around the same time, while others pointed out that the price cut seems small given how much wholesale rice prices have fallen, sparking a lively comparison with specialty chains like Omusubi Gonbei.
Seven-Eleven Japan will cut prices on two of its flagship hand-rolled onigiri starting September 8. The “Hand-Rolled Onigiri: Charcoal-Grilled Silver Salmon” and another item are included, with prices dropping by ¥19. The company lowered prices by cutting procurement costs for ingredients and other raw materials as well as shipping costs.
The prices of “Hand-Rolled Onigiri: Charcoal-Grilled Silver Salmon” and “Hand-Rolled Onigiri: Loaded Spicy Mentaiko” will drop from ¥232 to ¥213 (tax included). The cut comes without any change to the amount of filling or product specifications.
(Continued at the link below)
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, because Lawson did it first
7-Eleven can only ever follow Lawson's lead
Japanese corporations are seriously so laaame (drawn out in a mocking sing-song tone, like "kiii-moooi~")!
Yeah, Japan gets called out by other countries for collusion all the time.
It's probably just baked into the national character at this point.
A "collusion mentality."
No wonder China's overtaking us.
Onigiri shot up from over ¥200 to over ¥300 in no time.
They jacked the price up, but the cut back down is only token.
Charging ¥200 is just a rip-off.
For stuff that loses flavor when microwaved, I can sort of understand printing it on for the sake of color, if I'm being super generous.
But this nori is just malicious.
so now that rice prices have come back down and they're cutting prices again,
the customers who left aren't coming back lol
That's exactly the point, and yet there's something off about them acting all sincere over such a tiny price cut.
I'm impressed every time I look at their products.
Not buying them though.
Same here.
There's a real sense of quality to it.
Not buying it though lol
Supermarket natto has gone up more than ¥10 on average and it's not coming back down either.
I was shocked when ¥64 natto became ¥84.
Of course, I know things are tough all around so I'm not complaining, and I'll still buy it, but still…
Right? 5kg of rice is under ¥3,000 now, so there's no way I'm paying ¥200 for an onigiri.
I've been eating oddly-flavored stockpiled rice, so I'm actually kind of looking forward to it (referring to government emergency reserve rice)
There's probably some consultant's template they're all following, that's why the moves are so sluggish.
Yeah, they're bigger with way more filling, and the price is basically the same as convenience store onigiri.
Supreme God: FamilyMart — ¥22 off
God: 7-Eleven — ¥19 off
Scrub: Lawson — ¥10 off
Our enemy: 5kg rice — only ¥1,300 off
You should've written: "Total scrub: 7-Eleven, only 2 items"
W-wait, what about MiniStop? Isn't MiniStop cutting prices?
Fukui-grown Koshihikari rice, ¥1,999
New-crop rice, 5kg for ¥1,980
Convenience store onigiri price-cut roundup
Supreme God: FamilyMart — ¥22 off, ¥320→¥298, 1 item
God: 7-Eleven — ¥19 off, ¥232→¥213, 2 items
Scrub: Lawson — ¥10 off, ¥181→¥171, 2 items
Bonus
Our enemy: 5kg rice — only ¥1,300 off
All three of them are scrubs, aren't they
Wait, the others are only 2 items or 1 item too?
New-crop Koshihikari rice, ¥2,299
Background and Key Points
Onigiri prices at Japan’s three big convenience-store chains — 7-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart — control a huge share of daily food retail in Japan, and their pricing moves in near lockstep because all three source rice through similar wholesale supply chains and watch each other’s shelf prices closely. Rice costs spiked sharply over the past couple of years, and 7-Eleven had pushed its hand-rolled onigiri from just over ¥200 to over ¥300 at points during that run-up before settling near ¥232. With wholesale rice prices now falling — 5kg bags are widely available for under ¥2,000-2,300, as posters’ screenshots showed — chains are under pressure to pass savings back to customers, and 7-Eleven’s ¥19 cut (to ¥213, on just two items) is being framed as a token gesture rather than a real correction.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t whether the cut was good news, but why all three chains moved at once and whether that reflects informal price coordination (“dango” / cartel-like behavior) versus simple market mimicry in a tight oligopoly. Some posters treated the near-simultaneous cuts as evidence of a “collusion mentality” they see as a broader flaw in Japanese corporate culture; others pushed back that it’s just competitors reacting to each other’s public price moves, which is legal and common anywhere retail margins are thin.
What the thread glosses over is scale: convenience-store onigiri pricing bundles in far more than raw rice — packaging (petrochemical-based, so naphtha costs matter), logistics, printed-nori inserts, and retail markup on a single-serving impulse item, versus buying loose rice in bulk. That’s also why direct comparisons to bagged rice or to specialty rice-ball chains like Omusubi Gonbei, which have different cost structures and thicker margins per unit sold, aren’t quite apples-to-apples, even though several posters treated them as such.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “7-Eleven to Cut Onigiri Prices in September: ‘Lowering Prices by Reducing Raw Material Procurement and Shipping Costs’”.
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