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The story
A thread on 5ch (Livegalileo board) kicked off with a photo of Lawson’s cut-price bento, its corn and what looked like government-stockpiled rice among the fillings prompting cries of “that’s literally livestock feed.” The discussion spiraled into griping about rising prices in general: a beef kalbi bento now runs 740 yen, and the salmon in the salmon bento is apparently the pricey “bodakko” cut. Posters compared it to bentos from discount chains like Lamu and Don Quijote, and opinions split hard over the contradiction of “prices are through the roof, yet young people still line up at Starbucks dressed in brand-name clothes.”
What people said
Do you have to say "itadakimasu" and "gochisousama" (the customary phrases for before/after a meal) when eating this too?
Corn and stockpiled emergency rice
There's a corn version of mixed bean rice, so if you think of it like that, it's not so different — should be fine
it was 740 yen and I nearly had a heart attack
It was like 490 yen just a few years ago, how did we get here
Are you kidding me, at that price I'd rather go to Saizeriya (a cheap family Italian chain)
People actually buy it lol
It says "bodakko" on it — if it's really bodakko, that's a seriously salty cut (a premium salted-salmon brand)
are either rich elites or broke, lazy types who've completely lost their grip on money
Apparently sales are dropping across the board for convenience store chains
It's weird lumping the broke and the rich elite into the same category
I'm solidly middle-class on a 4.9 million yen salary, and honestly neither I nor anyone around me goes to convenience stores anymore
Just buying one meal's worth of bento for a family of three already tops 2000 yen
It's basically industrial waste shaped like food, honestly —
though I use it a lot when I'm on business trips
Gotta be Wamuu, obviously (a pun on "Lamu" sounding like the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character)
Esidisi sucks
And here's the obligatory "there's no store near me" comment (a recurring joke format on this board)
I trade stocks, and every chain's earnings keep coming in strong
On this board 7-Eleven gets trashed nonstop, but their last earnings report was actually good
Well, if it were a scam, they wouldn't let even the earnings look bad, right?
But isn't that exactly the crowd still going to convenience stores?
Those people are the ones propping up the whole convenience store industry lol
They might just assume it's a badly done AI-generated image
you can't really enjoy joking that Ramen Jiro is "pig slop" anymore (a running gag about the famously huge-portion ramen chain)
Boiled veggies on top so it's not too one-sided — what wonderful nutritional balance
Were you a disaster victim or something
This
I think so too
Like a bento that's literally just chicken skin
Don Quijote's stuff is basically a novelty item anyway
They were even selling just the crispy batter bits off corn dogs
This is bad for your health lol
That's because they're living off their parents' money
They claim to have no money, then blow it on merch in the name of "oshi-katsu" (supporting your favorite idol/character) and travel across the country for concerts
Weird nation we are
No sense of style
The crowd buying this doesn't care about having any greens on it at all
Background and Talking Points on This Thread
Convenience store bento prices have been climbing in recent years amid rising ingredient and logistics costs, and the thread’s sense that a bento now runs “740 yen” versus “490 yen before” fits that trend. The “stockpiled rice” mentioned in the replies likely refers to the government-released reserve rice put on the market in response to soaring rice prices, and has become a stock phrase for mocking price hikes. “Bodakko” is a brand name for salted salmon, a relatively pricey cut often given as a gift, which fed the complaints that it’s overkill for a bento filling. The thread split between viewing budget bentos as “companies working hard to offer more options” versus “a symbol of declining living standards” — and that same divide showed up in the debate over young people’s spending habits.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Livegalileo board) thread “[Image] Lawson to Launch Budget Bento wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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