From our other sites
The story
It’s been reported that Seven-Eleven Japan, aiming to turn around its earnings, has rolled out the low-price private brand “Seven the Price” nationwide — a line it had never carried before. The goal is said to be boosting customer counts rather than gross margins. On 5ch, commenters argued that the trust lost in the past “false-bottom” packaging scandal won’t come back so easily, and many compared onigiri prices across chains. Opinions also split over how to read this term’s results — a profit decline paired with “revenue growth” — sparking debate over whether customers are actually leaving at all.
Yuko Kitano (Editorial Reporter, Diamond Chain Store)
Seven-Eleven Japan (Tokyo; “Seven-Eleven” hereafter), aiming to turn its business around, is overhauling its product lineup and pricing strategy. Alongside expanding freshly-made food items and sweets, and product development leveraging IP (intellectual property),
it is pursuing a better balance between product value and price through supply chain reform. At the root of these moves is the pursuit of customer counts. As one step toward that, the company has rolled out nationwide the low-price private brand “Seven the Price,” a line it had never carried before.
Source: diamond-rm.net / Original article here
What people said
Who wants that?!
200 yen for one onigiri is already the standard price at convenience stores.
At FamilyMart it's cheaper in the morning if you bundle it with a drink.
I haven't actually read the article, but — prioritizing margins? So all they care about is still profit? And that's exactly the approach that's been failing them.
Prices at each chain (tax included):
FamilyMart: 198 yen
7-Eleven: 196 yen
Lawson: 181 yen
And probably skirting the misleading-quality-labeling rules too.
Just go to the drugstore — bento and drinks are tens of percent cheaper and the parking lot's way bigger, lol
But there's also a vending machine right outside the drugstore, and people actually buy from that instead.
It's genuinely baffling, but yeah, those people exist.
Just stock the cheap stuff from Shikishima or Daiichi Pan instead. (Shikishima and Daiichi Pan are budget Japanese bread makers.)
No upside for them in doing that.
A lot of people here are arguing the wrong point.
I'd guess the revenue bump just comes from unit prices rising due to higher costs.
And the profit drop feels like the result of cutting margins to keep prices down.
Convenience stores overall — competitors included — are losing customers to supermarkets and drugstores.
That's exactly why revenue went up.
Even if customers are leaving, revenue still rises if the per-item price hike outweighs the drop in customer count.
If a company like AEON is the one using spin like "lifting the ban," boycott it; if it's the media parroting that language, they're corporate stooges.
they'll probably just shrink the portions to cut the price.
Raise the price.
Shrink the portion (false bottom).
Fake it with deceptive presentation (push the filling toward the cut edge, paint the inside of the container).
Lately they've been cutting the flavor too.
Hamburger steak and fried egg napolitan — just color, no taste, bulked up with extra pasta.
Double sausage egg muffin — no flavor, bulked up with extra muffin.
Basically: more flour, less flavor.
They're betraying their customers.
Isn't their product development just rotten at this point?
But in this unequal society the middle class keeps shrinking,
so no matter how hard they try, business is only going to get tougher.
Could it be that the drinks in the store are room temperature?
There's a discount store near me that sells cheap by skimping on electricity [not refrigerating].
Background and key points of debate
Seven-Eleven has traditionally pursued a high-value-added strategy centered on its “Seven Premium” line, so rolling out a low-price private brand nationwide marks a shift in direction. Behind this lies declining trust stemming from reporting on “false-bottom” packaging that misrepresented product volume, plus an industry-wide shift in which customers are drifting from convenience stores toward drugstores and supermarkets. Thread opinion split over how to interpret this term’s “higher revenue, lower profit” results — whether customer numbers are actually falling, or whether revenue simply rose because higher unit prices pushed up average spend per customer. Whether the low-price brand will be meaningfully different from other chains’ existing private brands, and whether taste and quality hold up, won’t be clear until the actual products hit shelves — for now, most responses lean more toward concern than anticipation.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary from the 5ch (Business News+) thread “7-Eleven Lifts the Ban on Low-Price Private Brands! What It Prioritized Over Gross Margin.”
Leave a Reply