Once I go to my household in Taichung, Taiwan, I’ve realized to by no means ask the place we’re going, as a result of the reply is all the time the identical: first, 7-Eleven.
Going to Taiwan has all the time meant going to 7-Eleven. My uncle runs just a few shops in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest metropolis, and it’s usually our first cease after the airport.
Once I visited final month, I realized 7-Eleven aphorisms abound in Taiwan. One goes like this: The Taiwanese individuals may reside with out their authorities, however they may not reside with out 7-Eleven.
The shop looms so giant in Taiwanese life that it would as nicely be a authorities company. At any 7-Eleven, you’ll be able to pay your taxes, ship or choose up packages, drop off your laundry, examine your blood strain, return library books, ship faxes, purchase rail and aircraft tickets, buy web entry and, as a bonus, use the receipts for every little thing to play a lottery.
At one level, 30% of Taiwan’s driver’s license renewals came about at a 7-Eleven, based on a 2011 case research from Nationwide Chengchi College.
There are extra comfort shops per capita in Taiwan than wherever else on the planet, one for each 1,582 individuals, based on a 2021 research by a Japanese shopper analysis agency. Chains comparable to 7-Eleven, Hello-Life and Household Mart cluster so thickly on Taipei’s packed streets that many areas are inside eyeshot of one another, usually sharing a wall with a competitor.
About half of my prolonged household on my dad’s aspect works in a 7-Eleven retailer, apart from my cousin, who was poached by 7-Eleven’s major competitor, Household Mart. We go for breakfast, drinks earlier than and after meals and for dessert, usually a number of instances in a single day. After we pose for pictures, my uncle likes to inform us to make the “seven” signal with our fingers.
One yr the perimeters for our Lunar New Yr dinner got here from 7-Eleven, prepackaged in containers able to microwave. Similar for the fruit to set at my grandpa and grandma’s altar, in addition to the joss paper to burn for his or her luck. Honoring our ancestors needs to be handy. Certainly they wouldn’t need us to waste time.
The creator’s aunt at work at 7-Eleven in Taichung, Taiwan.
(Courtesy of Frank Shyong)
It’s a far cry from 7-Elevens in the USA, which reliably provide spare telephone chargers, drinks or toiletries however should not identified for a lot else. Throughout busy, tough intervals of my life, I used to order one thing known as a buffalo hen curler, a log of breaded, extruded floor hen in a menacing shade of pink.
The story of 7-Eleven in Taiwan is commonly informed for example of Asian entrepreneurial spirit and logistical ingenuity. Taiwan constructed a comfort retailer mannequin that captured the frenetic vitality of the booming economic system and have become important to almost each facet of life. However I might argue {that a} full accounting of its influences exhibits the chain’s trendy improvements have been a collaborative effort that couldn’t have existed with out pleasant, productive relationships between globalized economies.
7-Eleven started as a sequence of Texas ice shops run by the Southland Corp. in 1927, initially known as “Tote’m Shops,” which referred to the Native American-themed totems used to attract clients, based on the corporate’s web site. Founder Joe C. Thompson realized that his far-flung ice shops served clients in want of fundamental groceries, and he began providing staples comparable to bread, milk and eggs, creating the nation’s first comfort shops.
Pushed by gross sales of Slurpees and Huge Gulps, the chain grew to greater than 66,000 shops. But it surely struggled after the 1987 inventory market crash, and in 1990, the corporate filed for chapter and was bought to 7-Eleven Japan, based on Occasions archives.
Executives with Uni-President Enterprises Corp., the dad or mum firm, determined to create a sequence of shops impressed by the clear, brightly lit supermarkets they noticed in America and purchased a license to the 7-Eleven identify in Taiwan.
The improvements produced within the strain cooker of Taiwan’s industrializing economic system have been formed by the distinctive calls for of Taiwanese tradition on the time, based on Shih-Fen Chen, a enterprise professor at Western Washington College who has performed in depth case research of Taiwanese companies. He sums up the variations between American and Taiwanese 7-Elevens with one other aphorism:
“Within the U.S. you don’t want 7-Eleven to have an excellent life,” Chen mentioned. “In Taiwan you can not have an excellent life with out 7-Eleven.”
And I might add one other layer to 7-Eleven’s origin story. The American grocery shops that Asian enterprise executives admired owe affect to the agricultural and retail improvements of farmers and grocers in Southern California, the place among the nation’s first market chains have been born.
And Japanese American meals producers and retailers have been pioneers within the business earlier than World Warfare II, based on analysis by Scott Kurashige, a historian and creator of the e book “The Shifting Grounds of Race.”
Based on Hoji Shinbun, an archive of Japanese American newspapers hosted on-line by Stanford College, there have been greater than a thousand Japanese produce markets in Los Angeles in 1940. These outlets organized greens by colour and situation, and allowed clients to pick their very own produce. Along with rising yields and earnings, these early agricultural entrepreneurs pioneered the roadside produce stand, which featured neat, stacked shows of washed produce that allowed clients to pick their very own fruits.
By the point my uncle began working a 7-Eleven within the Nineteen Nineties, it bore little resemblance to those you see in Los Angeles. The chain’s try to imitate Western grocery shops had as a substitute created one thing uniquely Taiwanese.
When 7-Eleven’s first shops opened in Taiwan in 1979, it was half of a bigger societal embrace of American business conduct that many noticed as a obligatory precursor to attaining world competitiveness, Chen mentioned. In a booming economic system, individuals began consuming a lot of espresso and dealing across the clock — and 7-Eleven was there to provide them.
Taiwanese households, my very own included, wore Western garments and listened to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. My father got here to America as a result of, again then, going to the U.S. was seen as the easiest way to safe a future for his household.
However the miracle of comfort that’s 7-Eleven in Taiwan tells a special story, one which doesn’t belong to a single nation. Its mix of Asian comfort and American consumerism couldn’t exist with out the free circulate of individuals and concepts throughout borders and the contributions of immigrants. I might argue that the identical is true for a lot of the world’s finest concepts.
Over time, Taiwan’s 7-Eleven shops lower the Slurpee and the Huge Gulp and targeted on native flavors, creating the shop’s signature aroma — a potent mix of tea eggs marinated with cinnamon and star anise, fish desserts and roasted candy potatoes.
It’s a scent that I as soon as discovered unusual. However now it smells like dwelling.
