, Columnist
A 7-Eleven Buyout Would Stretch Japan’s Appetite for M&A
The country’s convenience stores have become essential to daily life. That has many fearing the prospect of a foreign takeover.
May I have some coffee with that buyout?
Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg
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The 7-Eleven convenience store experience is so quintessential to modern Japan that it’s sometimes hard to recall that it’s not Japanese.
The first in Japan opened 50 years ago in Tokyo’s Toyosu, where the first item sold was a pair of sunglasses. At the time, it was the inaugural franchise store under a model imported from the US; a few decades later, the Japanese conbini experience had become so successful that the Japanese offshoot bought out its US parent.