THE CONVENIENCE STORE REVOLUTION: COMPUTER NETWORKS, LOGISTICS, AND THE REINVENTION OF RETAIL IN JAPAN

Abstract

Convenience stores in their current, most globally popular form were born in the US, reinvented in Japan, and re-exported to Asia and the world. No company better illustrates this transnational trajectory than 7-Eleven. This paper turns to the humble, often-overlooked convenience store as a crucial site for thinking critically, historically, and globally about the discourse of Internet revolutions. In Japanese language business literature and popular descriptions, 7-Eleven Japan’s innovative use of networked computing and logistics from the 1980s onwards led (among other factors) to its immense national and then international success. In this paper I will draw on my archival research into the convenience store in Japan to argue for that this is a key site from which to rethink histories of networked computing and the Internet “revolution” in a non-Western context – furthering the project of “de-Westernizing” or de-colonizing Internet studies. Building on existing research on Internet histories in East Asia, this paper turns to the convenience store industry and 7-Eleven Japan in particular to tell a different story of the Internet itself. Many contemporaneous accounts of 7-Eleven’s practices in the 1980s and 1990s treat its turn to information-gathering, networked computing, logistics, and point of service ordering systems as revolutionary developments. As such the convenience store offers an alternative account of commercial revolutions and networked computing. It also offers a different view of contemporary discourses of “convenience” by retailers such as Amazon, an infrastructural or logistical view of convenience provision, and a new way of narrating Internet history.