[HN Gopher] Show HN: Interactive map of the convenience store "t...
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Show HN: Interactive map of the convenience store "turf war" in
Japan
Technologies used: Leaflet (frontend) Turf (Geojson generation and
Voronoi generation) I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons,
so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis
to see if these pockets of brand territory are common. I haven't
worked much with web frontends before, so feedback is welcomed. I
also have some ideas to maybe expand upon, like making the
territory calculations based on streets and other geographical
features rather than just beeline distance. The site isn't tested
too much on mobile yet, but should be ok. Currently the frontend
code and geojson files can be found at the public repo:
https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars. I will upload the backend
code soon as I am cleaning it up and reorganizing it.
Author : kikkia
Score : 98 points
Date : 2024-09-23 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (conbini.kikkia.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (conbini.kikkia.dev)
| higgins wrote:
| I appreciate that the map renders the regional name and character
| set of the territories
| layer8 wrote:
| That's the OpenStreetMap default.
| cedws wrote:
| This is cool. One of the things I miss most after my trip to
| Japan is 7-Eleven/FamilyMart. So many nice snacks and drinks, and
| you never need to walk more than two minutes to find a store. I
| liked the onigiri a lot.
| autoexec wrote:
| Japan made me want walkable cities in the US. I'd love it if I
| could just stroll down my street and pick up melon bread and
| Boss coffee in the morning.
| diggernet wrote:
| At first I struggled to make sense of the numbers in the circles.
| Surely there can't be 10,110 locations in a space the size of the
| SF Bay area? But yes, yes there are...
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Japan is _dense_ in the major cities. As someone from London,
| not exactly a quiet village, it's on a completely different
| level.
| djtango wrote:
| I'm reminded of some stat (which I haven't verified) that
| there were ~15k tripadvisor restaurants in London (a "large"
| city). There were 65k for Hong Kong... Tokyo had 80k
|
| Granted, Tokyo is very large. I got a bit burned out in my
| first two trips because hauling from one side to the other
| constantly to hit different sites is kind of exhausting but
| yes as another comment mentioned - it's totally normal to
| find restaurants on floors 1 through 10+++ so you can stack a
| lot of restaurants vertically. Within the city I was told not
| many people cook and a friend living there told us a lot of
| apartments don't even have a kitchen beyond a tiny heater for
| cooking instant noodles or simple stuff.
| austinl wrote:
| One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American
| living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to
| a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.
|
| In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all
| zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office
| units above. This gives the density a different feeling,
| because commercial/dining space extends upward.
| diggernet wrote:
| Oh, interesting point. So when I see a marker on every block
| in places, that doesn't mean you can just walk off the street
| into them, they might be upstairs?
| avidiax wrote:
| Convenience stores are almost always ground floor. I can
| only think of times where there is a mezzanine or similar
| that they might be on an upper floor. They are always
| placed to have high foot or vehicle traffic.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Exceptions would be places like railway stations, where
| there might be more people on a different level.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| THIS! I was just talking to a city council member about my
| trip to Japan and how this level of density (multiple stores
| in the same location vertically but not horizontally) Had
| some interesting effects on walkability, sales tax revenue
| per sq mile, and mixed use residential.
| jerlam wrote:
| In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a
| "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four
| floors.
|
| Makes it hard to believe Americans when they claim their city
| is "very dense" when it is mostly single story buildings
| surrounded by parking lots.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Right? Our only truly dense city seems to be New York City.
| Almost everything else is not even close.
| nojvek wrote:
| Manhattan is dense. The city is still a wide area with
| many low density apartments and single family homes.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _In the US, Chicago is also like this. I 've been to a
| "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among
| four floors._
|
| Chicago used to have a number of "vertical malls." I think
| Water Tower Place (7 floors) and The Shops at 900 (7 or 8
| floors, IIRC) are the only ones left. Unless you also count
| smaller places like Block 37 (4 floors).
|
| Some are now shadows of their former selves. Some sit empty
| (Chicago Place), or in various stages of redevelopment.
| hobotime wrote:
| ADA law in the US financially prohibit this. Once you need an
| elevator, the costs go though the roof for the building.
| Elevator design, installation, inspection and repair are
| incredibly expensive and eat up a lot of square footage on
| every floor.
| hendersonreed wrote:
| Have you been to Japan? Elevators are quite common, and in
| most of the buildings with multiple levels and restaurants
| on higher levels.
|
| Elevators _are_ smaller there. But I think the cost of
| building is lower there, for a variety of reasons, which
| makes this more feasible.
| gs17 wrote:
| For anyone else whose only experience with Japanese convenience
| stores is the Yakuza games wondering which one Poppo is supposed
| to be:
|
| > Poppo appears to be based on two of Japan's leading convenience
| store chains, Lawson and FamilyMart, as evidenced by most of the
| outlets in the series being placed in locations that correspond
| to branches in the real world.
| FredPret wrote:
| On my recent first trip to Japan, I couldn't believe the number
| and quality of 7-Elevens/Family Marts/Lawsons.
|
| You're never more than a five-minute walk from one in Tokyo, and
| they've got good stuff.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The best part is when you realize the conbinis actually have
| some of the lowest quality stuff. Not because it's bad, but
| because the rest is just that much better :)
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| Unfortunately, a side effect of the devaluation of the yen is
| that food quality at conbinis has decreased as they try to
| maintain price points. I recently spent a few weeks in Tokyo
| and there was noticeable difference in quality versus a few
| years ago.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| I visited Tokyo a few months back, and while the convenience
| stores seemed nicer than equivalents in America, I also wasn't
| particularly impressed. I think if I had just encountered them
| I'd be impressed, but the internet has hyped up the convenience
| stores of Japan so much I thought they'd blow me away. They're
| nice, they're good, but not amazing.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I had a similar experience in Thailand. The amount of 7-Elevens
| there is incredible. I remember being at one 7-Eleven, and
| noticing that there was another 7-Eleven visible just across
| the street.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Interesting! 7-Eleven, Family Mart and Lawson are all in Thailand
| too, but I think 7-Eleven is overwhelmingly dominant, eg on my
| street in a 100m radius there were three 7-Elevens to just one FM
| and one Lawson.
|
| Update: some stats, it's not even close... ~200 Lawson in
| Thailand, ~200 Family Mart (now Tops Daily), and 14,000
| 7-Elevens. Guess I just spent a lot of time in places with Lawson
| and Family Mart. This also means the 7-Eleven population density
| is about the same in Japan and Thailand, around one per 5k
| people.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I need to see if I can modify this to finally make my 'inaka or
| not' map by determining the distance to the closest combini.
|
| I can't quite use this one as the radius for every store seems to
| be a bit large.
| emilamlom wrote:
| What is "inaka or not"? A google search just pulls up an
| athletic clothing brand.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It means "countryside or not"; that is, measuring whether a
| location really counts as being in an urban vs a rural area.
| kikkia wrote:
| Ill post the backend code to the github soon, and there you
| could easily change the diameter of influence each store has.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I thought the difference was:
|
| Inaka: the bus comes every two hours.
|
| Not: the bus comes every ten minutes.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Why do you write 'conbini' instead of 'konbini' in the usual
| romanization form?
|
| For the _todofuken_ I would leave out the suffixes (mostly
| 'ken') in the English labels, except for Hokkaido obviously.
| hobotime wrote:
| 'Conbini' is a loan word from English meaning 'convenience
| store.' Please forgive the originators of the word for spelling
| it so they can understand as Convenience starts with the letter
| 'c.'
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This is really excellent UI.
|
| One suggestion.
|
| When zooming in, eventually the stores turn into a uniform blue
| dot. A light blue icon.
|
| I'd like to see the individual icons keep the color of the
| convenience store when zoomed in.
|
| Know the map color changes, but it isn't as obvious as the icon.
|
| There is bit of a disjoint in how my eye is tracking the colors
| where some icons are still a color of the store, but some have
| turned blue.
| kikkia wrote:
| Good feedback, I will see what I can do. I agree, I originally
| wanted to also use logo based icons.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Love this! I just got back from Tokyo and was thinking something
| similar about what determined the density of which brands. Nice
| work!
| maxglute wrote:
| The colors, while legible, are breaking my eyes. Other than that,
| great visualization. Fanastc work.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Thank you for doing this. TIL about Seicomart and its absolute
| dominance in Hokkaido
| joshdavham wrote:
| For those too afraid to ask, 'konbini' is short for 'kon-bi-ni-
| en-su-suto-a' which means 'convenience store'.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Another entry in the long list of "words and phrases you
| translate by saying the thing in English while trying to sound
| as racist as possible".
| tkgally wrote:
| > I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons
|
| There's a Lawson-heavy area about a twenty-minute walk from where
| I live in Yokohama. The three convenience stores closest to me,
| though, are 7-11. One reason for this clustering, I suspect, is
| deliveries. Convenience stores are carefully designed for
| logistical efficiency, and having stores close to each other must
| shave a bit off the distance traveled by delivery trucks.
|
| You might consider adding Aeon My Basket stores to your map, too.
| They have sprouted up all over the Tokyo region in recent years.
| They are positioned as small supermarkets rather than kombini,
| but their size, locations, and product overlap with kombini puts
| them in competition with Lawson, 7-11, etc., too.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| The legend or somewhere else on the page should show the
| aggregate circle percentages of Japan.
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(page generated 2024-09-23 23:02 UTC)