Seven-Eleven Japan Co. plans to expand its home delivery service by making it available through its convenience stores across the country totaling some 20,000 by around 2025, according to informed sources. Through the expansion of the service offered via a dedicated website, Seven & I Holdings Co., the parent of Seven-Eleven Japan, aims to capitalize on growing demand for online shopping amid the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when the convenience store market is believed to be in a state of saturation. Currently, about 550 Seven-Eleven convenience stores in Tokyo, Hiroshima Prefecture and Hokkaido are offering the service to deliver goods from their store shelves to customers' homes, workplaces and elsewhere within as fast as 30 minutes from the time of order. Customers within a 500-meter radius of a Seven-Eleven outlet can select what to buy from some 3,000 items sold at the store and have them delivered. They need to place at least ¥1,000 in orders excluding tax each time and pay a delivery fee of ¥330 including tax.

Seven-Eleven Japan Co. plans to expand its home delivery service by making it available through its convenience stores across the country totaling some 20,000 by around 2025, according to informed sources. Through the expansion of the service offered via a dedicated website, Seven & I Holdings Co., the parent of Seven-Eleven Japan, aims to capitalize on growing demand for online shopping amid the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when the convenience store market is believed to be in a state of saturation. Currently, about 550 Seven-Eleven convenience stores in Tokyo, Hiroshima Prefecture and Hokkaido are offering the service to deliver goods from their store shelves to customers' homes, workplaces and elsewhere within as fast as 30 minutes from the time of order. Customers within a 500-meter radius of a Seven-Eleven outlet can select what to buy from some 3,000 items sold at the store and have them delivered. They need to place at least ¥1,000 in orders excluding tax each time and pay a delivery fee of ¥330 including tax.

Back in 2014, Sadanobu Takemasu was asked by his boss to go to Lawson, the convenience store chain known for its white milk can logo on a blue signboard. Takemasu thought Ken Kobayashi, then president of Japan's largest trading house, Mitsubishi Corp., was suggesting he go shop at a Lawson store in the basement of their Tokyo office building. Kobayashi had other staff on hand to take care of such mundane errands. "I replied, 'Me?'" Takemasu, 48, said in a recent interview with The Japan Times. Instead of going to the convenience store, however, he was appointed vice president of the national chain.