Convenience Store Culture
Boasting over 9,200 convenience stores in an area of 35,980 km² and a population of 22.9 million, Taiwan has the Asia Pacific’s and perhaps the world’s highest density of convenience stores per person: one store per 2,500 people or .0004 stores per person. As of 1 January 2009, Taiwan also has 4,800 7-Eleven stores, and thus the world’s highest density of 7-Elevens per person: one store per 4,786 people or .000210 stores per person. In Taipei, it is not unusual to see two 7-Elevens across the street from or several of them within a few hundred meters of each other.
Because they are found everywhere, convenience stores in Taiwan provide services on behalf of financial institutions or government agencies such as collection of the city parking fee, utility bills, traffic violation fines, and credit card payments. Eighty-one percent of urban household shoppers in Taiwan visit a convenience store each week. The idea of being able to purchase food items, drink, fast food, magazines, videos, computer games, and so on 24 hours a day and at any corner of a street makes life easier for Taiwan’s extremely busy and rushed population.
Convenience stores include:
- Circle K (Called OK in Taiwan)
- FamilyMart
- Hi-Life
- NikoMart
- 7-11
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Taiwan
Famous quotes containing the words convenience, store and/or culture:
“Take pains ... to write a neat round, plain hand, and you will find it a great convenience through life to write a small and compact hand as well as a fair and legible one.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The first general store opened on the ‘Cold Saturday’ of the winter of 1833 ... Mrs. Mary Miller, daughter of the store’s promoter, recorded in a letter: ‘Chickens and birds fell dead from their roosts, cows ran bellowing through the streets’; but she failed to state what effect the freeze had on the gala occasion of the store opening.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)