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:
“... instead of being a help meet to man, in the highest, noblest sense of the term, as a companion, a co-worker, an equal; she has been a mere appendage of his being, an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he wiled [sic] away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,—’tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,—I should blush ... as an author; inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)