🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇺🇸 USA — By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
A Japanese supermarket is a jewel box. Every apple is inspected, cushioned, and presented like it has a title. The fish counter is an argument for national pride. The portions are small because the assumption — radical, apparently — is that you will come back tomorrow, buy what is fresh tomorrow, and eat like a person who lives near food.
An American supermarket is a warehouse with feelings. It is the size of a regional airport, sells kayaks next to the yoghurt, and offers you 340 breakfast cereals on the confident assumption that freedom means never having someone else narrow your options. You do not pop into an American supermarket. You provision, like a ship's quartermaster, for a voyage of unknown length. Both nations think their model is normal. Neither has any idea what the other one is doing.
Japan 🇯🇵
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Show up in the evening for the half-price (hangaku) sticker ritual | Grab a discounted bento out of the staffer's hand mid-sticker — wait your turn |
| Bring your own bag or buy one; plastic bags cost money now | Eat or drink while walking the aisles |
| Put your basket in the designated spot and bag at the sacking counter | Bag your groceries at the till and hold up the sacred flow |
| Treat the depachika (department store food hall) as a pilgrimage | Squeeze the fruit — it has been curated by professionals, thank you |
USA 🇺🇸
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Join the loyalty programme immediately — the "regular" prices are fiction | Pay the non-member price like a tourist |
| Accept small talk from the cashier; it's the local liturgy | Respond to "How are you?" with an actual answer of any length |
| Try the free samples at Costco without shame — it's a lifestyle | Attempt Costco on a Saturday afternoon without a strategy and an exit plan |
| Check unit prices, because package sizes are psychological warfare | Assume the bigger jar is cheaper per gram; often it isn't, and that's on purpose |
The Japanese supermarket operates on a principle that sounds simple and is actually a civilisational commitment: food should be fresh, and fresh means today. Portions are sized for tonight's dinner, not this quarter's. Fish arrives daily and is labelled with where it was caught and, occasionally, roughly what mood it was in. Strawberries sit in individual foam cradles. A melon can cost more than a train ticket to another city, and the melon deserves it.
The evening discount ritual is the closest thing Japanese retail has to theatre. Around 7pm, a staff member emerges with a roll of half-price stickers and begins marking down the day's prepared food — because it will not be sold tomorrow, because tomorrow it will not be fresh, because standards are standards. A quiet crowd materialises. Regulars orbit at a respectful distance. Nobody pushes. Nobody speaks. It is the politest feeding frenzy on Earth, and the etiquette is absolute: you do not take a bento the sticker has not yet blessed.
Then there is the depachika — the basement food hall of a department store — which is not a supermarket so much as a museum where the exhibits are edible and the curators are aggressive perfectionists. And the konbini, the 7-Elevens and Lawsons that are objectively the best convenience stores on the planet and have ruined every expat for the versions back home.
The trade-off: it's expensive, the portions can feel stingy, and your freezer will mock you with its emptiness. The reward: you eat, every day, like the food actually mattered to someone. Because it did.
The American grocery store is not trying to feed you. It is trying to supply you, the way one supplies an expedition. The average supermarket carries north of 30,000 products; a Walmart Supercenter carries four times that and will also sell you a firearm, a paddling pool, and a tyre. The cart is the size of a small car because it needs to be. Nobody walks here. The car park is measured in acres.
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And it works, in its way, magnificently. Nowhere on Earth is food this varied, this available, this relentlessly convenient. Open 24 hours in many places, because the American right to buy ranch dressing at 3am is apparently constitutional. Free samples. Drive-through pharmacy. A bakery, a bank, a florist and an optician under one roof — the supermarket as a city-state.
Costco deserves its own paragraph, because Costco is not a shop, it's a belief system. Members pay an annual fee for the privilege of buying mayonnaise by the litre and leaving, every single time, with $200 of things they did not know existed an hour earlier. The $1.50 hot dog combo has not changed price since 1985 and is defended by the company with a seriousness other nations reserve for territorial waters. Americans do not describe Costco the way one describes a store. They describe it the way one describes a homeland.
The trade-off is the food itself: engineered for shelf life, portioned for abundance, and sweetened with a heavy hand — the bread is sweet, the sauce is sweet, the bacon is sweet. You will never run out of anything. You may also never quite remember what a tomato tasted like.
The American supermarket wins on choice, price, hours, and sheer logistical audacity — it is the greatest supply chain ever pointed at a dinner table. The Japanese supermarket wins on the small matter of the food.
And that, ultimately, decides it. Choice is a means. Dinner is the end. Japan's system — small, fresh, daily, expensive — produces meals; America's system produces inventory. One country treats grocery shopping as the first step of cooking. The other treats it as a hedge against scarcity that never comes, in the only nation on Earth where it never would.
Japan wins. Buy less, buy today, eat better. The kayak was never going to fit in your kitchen anyway.
<small>"The half-price sticker guy at my local supermarket has a following. We know his schedule. We pretend to browse. The moment that sticker roll comes out, twelve strangers move as one. Total silence. It's beautiful." — Reddit r/japanlife</small>
<small>"Took my Japanese mother-in-law to a Texas H-E-B. She stood in the cereal aisle for a full minute, then asked me, very quietly, 'Who is all this for?' I still don't have an answer." — Reddit r/Costco</small>
<small>"Nobody warns you that in Japan the cashier will never touch your bagging. You bag at a separate counter. I held up a queue of eleven people trying to pack my groceries at the till like an animal." — Internations Tokyo</small>
A supermarket is a country's honest self-portrait, hung in fluorescent light. Japan's says: we are crowded, precise, and we have decided that if a thing is worth doing — even selling a strawberry — it is worth doing beautifully. America's says: we have more space than history, more choice than patience, and we would rather waste some of everything than risk running out of anything.
Visit both. Genuflect at the depachika. Make your pilgrimage to Costco and eat the hot dog. But when you get home and someone asks what you learned, tell them the truth: the Japanese shop as if food is precious, the Americans shop as if it's infinite, and only one of them is right — you just won't feel it until dinner.
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Suki Nakamura
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.