Convenience as Wealth
Convenience and the value it provides are key to vernacular ideas of wealth and everyday social life. Convenience is also frequently proffered as an explanation for innovations in the platform economy, from e-commerce (Amazon, Alibaba) to app-based payment systems. This research axis focuses on Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India assesses the production of convenience as wealth via a longer historical view, and via attention to the specific retail space of the convenience store and smart technologies and on-demand delivery services modeled upon it.
Japan’s first convenience store was opened in 1969; its first franchised 7-Eleven opened its doors in Tokyo in 1974. Licensed from the American head company, 7-Eleven Japan became so successful it bought out the US head company in 1991, becoming a global convenience giant. Its success is usually understood as (1) reflecting a commitment to convenience as a situational and ever-changing social demand; (2) relying on ever-new advances in technologies and services to enhance this social convenience; and (3) being in step with changes in social organization, employment, and family structures from the 1970s to the present. As reliant on new technologies, just-in-time delivery as inspired by Toyotist manufacturing practices, logistical management, and the provision of fresh foods multiple times daily, it has become recognized as a kind of “social infrastructure” since the 1990s.
Convenience stores in Tokyo are an early site from which on-demand and smartphone-mediated set of services develop; they are also a site where innovations in service offering extend to the payment technologies so often associated with Asian super apps today. Convenience stores were established in Japan as part of a government-initiated project in partnership with the private sector to rationalize small and medium size businesses in the 1970s, and manage labor shortages. They become vibrant sites that are equal parts technologized store and hub of everyday life, where visitors find food, drink and other basic necessities on a daily basis. Since the 1980s, the convenience store was viewed as being the forefront of the “information revolution”; a site of innovation and value creation. Tracing this development and its relation to shifting models of wealth – wherein wealth also includes social reproduction – is key to this analysis. This research site headed by Marc Steinberg aims to take the now-globalized Japanese convenience store as a site for consideration of convenience as a dimension of wealth, closely tied to questions of finance and social reproduction.
As a comparison to this, and with the aim of expanding the models and vernaculars of convenience to an inter-Asian research frame (Chen 2010), we also look to Bangalore (also known as India’s Silicon Valley) as another key site that foregrounds innovations in the convenience of delivery. The Bangalore research site headed by Ananya will focus on the attempts to reshape consumption at neighborhood kirana stores by displacing them with hyperlocal 10 minute delivery services. Significantly, India is touted to be the first market where the quick-commerce model has been implemented successfully by a range of platforms including Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Zepto, and more. The on-demand and near-instantaneous temporality of such quick commerce platforms rivals the quotidian experience of shopping at one’s neighborhood stores. Even as none of these platforms are profitable at the moment, they command a significant presence within the country’s major urban centers. We will juxtapose the development of such quick-commerce delivery services with the Indian government’s recently launched Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The ONDC is an initiative to create decentralized, interoperable, and unbundled digital marketplaces that can be inclusive avenues for small and medium sized businesses. Launched in 2022, ONDC is a part of the government’s extensive Digital Public Infrastructure (alongside Aadhar and the United Payments Interface) and seeks to combat the platform-centric model that currently dominates India’s digital marketplaces. Significantly, ONDC’s intervention marks an attempt by the state to both strengthen India’s Digital Public Infrastructure and financialize and formalize smaller businesses through e-commerce, paralleling the Japanese government’s push towards convenience stores as retail format in the 1970s. We will focus on how pre-existing sociocultural forms of consumption are reshaped by innovations in India’s platform economy.
Examining these sites both separately and together, Steinberg and Ananya will explore the historical shifts in the configuration of convenience via the rise of the small-retail oriented convenience stores and the gig economy, and via the relation of older and newer configurations of convenience to social reproduction, wealth, and new models of living.
