house: Japundit
John Couke
Japundit can usually be counted on to provide useful and relevant information regarding Japanese culture and happenings (I actually just mentioned their site as a regular read of mine). However, they came up short of the mark in a recent posting entitled
Lucky Bag Madness. Now - I'll certainly continue to read their posts daily, because usually their writing is top notch. But Japundit certainly dropped the ball in their Lucky Bag story.
This phenomenon occurs at the end of the year (or more accurately, the start of the year) all over Japan in all shapes and forms, but basically involves stores selling off grab bags of their merchandise. The rest, according to Japundit, is as follows for consumers of said lucky bag:
"They jostle and fight to buy a lucky back that contains. . . Well, no one really knows. Each bag is sealed and you don’t know what is inside until you purchase it."
The meaning one can take from Japundit's post here is that the bags are purchased because they are lucky, irregardless of their contents (clearly, as you don't know what's inside until you purchase it).
Well - yes and no. Unfortunately, mostly no. Don't get me wrong: there is "strangeness" in this event. However, it's not in the fact that people are fighting over lucky bags, the contents of which they are unaware of. There are two things I genuinely find strange about this phenomenon. Read on...
The truth:
Often, bags are labelled clearly enough that you know what you are buying.
A socks store I stopped by in Roppongi Hills had grab bags that contained, well, socks. Actually, for 3,000 yen you got about 20,000 yen worth of socks. And the bags were labelled for men and women.
I passed by Seibu in Shibuya and noticed that some of the bags there were actually labelled: "men's sportswear", "women's pajamas" and stuff like that. You could actually buy a grab bag that contained seven dress shirts for only 10,000 yen. The size was clearly printed on the bag. You just didn't know what kind of designs the shirts would have. That's a great deal, and if I liked shopping, clothing, or dress shirts, for that matter, I might have bought some.
The Tsutaya/Starbucks near Roppongi Hills had grab bags too - of books. Not only could you peer inside each bag, but you could also read their contents, and they wrote the retial price on each bag, next to its sale price. I saw a bag with 120,000 yen worth of books, for just 10,000 yen. Now that's a lucky bag! (granted, for the fan of motor sports, or whatever theme the bag's contents were aligned under).
More upscale shops feature grab bags that are different. I saw some fashion shops that had grab bags of over 50,000 yen. They tended to sell them in different ways. Some would tell you that the products inside were over 100,000 yen normal cost, and contained (vague overview). If you trust the brand, you buy the bag. I'm sure whatever you didn't like would make for good gifts for someone else. Other stores, once you showed interested in buying a bag, and asked enough questions as to their contents, would actually let you look right into the bag!
Point Number One: they aren't grab bags anymore.
I witnessed this several times. It made me wonder why they were packaged like that in the first place! I guess the idea was that the contents of the bag normally so much more than the cost of the bag, that it was a great deal for the consumer. This, of course, let me to conclude that the store benefitted from such a massive sell-off by padding their bottom line at the end of the year.
Point number two: most of these sales occur January 2-9, and some start on January 1. At the start of the year!
No answer for that one.
So, instead of the overly simplified "lucky bag" that people line up for hours to get, you actually have consumers that are getting a great deal. An unbelievably great deal, in many cases.
It just makes me wonder what the stores get out of this..
