Conveniently Located Convenience Stores or Inconvenient Konbini

Abstract

7-Eleven is the largest convenience store company or brand in the world with over 85,000 locations. Over half of these are in Japan where the parent company of 7-Eleven, Seven & i Holdings, is headquartered out of. Competition for convenience store, or “konbini” in Japanese, dominance comes from other companies in Japan, namely Familymart and Lawson. Okinawa, Japan is no exception to having its share of konbini, but 7-Eleven locations on the island are limited when compared to other major competitors. This project investigates the spatial relationship between 7-Eleven locations in Okinawa and census data for the expansion of 7-Eleven stores. The locations for 7-Eleven konbini were collected from Google while the census statistics and shapefiles were collected from the Statistics Bureau of Japan for 2020. The demographics used from the census data included persons by occupation, construction type, family type, ownership status, household size, economic structure, and age. Ordinary Least Squares regression techniques used within the analysis determine the relationship between convenience store locations and demographics. 7-Elevens have a positive relationship between census tracts containing apartments 11 floors or more, construction types classified as other, household sizes of 1, and women ages 35 – 39, while having a negative relationship with transportation or postal workers. A properly specified model for 7-Eleven locations was not determined due to weak Adjusted R-Squares values and severe multicollinearity present within the census statistics.