Photo by EVC
The sheer number of services offered by Taiwan’s convenience stores is nothing short of wondrous. At convenience stores, it’s not simply that you can buy snacks, coffee, or cigarettes–you can do everything from paying your bills, making an ATM withdrawal, buying concert tickets, picking up packages, to taking care of printing jobs. It is no surprise that they have become ubiquitous features of life in Taiwan. Convenience stores always seem to be rolling out new services, as you can see with convenience stores introducing sandwich presses, beer on tap, and other novelties.
At the same time, convenience store workers work long, hard hours for low pay. Offering that many services means that your convenience store worker is at once a barista, bank teller, bartender, postal office worker, and clerk–and they do all this for minimum wage. As the title of Chang Li-hsiang’s (張立祥) book on convenience store workers describes evocatively, Your Convenience, My Overwork. In the same ten minutes, a convenience store will be doing anything from checking for expired products on the shelves and restocking, accepting deliveries of delivery packages or new products, ringing up customer purchases, making coffee, and assisting with the printer.
If convenience stores are so remarkable, Chang argues that convenience stores are fundamentally a form of supermarkets, and structurally, they still most resemble supermarkets. The backbone of running a convenience store is the point of sale (POS), which allows for tracking products coming in and being sold in the store. Technology has not yet advanced to the point that automating the process, without any human element, is possible. While Taiwan’s major convenience stores have made attempts, they are not yet capable of removing the human element. Attempts by 7-Eleven and FamilyMart to roll out automated convenience stores remain concept stores, which still require human labor behind the scenes.
There have been efforts to organize convenience store workers in labor unions in recent years. Parallels have been drawn between convenience stores in Taiwan and fast-food workers in other parts of the world. Yet, the industry has remained resistant to labor organizing efforts, perhaps returning to the overall weakness of organized labor in Taiwan.
For convenience stores to be able to provide services such as paying your electricity and water bills, even your taxes, tight links with the government are required. This points to how major convenience store chains such as 7-Eleven and FamilyMart are run by large and powerful conglomerates that have close links with the government, such as 7-Eleven’s Uni-President Group. The joke often goes that 7-Eleven itself could be a government ministry. The convenience store itself replaced the more traditional institution of the ga-ma-diam (柑仔店), which fulfilled many of the same functions. In this sense, the rise of the modern convenience store also proves a form of gentrification.
That the convenience store is such a staple of life in Taiwan links even to the threats that Taiwan faces from China. The Lai administration recently denied rumors that convenience stores would be used as supply centers in wartime, stating that the idea had only been discussed. The government very likely hoped to avoid panic about the possibility of war. Still, the truth is that convenience stores would in all probability be used for such purposes in wartime, given their strategic location in central transportation and logistical hubs in Taiwan, at the level of local neighborhoods.
If convenience store workers are mostly young people for whom it may be their first job, some convenience store chains now, such as Hi-Life, highlight that in their recruitment ads. FamilyMart has recently begun hiring a growing number of Southeast Asian students from Taiwanese schools, who wear name tags that also list what country they are from. It is to be seen if this leads to shifts in the convenience store industry similar to Japan, which also diversified hiring in the last decade, such that it is now common to see non-Japanese convenience store clerks. At the same time, there continues to be little discussion of the labor conditions in this pivotal institution of Taiwanese life–the convenience store, and this has not changed in spite of an uptick in labor activity in Taiwan in the past ten years of the Democratic Progressive Party’s governance.
Brian Hioe
Brian Hioe (丘琦欣) is a writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ based out of Taipei. In 2014, he was one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine (破土), an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific that was founded after the Sunflower Movement. In his capacity as such, he helps run the community space for events that New Bloom runs in Taipei, DAYBREAK (破曉咖啡). He is currently a non-resident fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Research Hub.
