High Convenience; Late-night shoppers rejoice: Japan's high-tech minimarts are going global.(FamilyMart Company Ltd.)

Byline: Christian Caryl and Andakiko Kashiwagi (With Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles)

Noritsugu Miyazaki is a clerk in a convenience store. Slacker job, right? Not. Miyazaki works for Family Mart in Japan, where the seemingly mundane task of running such stores has been raised to the level of a high and demanding art. Miyazaki, 22, does more than sell drinks and snacks. He also helps patrons with dry cleaning, package delivery and DVD rentals. He can accept payment for utility bills and issue tickets to Tokyo Disneyland, baseball games or movies. And when it's time to restock inventory, Miyazaki transmits his orders with the help of a tablet computer he carries with him as he walks the aisles. The computer's touchscreen can summon up details of individual products, sales data going back for weeks, even weather reports. "Stock up on plastic umbrellas," the computer admonishes him. "Rain is on the way." "It's pretty difficult," says Miyazaki. "I'm looking for a different job, to be honest."

Welcome to the demanding world of Japanese convenience stores. In other parts of the world the big-box chains, from Wal-Mart to Target, are setting the pace in retail. Convenience stores, by contrast, tend to be the poor stepchildren of the business, drearily linked in the popular mind, at least in their American homeland, with stale sandwiches, stickups and insomnia. Not so in Japan, where the 38,000 conbini, as they're known, use cutting-edge information technology to serve the spontaneous desires of their customers, from ski-lift tickets to banking services (which Wal-Mart is fighting a legal battle to offer in its U.S. stores). Japan's Seven & i Holdings bought a majority stake in the 7-Eleven chain in 1991 and turned it into a household word in Asia, thanks to the Japanese parent's profit margins of 31 percent.

And now the conbini are setting their sights abroad. The rationale for expansion is straightforward: the $61 billion convenience-store market is saturated in Japan, where the population is shrinking; the number of new-store openings has flattened as growth shifts to new Asian markets. Out of Family Mart's 12,000 stores around the world, nearly one half are located in Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and China. The South Korean affiliate even has two stores in North Korea's free-trade zones. Now the company is pushing into the United States, under the name Famima, with four outlets open in the Los Angeles area and plans for 200 nationwide by 2009. "We are trying to be a premium grocery, quick-service restaurant and convenience store in one," says Hidenari Sato, who runs Family Mart's fledgling U.S. operation. "But we don't want the image of the gas-and-snack convenience store that America is used to."

Just visit one of Family Mart's stores in West Hollywood, and the differences immediately register. Wide aisles are neatly stocked with organic instant oatmeal, premium pastas and expensive artisanal teas alongside convenience-store staples like diapers, dental floss and dog food. A huge prepared-foods section displays ready-made sushi and hand rolls, crab cakes, fruit salad and dishes like beef with curry sauce, carrots and rice, as well as a variety of panini grilled to order. Sato says that the store is targeting customers between the ages of 21 and 44 whose household incomes top $80,000--and particularly women, who ...