They just end up rewarded after doing shady tricks more often. Whereas in any other country being too devious too often is fatal.

I guess the archetypal example on HN would be Microsoft or Oracle.

There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.

It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.

But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.

There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).

Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.

5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.

Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."

Their accomplishments here are very impressive.

coincidence?

But that's down to larger cultural differences. Japanese schoolchildren probably get less supervision overall than their US counterparts.