世論 What Japan Thinks

I once met someone who got chucked out of a department store for eating whole platefoods of the sample food, but if you play by the rules in Japanese food courts you can get to try a decent amount of free food. To see what the average Japanese person gets up to, MyVoice recently surveyed its online community to see what they thought about free samples.

Demographics

Over the first five days of July 2007 12,654 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was male, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 14% aged fifty or older.

My favourite free sample is always food, and I find Hanshin department store in Umeda, Osaka a good place to try before I have no intention of buying. Other than that, I don’t really collect much else, although wifey saves up free cosmetic samples for use on holidays, and she quite often ends up buying the food we sample.

Note that paper tissues are exempt from this survey. Oh, and talking of free samples, all of you in Japan did try to get a free cream puff, I hope! The offer is still open, just in case you missed it the first time.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or check out my weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

The headline may very well be true, but as part of DIMSDRIVE’s 90th Research Ranking survey, they asked people what they thought the best free things in life were.

I have to pretty much agree with the rankings below; the mottainai part of me wants to disagree with the supermarket carrier bag option, but they always get reused at home as rubbish bags.

One might think that libraries are rather low in the list for a country that seems to like reading so much; perhaps two reasons are that many people buy their paperbacks either new or used, and that libraries don’t tend to stock much manga!

I think the “free newspapers” and “coupon magazines” have a lot of overlap as many free newspapers have coupons as a major part, and the quality of the articles leave a lot to be desired, but there are some exceptions, of course. Not that I’m biased for them plugging me, oh no…
Read the rest of this entry »