One great feature of many Japanese supermarkets and department store food floors is that they often have tasting corners, the subject of a recent survey from iShare.
Demographics
Between the 26th of November and the 1st of December 2009 542 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample were male, 30.3% in their twenties, 33.6% in their thrities, and 36.2% in their forties.
Whenever there’s free sweets, cake or fruit I’m always sure to grab a bite or two, and will occasionally partake of other free samples. One always hears stories about people effectively having full meals by circulating around the free sample locations, but I’ve never tried it for myself. A lot of the posh department stores also have alcohol tasting corners – I wonder if it’s possible to drink enough to get drunk? I’ll have to try one day…
In Japan, there’s always some brand or other of soft drink in particular that has a free collectable gift attached to it, such as figurines, mobile phone straps, or even once plant seeds! These food items collectable gifts were the focus of a recent survey from iShare. Oh, a long time ago I did a similar DIMSDRIVE survey.
Demographics
Between the 30th of October and the 5ht of November 2009 537 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 57.5% of the sample were male, 35.8% in their twenties, 30.5% in their thirties, and 33.7% in their forties.
The last nice collectable set I got was Snoopy lying on various delicacies from around the country, given away free with Pepsi. I’ve never gone out of my way to collect such items, but they do influence my wife’s buying habits to some degree.
A friend of mine once bought a whole case of collectable cards that came with a tiny sweet, so it looked more to me like buying a card that came with a free ebidle item, not the other way round! Read the rest of this entry »
A new gadget that is generating quite a bit of buzz around the Japanese English-language blogs is the Poken, with various events having giveaways of the wee beasties, with now JapanSoc also getting in on the act.
What is a Poken? Perhaps this video explains:
It’s basically a portable cache of your social network accounts (actually, pointers to an online cache) so when two pokens meet, they exchange identifiers so back at home you can quickly find out where you can meet all your real-life contacts. Quicker and more accurate than scribbling a phone number or email address on a bit of paper, and for anti-social gits such as myself it saves the business of asking, just a quick high-four and Bob’s your uncle.
The Poken shop shows a few designs, but printing your own would be a fabulous extra feature…
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 »
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 »
One great feature of many Japanese supermarkets and department store food floors is that they often have tasting corners, the subject of a recent survey from iShare.
In Japan, there’s always some brand or other of soft drink in particular that has a free collectable gift attached to it, such as figurines, mobile phone straps, or even once plant seeds! These 
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 
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