Near Daegu, South Korea: 35°58' 31" N, 128°33' 12" E
Behold the South Korean convenience store:
Shimmering in the heat waves of distance. With its tall plastic sign gaily painted in primary colors. With its wide front windows that chill the fingertips on a scorching afternoon.
And inside: A cheery greeting from the staff—“Eoseo-oseyo!” or “Come in quick!”—welcoming you into a fluorescent-lit treasure cave of coolness, of organization and clean surfaces, of comfort and efficiency, with every possible commodity useful to daily life on offer: computer cables, sports socks, first-aid medicines, stationary supplies, not to mention a cornucopia of foods running the gamut from junky (waffle-shaped ice cream) to heart-nourishing (fresh apples and oranges, green salads, rice balls, tofu—tofu!), plus quality fresh-ground coffee and a chair and table to sit and enjoy it all.
“The usual?” asks my walking partner, Lee Junseok, as we ease off our sweaty backpacks and (discreetly) our steaming hiking shoes at one such establishment, near the Korean city of Daegu.
Lee is referring to the convenience-store staples on our 650-kilometer trek across the Korean peninsula: an egg salad sandwich and an iced Americano. Much has been hotly written regarding the virtues of the various egg salad sandwiches offered by competing convenience store chains across Asia, at the G25s, the 7-Elevens, the Lawsons. (“This sandwich, made with a creamy, yolk-heavy salad whipped up and served alongside a few spare chunks of whites on fluffy milk bread, stands out...”) Sadly, this dispute is beyond the scope of this dispatch.
And yes, I know:
Convenience stores are mass-produced experiences, franchises deemed by cultural elites as déclassé, and typically operated by large and soulless corporations. Who would not rather walk—of course!—into a shambolic yet more human mom-and-pop shop, with the aforesaid mom or pop fanning themselves in the musty half-light with a flyspecked sports newspaper, just waiting to impart a quotable bon mot about birth, life, suffering, and death? And who would contest the fact—as I can personally attest, after walking out the extremes of the grand Silk Road, the six-and-a-half-thousand kilometer trade route that once spanned continental Asia—that the original travelers’ roadside stops, the “convenience stores” of those olden says, were far more romantic steppe oases, colorful caravanserais where sunburned merchants could swap stories and trade goods, as well as buy their camel fodder and egg salad sandwiches?
Yet aren’t modern convenience stores much the same? Outposts of human ingenuity? Albeit with fodder now suction-wrapped in cellophane?
In countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan, the lowly convenience store offers facilities undreamed of by their drearier cousins in North America: banking services, postal delivery services, with some even functioning as disaster relief centers in earthquake-prone Japan.
Walking to the next store-bought iced coffee on a trek through South Korea.
Out of Eden Walk
Let it be known that I’m something of a connoisseur of convenience stores.
This goes way back.
In the mid-2000s, while working as a reporter, I clerked for nine months at a convenience store outside Chicago. It was a combo gas-station-junk-food-emporium cunningly located at an exurban crossroads encircled by new McMansion estates with the sorts of monikers that reflected what was no longer there (Western Pines, Willow Lake, Old Oaks). As I noted at the time:
“As service stations go, it's an alpha establishment. A $3 million Marathon outlet with 24 digital pumps, a computerized carwash, a Goodfella's sandwich shop and a convenience store lit up like an operating room, it sells everything from ultra low sulfur diesel to a herbal "memory enhancer" to Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Infrared sensors activate the faucets in its immaculate, white-tiled bathrooms. The coffee kiosk's floor is real hardwood.”
I staffed the cash register in a polyester blue vest pinned with a name-tag that said: “Hello, I’m PAUL.” I mopped those “immaculate” bathrooms and stocked the vast bank of glass-door coolers with a hundred-plus different taxa of sugary drinks. My fellow clerks were America’s working poor, streetwise and implausibly tender-hearted, living crappy paycheck to crappy paycheck, a few succored by illegal substances, most driving jalopies to distant mobile homes or shared apartments, and many already pre-diabetic and handcuffed to explosively overdrawn credit cards while still in their 20s. I loved them. When the 2024 YR4 asteroid hits Earth, they will be the survivors. They will be serving up the lately bunkered Silicon Valley billionaires for protein. Vacuum-packed, of course.
But back to the 55,200 convenience stores now pocking South Korea, the world’s capital of 24-hour roadside capitalism:
Walking partner Lee helps navigate us forward 25 kilometers at a time using a Korean mapping app on his phone. We slog through intense heat through rice paddies and over the densely forested Sobaek Mountains, routing between Seoul and Busan. We dodge cars. We pass cement factories, Buddhist temples, semi-derelict villages and Korean War monuments. History and time and humidity envelop us.
“When’s the next convenience store?” I ask Lee.
I am thinking of a freezing-cold latte. And Lee doubtless is thinking too—of a strawberry slushy.
I will not tell him that once, long ago, when I cleaned out the slushy machine in Chicago, long tendrils of algal-like growth clung to the brush. There are secrets you share with walking partners, and others that you don’t.
