Have you ever wondered why even getting the smallest thing done seems incredibly complicated in this country sometimes? Buying food and supplies, and trying to save money at it, can be quite a chore. Try adding a new baby, an ill family member, or a busy work schedule to the equation, and you really begin to wonder how Japanese people manage.
Interestingly enough, Japan has developed a wide variety of long-established food delivery services to make shopping more convenient. Many urban grocery stores, especially those struggling to compete against larger suburban chains, now offer reasonably priced "takuhai," or delivery services. Any purchases made by a certain time (usually morning) can be delivered to your door about 3 - 5 hours later, for a fee, of course. Ask your supermarket service counter if they offer "takuhai saabisu" and how much it costs.
A second type of service is the well-known seikyo or home grocery-delivery service. Local "seikyo" or farmers' cooperatives (usually one per prefecture or large city) offer home delivery services in addition to retail stores. The basis for ordering is a set of catalogs delivered weekly to your home. Using the catalogs, you fill out a specialized order sheet, and your groceries and supplies are delivered via a special route truck on a certain day of the week. Sealed Styrofoam containers (for cold or frozen items) and cardboard boxes (each recycled and collected weekly) hold the items outside your doorstep, and you don't have to be home to receive deliveries. Each week you fill our the form for your groceries for the next week, making meal planning relatively easy. While most seikyo used to require group orders, almost all services deal with individual families now.
The Tokyo metropolitan region PAL System (Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Saitama, see the following Japanese website for info: http://www.pal-system.co.jp) supplies a whopping 640,000 homes, allows Internet/phone/and fax-based ordering, and offers a wide range of specialized catalogs and services. Shipping for most Coop services is free when there is a new baby or elderly person in the house. Other regions have very similar groups: ask your neighbors about the "seikyo takuhai" or do an Internet search with your city/region name and "seikyo takuhai" in Japanese.
Another booming sub-market of home grocery delivery service is organic food home delivery. Our family uses Radish Boya, a long-standing nationwide service that contracts with local farmers to produce organic vegetables, fruits, meat, and even processed foods. The system (catalogs/order sheets/home delivery) is similar to Seikyo, except that every week a large box of fresh vegetables and fruits is sent to your home. The box is filled with what's in season and what's available, meaning that you could end up with three consecutive weeks of gobo (burdock root), or a large watermelon one week and two cantaloupes the next. The service also ships relatively rare but traditional vegetables difficult to find in supermarkets. You can order additional weekly and/or one-off products as well. Check out http://www.radishbo-ya.co.jp for more information, or here (http://www.zmag.org/Japan/Politics/Radish1.html) for a detailed English description. Other organic food delivery services are popping up all over: it might be worth it to compare prices. (Organic vegetables are "yuuki yasai" in Japanese.)
Finally, a new subset of the market that caters to the truly busy or those on special diets is worth mentioning: "menu-specific" meal shipping services. Essentially, these services send you both the ingredients and recipes as a packaged set of menus for each week, eliminating the question "what's for dinner?" and shopping. While I've never tried these services myself, they do seem convenient, and certainly less expensive than eating out. Some recommended sites include: Benesse EF (http://www.benesse-ef.jp), Watashi no Kondate (http://www.shokubun.co.jp), and Yoshikei (http://www.yoshikei-dvlp.co.jp). Note that you can, of course, cancel for days or weeks if you don't like the menu or won't be at home to cook.
So, finally, the real question is: are these services frugal? There is no question that a dedicated comparison shopper with lots of time to visit many stores would find cheaper per-unit prices on many of the items sold through these services. Plus, shipping can get expensive if you live too far off route for one of the weekly truck deliveries. That said, I've found that using our service actually lowered our grocery bill for three reasons:
1) We don't go shopping as much (maybe once a week to get meat or fish), thus cutting down drastically on unneeded or impulse buys.
2) Groceries become more of a fixed cost (you are typically billed for your monthly purchases at the end of the month through direct withdrawal from your bank account).
3) "Inventory control" becomes easier (you order based on a catalog, allowing you to check your 'stock' of groceries as you go).
Whatever grocery delivery service type you choose, realize that the catalogs you receive will be in Japanese, and most customer service too. While extensive pictures are used, it can take a month or two to get used to how the service works. That said, a number of friends I know with limited Japanese manage to use the services quite successfully. If your spoken Japanese is better than your reading, ask for a sales person to visit your home to explain things to you - many will do just that. Happy Ordering!
PS: Note that many services (including mine) have dropped their joining and membership renewal fees altogether (used to be 5,000 yen), and that many have "trial membership" campaigns for a month or so. Radish Boya, and some Seikyo, will also send you a free pack of vegetables or basic products so you can try out the merchandise.
By Wendy J. Imura. Copyright 2005.