Krispy Kreme

Just when you thought it was insane to queue for hours and hours to buy doughnuts, how about queuing for hours to buy doughnuts then lugging six boxes of them for five hours on the train up to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture?! On a recent visit to said place, I spotted the family below. There's actually another bag hidden that is the same size as the one you can see - almost half their baggage was doughnuts!



Along with queuing for hours for each ride at Tokyo Disney, it would seem that queuing at Krispy Kreme is now also an essential part of the Tokyo experience for visitors to the big city.

This did get me thinking though. After watching the excellent Canadian documentary 'The Corporation' and in particular a piece about 'undercover marketing', it struck me that it could actually make good sense for a company to PAY PEOPLE TO QUEUE! In Japan, long, long queues are recognised as a sign of the success and popularity of a store. Perhaps in contrast to the west, queues attract people rather than put them off. So, paying 200 students 800yen an hour to queue up outside my store for 8 hours a day, for two days, would only cost about 2.5 million yen. Hopefully, after two days, the paid queuers would be replaced by the real article and suddenly I'd be generating huge free publicity.

According to Trans Pacific Radio, one hour long waits still persist at Krispy Kreme's Shinjuku branch. It would be appropriate to finish with a quote from Homer Simpson 'Hmmm... Donuts', but I don't actually like them so that would be insincere.