Fukubukuro: Lucky Bags, but Lucky for Whom?
There is a Japanese expression, "残り物には福がある" which means "there's luck in leftovers. That expression was probably intended to get the family to eat all the food before it went bad, or as was the case in the immediate post war era, eat all the calories they can get because there aren't any more.
But family dinners aren't the only thing which produces leftovers. Retail has a lot of leftovers; leftover merchandise to be precise. Selling items, especially clothing, is really difficult to do efficiently. Clothing may be the wrong size, or it may not match fashion trends, or demand for somethings (like sweaters) may not be proportional to others (like pants). According to sustainability statistics, apparel retail stores have an unsold goods rate at around 30%. So what happens to all this unsold stuff? Do they just dump it and take a loss? Not in Japan.
Like most things that are common and successful, fukubukuro, literally "lucky bags" have many purported "fathers." Some claim that the first fukubukuro was sold by kimono shop Echigoya (today the Mitsukoshi Department Store) in the early 1860s in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo. Others claim that Ginza's Matsuya Department store invented the custom in the late Meiji Era (1868 to 1912).
The idea of a fukubukuro is to take unsold inventory, put it together in a bag, and sell it for what is listed as a steep discount (e.g. the original full retail price). The most desired fukubukuro are sold on the first day of business after the New Year's holiday. Some fukubukuro are not highly prized, being derisively called "bad luck bags" or "garbage bags" by customers unhappy with their purchase. But in some cases, some stores lean into the "misfortune bag" label and self-deprecatingly label them that and sell them at steep discounts.
Since the beginning of the Heisei era (1989 to 2019), there have been a number of innovations to the fukubukuro concept, including some which seem to run contrary to the whole idea of a fukubukuro. Some are sold in transparent bags so that purchasers can see exactly what is inside before they buy. Sometimes the contents are advertised in advance. Sometimes the fukubukuro is actually a list of products that customers can choose from to make up their own bag. It's a much more efficient system, so economists would love it, but it detracts somewhat from the excitement of getting something really valuable for a low price by chance.
Fukubukuro are regulated by the Premiums and Representations Act of 1960, which stipulates that the maximum value of goods in a fukubukuro can be up to 20 times the selling price if the selling price is less than 5,000 yen, or up to 100,000 yen if the price is 5,000 yen or more. Note that the law is more complicated than this, this is not legal advice, and if you want to sell a fukubukuro, you really should ask a real Japanese lawyer first.
Foreign companies like Apple and Starbucks have been active participants in annual fukubukuro sales, and their bags are always in high demand.
Starting in the year 2000, many public libraries in Japan introduced the "library lucky bag," where they placed a number of books in a bag to be borrowed by a library card holder without them seeing what the titles are until they get home. The idea is to expose readers to new books they might not otherwise choose. They are library books, so the titles must be returned when their lending period is up, but some libraries allow patrons to keep the bags that the books came in.
Finally, in a combination of two very Japanese retail concepts in one, in the suburban Tokyo neighborhood of Kichijoji, there are at least two vending machines that sell fukubukuro for 1,000 yen each. The pictures on the machine offer dreams of drones, power banks, G-Shock watches, Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, and other similar prizes. However in the only story I could find about these vending machines, the author's bag contained a knife sharpener, which they pointed out was useless, as they only have ceramic knives at home. Better luck next year!