Christmas may be over here in the United States, but the season’s just starting in Japan. Apple has just announced that it will kick off its annual “Lucky Bag” celebration in its Japanese retail stores starting January 2.
Here’s how it works.
Every New Year’s Day, Japanese consumers line up to take place in the annual tradition of the Fukubukuro, in which merchants sell sealed bags of mystery gifts at huge discounts. For example, if you go into your local video game store, you might pick up a bag of game discs for $100. Walk into the local butcher, and you can take your pick of any number of dripping canvas sacks of mystery meat for a nominal fee.
Apple’s Japanese stores have been taking part in the Fukubukuro celebration since 2005, and starting Friday, customers will have the chance to buy a limited number of Lucky Bags at Apple’s retail stores, starting at around $300.
What’s in a Lucky Bag? It depends on the year, but the value always exceeds the cost. Last year’s Lucky Bag giveaway was particularly good, containing an 11-inch 128GB MacBook Air, a Magic Mouse, a pair of JayBird BlueBuds X wireless earphones, a Mophie Juice Pack powerstation mini portable battery, a Twelve South PlugBug World travel plug adapter, a Beats by Dre Pill Speaker Gold Edition, a Power Support Air Jacket sleeve for the MacBook Air, and an Apple T-shirt — in total a haul valued at 176,840 yen, or around $1,680.
What will Japan’s Lucky Bags contain this year? Only time will tell. This is one Japanese tradition we wish would come stateside.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
4 responses to “Apple’s Japanese ‘Lucky Bags’ will go on sale January 2”
so last year they bought a lucky bag ticket for 300USD and got a total value of 1,680USD? Or did i misunderstand something?
I’m thinking the same thing. I’m guessing that the holiday spirit REALLY fuels the sales of these gift packages in an already Apple-obsessed nation. With the extreme profit margin Apple makes off their accessories individually, lowering the unit price by about 5x but selling probably 7-10x due to the holiday spirit fully compensated everything and generates a decent opportunistic profit.
I think the article has it wrong… from what I understand each person got a bunch of small items and one larger item ranging from a macbook air all the way down to an ipod. Basically one Apple product + 3-4 other items IE headphones and batterpacks.
Yeah, this is wrong. Every bag is different, sort of like a lottery. And those big ticket items like the MacBook Air would be very limited.