Published on December 24th, 2025
It's amazing how one company's successful marketing campaign can shape the behavior of a whole society.
This is the bento section of my supermarket today. Where there are normally a large variety of different meals, today it's basically all chicken.
You've probably heard already that in Japan, it's a "christmas tradition" to eat KFC (yes, the fast food chain). This is because in the 70s, they ran a campaign for christmas dressing up Colonel Sanders as Santa Claus. And it worked.
Nowadays families make reservations for take-out KFC weeks in advance, and on Christmas Eve (today), large numbers of people line up at KFC to pick up the christmas sets they ordered.
Obviously, other businesses try to capitalize on this mass hysteria, so today supermarkets all over Japan try and copy the food and aesthetics of the menus sold at KFC.
Crazy how easy it is to change and create traditions.
