"Seven-Eleven to test shorter hours in labor-short Japan"

NAR:

The company has made 24-hour operation a basic rule for franchise locations not only for customers' convenience, but also because it has built its own production and logistics operations around this business model.

Franchise owners are hard-pressed to staff their stores, however.

Related:

South Korea's fertility rate hit another record low last year, government data showed yesterday, falling below one for the first time despite a raft of measures to try and reverse one of the world's lowest birth rates.

The country's fertility rate - the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime - fell to 0.98 in 2018, far short of the 2.1 needed to maintain population stability.