Saturday morning, half seven, dead behind the eyes, I walk into the Family Mart for a single can of Monster Energy. Ultra Vice Guava, if you must know, because I'm a thirty-something man making excellent life decisions. That's it. That is the entire transaction. One can of cold sugar-free battery acid, scanned, paid for, gone. And yet what unfolded at that counter was a full demonstration of Japanese konbini etiquette in all its baffling, over-engineered glory, and I am still not entirely fucking over it.

The can gets scanned. Fine. Then, with the solemn precision of a sommelier presenting a 1982 Margaux, the lass behind the till produces a plastic straw and places it before me. A straw. For a can. A can that already has a hole specifically designed by engineers, in a lab, for the express purpose of getting the liquid into your face without a straw. The can IS the delivery system. That's the whole point of the bloody can.

Then comes the oshibori. A wet towel. For my hands. Because clearly the act of gripping an aluminium cylinder is going to leave me filthy, sweat-drenched, in desperate need of a refreshing wipe-down before I can face the guava. I'm not eating yakitori off a communal grill, mate. I'm drinking an energy drink that tastes like a melted air freshener. What exactly does he think is about to get on my hands.

Why konbini etiquette has lost the plot

And then, the masterstroke. The question. "Fukuro wa goriyou desu ka?" Would I like a bag. For this. For one can. A single object with a flat bottom that I am holding in my actual hand. What does she imagine I'm going to do, carry it home in a fucking palanquin? The bag exists to contain multiple items or one awkward item. A can is neither. A can is the most carryable object ever devised by mankind. We have been carrying cans, unassisted, by hand, since the Napoleonic wars.

Here's the thing that does my head in. None of this is laziness. None of it. It is the opposite of laziness, which is somehow worse. It is a system of relentless, exhausting, ritualised thoroughness applied with zero thought as to whether any of it is remotely necessary. The straw, the towel, the bag, all offered with the same immaculate politeness whether you're buying a wedding cake or a packet of fucking gum. It is tatemae weaponised into a checklist, performed at full tempo on a man who has not yet had the caffeine that the entire transaction exists to provide.

And I get it, I genuinely do, the poor sod is just running the script. Some absolute clown in a Family Mart head office in 2003 decided every customer gets the full menu of accessories, laminated it, trained twelve thousand people on it, and now it cannot be stopped. It has the momentum of national tradition. You cannot opt out of the ceremony. You can decline the straw and the towel and the bag one by one, iie, daijoubu desu, iie, iie, doing your own little tatemae dance back at him, three refusals deep, but you cannot skip the offering itself. The offering is mandatory. The offering is the point.

The contents of one drink purchase

So I leave. In my hands: one can of Monster, one declined straw, one rejected oshibori going into landfill, and the faint sense that I have just participated in something. A small civic rite. A liturgy of single-use plastic performed over a beverage I will finish in ninety seconds standing up outside the shop like a tramp.

The tossers who designed this think they've built customer service. What they've actually built is a tiny daily interrogation about my relationship with hand hygiene before I've fully woken up. For fuck's sake. It's a can. I have hands. I have a mouth. The two have met before. We are old colleagues. We do not need a straw, a towel, or a bloody bag to broker the introduction.

Ultra Vice Guava, by the way, tastes like getting slapped by a fruit you've never met. Worth every yen. Not worth the ceremony.