Famiポート (Famiport)

» see family.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The name is a joining of two words, FamilyMart and port, chosen because the company wanted something that described a socket where customers could plug into whatever the chain was selling that was not food. It was a multimedia station, which is the Japanese retail term for the machine in the corner, and FamilyMart began installing them in 2000.

Something had been there before it. Faminet, in service from 1997, was a fax machine with a small LCD panel bolted on and a ticket function running through it, selling Ticket Pia seats from 1998 and JTB travel products alongside. Famiport took over its work and left Faminet standing as a plain fax until the last units were pulled out in 2007.

What the machine actually did is a list that keeps going past the point where you expect it to stop. Utility bills and electronic money top-ups. Mail-order payments. Concert tickets through Ticket Pia, then e+ and CN Play Guide. Highway bus reservations via JTB. The toto football pools, which private citizens could buy from the 2006 season. Numbers and Loto. Tokyo Disney Resort day passes, which from February 2015 you could walk into the park on directly. KidZania admissions. Movie pre-sale vouchers. None of this has a Turkish equivalent to compare it against, because the thing it depended on never existed there: a store open all night, on every corner, trusted to handle a payment, and willing to be the counter for companies that have no counter of their own. In Turkey that work sat with the PTT, and later with bank machines.

~ the case file ~

~ the box in the corner ~

The operating rule was strict and a little hostile. The machine never handled payment itself. It printed an application slip, and that slip was valid for thirty minutes, at the till of the same branch that printed it, and nowhere else. You also could not combine purchases: one Famiport slip was one transaction, and you could not ring it up alongside a sandwich.

Until 2018 the slips carried four separate barcodes which staff had to scan from the top down in order, and scanning them out of sequence threw an error. An operations review cut that to one. From March 2020 the system would batch up to five slips of the same type in a single sale, and the receipts moved off the voucher printer and onto the ordinary till roll in January 2021, which was the first visible sign that the machine was being hollowed out from the inside.

~ three generations ~

The first Famiport, from 2000 to 2006, was Toyota's e-TOWER, supplied through a company called e-Platt. It had a monitor on top that played advertising and programming out loud into the shop, and it took memory cards for digital photo printing, with a scanner built in as well. It ran Windows 2000, and it talked to head office over satellite and ISDN.

The second generation, designed in-house and swapped in between September 2006 and February 2007, is the one that reached every prefecture, including the stores in Miyazaki and Kagoshima that had gone without a terminal until then. It ran Windows XP Embedded over fiber with ISDN as a fallback, and the touchscreen carried a privacy film so the person behind you could not read it. The third, from June 2014, was built to be smaller, with the slogan slim and best, and ran Windows Embedded 8. PFU made both. The voucher printers came from Kyocera Mita and then OKI, who also sold the same unit to NTT Data.

~ folded into a copier ~

FamilyMart announced the replacement on 1 December 2021, and it was announced as a copier. The chain was rolling out a new Sharp multi-copier, the first in a Japanese convenience store with a privacy filter fitted as standard, and the release said Famiport's functions would move into it in spring 2022.

Migration started in late May 2022. J-CAST reported in June that the terminals were being pulled from every branch, and by 15 July the handover was complete and the multimedia stations were gone. Ticketing and bill payment carry on today at the copier, which runs Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. Taiwan kept its own FamiPort, under the same name, and it is still there.

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