Blue Chip

(A former mom-and-pop shop in Waseda.)

Once upon a time, you could walk into a shop with this "Blue Chip affiliated store" sign hanging above, do your shopping, and receive some Blue Chip stamps according to the money you spent. You would carefully paste each stamp onto a sheet, slowly accumulating hundreds. The stamps would then be exchanged for pans or mere trinkets, depending on how much you'd collected.

Fast forward to the present, where the stamps have been replaced with plastic cards generating digital points, but the mom-and-pop shops affiliated with Blue Chip have all but died out. Good luck gathering the 74,000 points you need to win a Coach bag.