Random Picture #94

Peacock "lucky bags". They're stapled shut, but the notion of there being a surprise was rather undermined by the neighboring display. 

Last year, my husband and I went a little crazy and bought three "lucky bags" (fukubukuro). For the two or three people who haven't heard me prattle about these before, they are grab bags that are sold around the new year which include a variety of items that (supposedly) have a value that exceeds the total cost of the bag. It took us over 6 months to get through most of the stuff we bought, and that was with me giving away some of it to one of my students. This year, we decided to exercise great caution in such purchases so that we wouldn't be faced with months and months of food to eat up (or throw out). 

Fortunately for us, one of our previous suppliers of fukubukuro, Peacock supermarket, obliged us by revealing the contents of their lucky bags before purchase. This year was rather a contrast to last year in which there were some actual food items in the bag like coffee, tea, soy sauce, seaweed and egg drop soup because it mainly contains snacks. I wasn't able to dig through the entire bag, but it was heavy on the salted snacks and sweets including cookies, (European imported!) sugar wafers, castella cake, at least two kinds of sembei, salted shrimp snacks, (imported) potato sticks, and karinto (crispy, lightly sweet, fried brown sugar snacks that are very popular in Japan). The cost of the bag, 2000 yen/$26, is not incredibly high, but I'm not sure that the contents represent a great deal of value for the money, particularly if every single items is not of interest. Still, I think it is a nice assortment, but we passed on it.