Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan (opens in new tab)

This is one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations)

> The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn

It's a better service than FB or Instagram that depress because people only show their good sides there... As you said, she was an essential part of the community ;-)

This is pretty typical of life in small villages across southeast Asia, especially towns along the coast have fish/cashew nuts lady as opposed to the yogurt lady. She was the local news representative and also the beacon of acceptable levels of capitalism -- would price her products with just enough margin for her to enjoy her simple life.

I still see them going door to door these days!

Well, I'd go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It's a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I'm bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.

Can't you just buy it from the grocery store?

400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5

Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.

The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.

Low salaries/wages. Decades of deflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

It's very effective if you have just a few of these, but are able to get lots of press from doing so that causes many other consumers to go and buy yourself through normal grocery outlets.

I heard about those from parents/grandparents and it was interesting in contrast to MLM meetings I had people trying to con me into participating. I fell for one invite once and they are pure sleaze.

And the Avon cream products in the 90s!

They existed well into the 80s in rural Missouri.

Completely unclear what "submarine article" could mean.

This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.

>Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic...

you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.

Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.

Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?

The problem is, even if we somehow could do that, it's not possible to predict the consequences. Being social is exactly the one specific trait that gave humans massive advantage over other species, and was the backbone of our evolution.

> we can fix the human condition by removing humanity

wild take.

I don't think a maximalist solution exists for something like this. And in fact historic trends are doing exactly what you talk about. And the best example is money. It eliminates social resiprocity in favour of a transaction that completes in the moment. And for many people that satisfies a substantial portion of their basic needs. But everything else is then left with just an emotional side as the primary objective. Relationships are based on fulfilling some barely understood emotional need rather than practical benefit. And we feel more and more need to use hacks to try and satisfy that.

The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.

Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.

To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".

James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".

When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.

Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".

If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.

Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.

On some level I agree, but I don't think most of my fellow humans would agree.

Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.

The part of the brain that needs human contact could be chemically or surgically neutralized.

> The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)

https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/loneliness.html

I'm guessing you haven't considered evolutionary psychology? If we didn't yearn for other people, there would be a lot less reproduction, and the human species would die.

What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?

Username checks out stares into abyss

Techbros are thinking: "Don't eliminate their need! They need a subscription AI app!"

At first, I laughed.

But it's a good question. My answer is social contact sharpens our mind. Without it, we would be stupider. And God knows we're stupid enough as it is without degrading our intellectual faculties further.

At a basic level, loners will get hunted down by tribes because they are easy prey and because their behavior can be misconstrued or spun by grifters as nefarious because they are different.

have you ever been by yourself for more than a few weeks ? you would find out that even you need to see people after having spent enough time alone. and it hurts if you're unable to see people when you feel that urge. it's a real human need

Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have 'pathological' need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don't enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing/recharging.

I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.

Thanks for the comment.

This sadly is the default zeitgeist within Liberalism as a political philosophy - which is why elites across the world treat humans as cannon fodder. They'd sell them a "dream" and destroy them and communities they're part of in order to create cheap labourers and needy consumers.Once that has passed, they'll throw them under the bus.

Once our overlords get AI/Robots to work for them, we'll quickly see mass-eugenics (positive & negative) programs instituted across the world.

As Dugin et.al note, this is infact the central flaw in modernity - which was moderated occasionally by nationalism, fascism and communism - but ultimately all within the same broad loci.

Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.

By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.

So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.

So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.

I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".

0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.

1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.

2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.

3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community

Seen a doc about this before also. Some Japanese towns are super rural and may be many kilometers from typical supermarkets. Many don't even have the famous convenience stores. Trains may only run once an hour as well, if that.

So these mobile supermarkets are as convenient as it gets.

From the BBC no less. We were just discussing how uncommercial they are.

I thought the BBC was state funded and didn't have to rely on undisclosed sponsorships.

In a word, yes.

But reading through all the great comments on HN - why should I care?

> Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult

The plaid trim on the official uniform definitely gives it a Scottish aesthetic.

That trope only applies if the non-Japanese version of the thing exists. Which, if you live in the US, it doesn't. I would be just as interested in an article about Minnesota yogurt delivery women, but they don't exist, so...

Yoghurt delivery women is the subject of the sentence and it's about women who deliver yoghurts.

I think most feedback I've seen regarding automation of customer service labour has been along the lines of "no! Get it away from me! I want to speak to the human!". With approximately that level of frustration.

I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.

The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient

We can pay one another to look after each other's parents. Watch GDP, taxable income, and payment processor fee revenue rise!

Japan is a very interesting country for Western people (US and Canada, Western Europe) because it is by far the most developed country that is not Western. In this regard, it is unique and intriguing.

I also find it odd that there’s daily top ranked Japan related articles on HN.

You are missing the point entirely. It's about how retaining human exposure in the societal loops is playing a vital role in keeping people connected and engaged. I'm an European living in Thailand and I see this difference first hand - the auntie doing local food deliveries or uncle selling food from a cart really connect people a billion times more than a super market would.

My long term prediction is that we we'll be taking curator-like roles much more seriously due to automation, as having human in the loop is not only needed for debugging automation issues but maintaining healthy society loops as well.

This is not a new argument either. Since the inception of cities we know that connection is being lost in extreme efficiency. Ladies delivering yogurt is just trading efficiency for connection.

The annual consumption of ice cream in Japan was 6.7 litres per person in 2021 (compared to 10 litres/person in Canada and 20 litres/person in the U.S.). For all dairy, Japanese people each ate 94 kg in 2022.

They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.

A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.

How come Yakult is a nearly 100 years old Japanese company?

Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.

So does Thailand but we also have Yakult ladies here, they just sell the drinks though.

A video on how it’s possible for lactose intolerant peoples to still eat lots of dairy.

Case in video: Chinese and milk tea

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=At_WjGosTNM

The first line is true, the second line is false.

Lactose intolerance is not absolute.