Family Mart Designed Cute Teary-Eyed Stickers to Combat Food Loss (spoon-tamago.com)

> In selecting the design, we created several illustrated designs based on the criteria of ‘being able to gain consumer sympathy

Do people really feel sympathy for cartoons of crying food?

So if I grumpily (sorry) understand this correctly, the business wants to make customers feel guilty that the business over-ordered?

The business could have been a little conservative in how many units they ordered, but no, the just couldn't give up on even one potential lost sale, so they ordered too many. The solution, put a sticker on it to try to talk a customer into buying something perhaps they otherwise wouldn't.

The only sticker they needed to design was a discount!

We've had these in the Netherlands for about a decade or something. You also get a 35% discount on the products with a sticker on them. The sticker says something like: "shame if had to be thrown away".

can't they just give it away for free if the alternative is to throw it away?

I feel like this might only work in Japan...