One drink per location, for an epic adventure. When it comes to shopping malls in Japan, it’s hard to beat Aeon Lake Town in terms of size, as it contains more than 700 shops and restaurants in three large complexes that cover an expanse of 224,000 square metres (2.4 million square feet).
Located in Koshigaya, in Tokyo’s neighbouring prefecture of Saitama, this is a mall that you can spend an entire day in without getting to see everything it has to offer, which got us to thinking — how long would it take for us to visit all of the mall’s Starbucks branches? ▼ The mall has a total of seven branches , pictured below. As you can see, they’re pretty spread out, so this wasn’t going to be an easy task, but it was a challenge we were keen to complete. We began our journey at the first branch, located at the top of the escalator, immediately after exiting the station.
▼ The clock starts here at 3:22 p.m. With this being a Sunday, the complex was quite busy, so we started the clock when we joined the queue, patiently waiting in line until it was our turn to order.
Considering we had a lot of drinking ahead of us, our order here was for a small-sized iced decaf Americano . It took a while for the coffee to be made, but once we had it, it was gone in seconds and it was time to head off to the next location. The second branch was, thankfully, surprisingly close by, on the first floor of the building next door.
However, it would take us a while to order here as the line .