Hee-kyung giggles as she steps into Seoul’s new “warm-hearted convenience store”.
At 29, she is perhaps not the person most would have imagined wanting to take advantage of the South Korean capital’s latest efforts to combat loneliness.
But Hee-Kyung visits every day to grab the free instant ramen noodles and spend hours chatting with other visitors and social workers.
“I tell myself, ‘another day, another escape from feeling lonely’,” Hee-kyung says.
A teenage runaway, she no longer talks to anyone from her family. The friends she has she met online, through the shared love of K-pop group SuperJunior, and they live far away. Currently unemployed, she has no work mates to chat to.
She lives alone, and whiles away the time watching cute animal videos on her phone as she lies on the floor.
“I have no other place to go if it weren’t for [the store].”
Hee-Kyung is one of 20,000 people to visit the four stores since they were opened in March. The city had been expecting just 5,000 in the first year.
This particular location, in the city’s north-eastern district of Dongdaemun, sees around 70 to 80 visitors each day.
Most are in their 40s and 50s, but Hee-Kyung is far from being the only young person to access the store’s services.
A 2022 study revealed an estimated 130,000 young people in the city – those aged between 19 and 39 – are either socially isolated or shut in. That same study also found the share of single-person households in the capital had reached nearly 40% – that alarmed a government that has been trying to reverse plummeting birth and marriage rates.