Shibuya Burger King releases tongue-in-cheek poster to announce it will be closed on Halloween

Restrictions in Tokyo’s popular Halloween hotspot just got even tighter. 

With Halloween just around the corner, all eyes are on the area around Tokyo’s Shibuya scramble crossing, a spot that’s become an unofficial party venue for the holiday, and where bad behaviour has led the local government to clamp down on the event with drinking bans and appeals to the public to refrain from gathering in the area on the night of the event and the preceding weekend, when gatherings tend to occur.

It’s clear that the government wants to shut down the event, and local businesses in the area are being asked to help maintain order by not selling alcoholic beverages between 6 p.m. and 5 a.m. from the evening of 26 October through to the morning of 1 November.

It’s a request that the local Burger King is keen to help out with, starting last year when it released this poster, which announced that the chain was going one step further by totally closing its store at Shibuya’s Center Gai on 31 October.

The poster above was designed to look like the 2023 posters plastered around Shibuya by the local government, as seen in this photo below, which was taken last year.

This year, Burger King has announced it will be closing again for Halloween, and this time it has a new poster to advertise the closure.

As you can see, the chain has cleverly plastered out the “Drink” in “Drinking”, covering it with the word “Burger” so it reads “No Burger King on the Street” instead of “No Drinking on the Street“, which is the slogan promoted by Shibuya Ward this year.

【渋谷に、路上でお酒を飲む文化はありません。】
渋谷駅周辺では、条例で路上飲酒が禁止されています。安全・安心を守るため、皆様のご協力をお願いいたします。 pic.twitter.com/PW7a9qRET0

— 渋谷区 (@city_shibuya) October 21, 2024

It’s a clever piece of marketing from the chain that’s known for masking tongue-in-cheek jibes in its advertising, and the wittiness helps to offset any feelings of ill will by customers who might be put off by the closure.

▼ Like these blokes, perhaps.

With Burger King’s Center Gai store located in one of the narrow streets just off the crossing, it can get dangerously crowded, as seen in the below photo taken outside the branch on a previous Halloween.

Burger King is making use of the day off to give its Center Gai branch a thorough cleaning before reopening to the public on 1 November. As for its main competitor, the golden arches down the street, there’s no word whether it will follow suit but it’s likely to stay open as it did last year, giving Burger King a win on the moral high ground for the second year running.

Source: PR Times
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Insert images: PR Times (1, 2),
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