Korea is not a country that lacks modern retail infrastructure. Supermarket chains operate at a density that makes fresh groceries available within walking distance of most urban households. Convenience stores [pyeonuijeoem] occupy nearly every street corner, open around the clock, stocked with prepared food and daily necessities. Online grocery platforms deliver fresh produce, meat, and seafood to apartment doors within hours of ordering, sometimes within the same morning. By any reasonable measure, the Korean consumer has never had more efficient ways to buy food.
And yet the traditional market — the sijang — has not disappeared. It has not been reduced to a heritage attraction or a weekend novelty for nostalgic older shoppers. Across Korean cities, traditional markets continue to operate daily, drawing genuine foot traffic from genuine shoppers who are there not because they lack alternatives but because the market offers something the alternatives do not.
Understanding why requires looking honestly at what a traditional market actually is and what it provides — not romantically, but practically.
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| A modernized Korean sijang — renovation programs over the past two decades have transformed many traditional markets into clean, well-lit indoor spaces without changing what they sell or how they operate |
A Different Kind of Retail
The Korean sijang operates on a commercial logic that is fundamentally different from the supermarket model, and the difference is not primarily about price or product range. It is about the structure of the transaction itself.
In a supermarket, the product is packaged, standardized, and priced before the customer arrives. The interaction between buyer and seller is minimal — a barcode scan, a payment, a receipt. The product has been selected, graded, and presented by a supply chain the customer has no visibility into. What you see is what the packaging tells you it is.
In a traditional market, the product is in front of you, unpackaged, and the person selling it is typically the person who sourced it, prepared it, or in some cases grew or caught it. The fish vendor at a sijang fish stall knows where the fish came from that morning. The vegetable seller can tell you which region the produce is from and how long it has been sitting. The banchan stall owner made the dishes on display herself, that day, using recipes she has been refining for years or decades.
This directness produces a quality of information about the product that packaged retail cannot replicate. It also produces a quality of accountability — if the fish is not fresh, the customer knows exactly who sold it and will be back tomorrow. The relationship between vendor and regular customer in a Korean traditional market is a long-term one, and that longevity creates incentives for quality that the anonymous supermarket supply chain does not.
What the Supermarket Cannot Sell
There are specific product categories where the traditional market consistently outperforms modern retail, and Korean shoppers know exactly which ones they are.
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| Fish stalls at modernized Korean markets maintain the directness of traditional wet market retail — the product is fresh and visible — while meeting contemporary standards of hygiene and presentation |
Fresh fish and seafood is the clearest example. Korean wet market fish stalls operate at a level of freshness and variety that supermarket seafood sections — with their refrigerated display cases and pre-portioned packaging — cannot match. A sijang fish stall will have whole fish, live shellfish, and fresh seafood that was at the port hours earlier. The selection changes daily based on what came in. A customer who wants a specific cut, a specific size, or a specific preparation can ask for it and watch it done on the spot. This is a different category of product from the supermarket equivalent, and Korean cooks who care about the quality of their seafood know it.
Banchan — the fermented and prepared side dishes that accompany Korean meals — is another area where market stalls hold a genuine advantage. Supermarket banchan is industrially produced, consistent, and convenient. Market banchan stalls sell small-batch preparations made by the vendor, often using family recipes and regional variations that no industrial producer bothers to replicate. For a Korean household that eats banchan daily, the difference in quality and variety is meaningful enough to justify the extra effort of a market trip.
Dried goods, grains, spices, and specialty ingredients round out the categories where traditional markets reliably offer depth that supermarkets do not. A sijang grain stall will carry ten varieties of rice, multiple types of dried beans and legumes, and specialty grains that a mainstream supermarket stocks in single options if at all. The vendor knows the product well enough to advise on it. This kind of specialist knowledge is simply not available at a supermarket checkout.
The Market as a Social Space
The sijang is not only a place to buy things. It is a social environment, and that social function is part of what keeps it relevant in ways that purely transactional retail analysis would miss.
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| Street food stalls inside modernized Korean markets maintain the informality of traditional market eating while operating in noticeably cleaner and better-equipped conditions than a decade ago |
The traditional market is one of the few remaining public spaces in Korean urban life where extended, unscripted social interaction between strangers and acquaintances happens as a matter of course. Regular customers and familiar vendors talk. Older shoppers who live alone and might spend most of their day without meaningful social contact find the market a place where conversation is natural and expected. The vendor who adds an extra handful of something to a regular customer's bag, the ajumma who stops to discuss the quality of this season's kimchi cabbage with the person behind her in line — these interactions are small, but they are real, and they are not available in a supermarket or a delivery app.
Korean street food culture is also inseparable from the traditional market. The tteokbokki stall, the sundae counter, the hotteok griddle at the market entrance — these are not just convenient lunch options. They are part of the texture of market life, the reason people linger rather than transact and leave. Eating standing at a market food stall is a specific experience, different in character from restaurant dining or convenience store eating, and the pleasure of it is part of why people come to the market even when they could order the same food delivered to their door.
Government Support and the Policy Decision to Preserve
The survival of Korean traditional markets is not entirely a market outcome. The Korean government made a deliberate policy decision to support traditional markets rather than allow them to be displaced by large-format retail, and that decision has had real structural effects.
The Sijang Hyundaehwa — Traditional Market Modernization — program, running since the early 2000s, has directed substantial public funding into infrastructure improvements at traditional markets across the country: covered arcades to protect shoppers from rain, upgraded electrical systems, improved sanitation facilities, parking structures, and in some cases significant architectural renovation. The goal has been to reduce the practical disadvantages of the traditional market relative to the supermarket — specifically the exposure to weather and the parking difficulty — without eliminating the character that makes it distinct.
Separate regulations limit the expansion of large supermarket chains and restrict their operating hours in ways specifically designed to protect traditional market viability. Major supermarkets in Korea are required to close on designated Sundays twice a month — a restriction that does not apply to traditional markets. This policy has been controversial among large retailers but has provided traditional markets with a structural advantage on those days that translates into measurable foot traffic increases.
The policy rationale is economic as well as cultural. Traditional markets support a large number of small, independent vendors — many of them older Koreans for whom the market stall is their primary livelihood. Allowing large-format retail to fully displace the sijang would not just change where Koreans shop. It would eliminate an economic category that supports a specific demographic in a specific way. The government has judged, repeatedly, that the social cost of that displacement outweighs the efficiency gains of unconditional retail competition.
Why Younger Koreans Are Coming Back
For a period, the traditional market looked like it might follow the trajectory seen in many other developed economies — gradually hollowing out as younger shoppers moved to supermarkets and online retail, leaving an aging customer base that would eventually be insufficient to sustain it. That trajectory has not fully materialized, and in some markets, the direction has reversed.
Younger Korean consumers have developed a genuine interest in traditional markets that is distinct from nostalgia — they did not grow up shopping there in the way their parents did. The interest is partly driven by the food quality arguments outlined above, particularly for seafood and specialty ingredients. It is partly driven by the food experience — the market as a destination for eating, not just buying, with the street food culture as a draw in its own right.
Social media has played an unexpected role. Korean traditional markets — with their visual density, their steam and color and activity — photograph well, and market food content performs strongly on platforms where Korean food culture has a large and engaged audience. Markets that became popular on social media have seen genuine increases in foot traffic from younger visitors who arrived initially for the content and stayed for the food. The Gwangjang Market in Seoul, the Jagalchi fish market in Busan, the Tongin Market with its unique dosirak lunch experience — these are now destinations in their own right, visited by domestic tourists as well as locals.
The traditional market has survived not by remaining unchanged but by being genuinely useful in ways that modern retail infrastructure has not made obsolete. It offers freshness, directness, variety, social texture, and a specific kind of food experience that the supermarket and the delivery app, for all their efficiency, do not replicate. As long as those things matter to Korean shoppers — and the evidence suggests they continue to — the sijang will remain a working part of Korean daily life rather than a preserved memory of one.
FRANVIA explains everyday life in Korea — not as a destination, but as a place people actually live.
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