Michael Girdley explains how 7-Eleven collapsed from America's largest convenience chain to closing over 1,000 stores. Cigarette sales dropped 50% between 2014 and 2023 while competitors like Wawa and Buc-ee's pivoted to prepared food. A $21 billion Speedway acquisition in 2021, timed just as interest rates began rising, buried the company in debt it couldn't survive.
As I record this, 7-Eleven is in the middle of going from being the world's largest convenience store chain to closing over 1,000 stores in the United States. 7-Eleven had invented the convenience store concept and exploded it after World War II. And by the 1980s, they basically owned the United States convenience store market. But then they started to lose it all. Business was about convenience. How close was the store to you? Was it open 24 hours a day? Did it have what you need when you walked in? And for decades, 7-Eleven won that war. Then as the 2000s came around, —things started to change radically. Well, badly for 7-Eleven. The first of those was that cigarette smoking started to decrease heavily. For decades, the highest margin product sold at convenience stores was cigarettes, and the sales of those would go down by over 50% between 2014 and 2023. While in America, the United States stores never found a replacement for tobacco as it started to die, the Japanese versions of 7-Eleven did something entirely different. In Japan, 7-Elevens are basically essential civic infrastructure. You can pay your taxes there, you can pay your cell phone bill, get dinner. 30% or more of their sales come from prepared food of quality that's better than most American restaurants. And as the 2010s came along, while other chains like Wawa, Buc-ee's, and Sheetz figured out that the future was food and becoming a bigger part of American life, 7-Eleven stayed basically the same. And in 2021, instead of making their stores better, 7-Eleven decided just to invest more money to buy competitors and spent $21 billion to buy the Speedway chain of convenience stores. They did it at precisely the worst time. Their interest rate has tripled from 2021 to 2024, and now the entire chain is saddled with enormous amounts of debt. And that's why today they've announced over 1,000 store closures and, uh, basically are becoming a nonentity in American convenience stores. Great businesses don't stand still while the world changes around them. They anticipate what's coming in the broader world and they move aggressively to meet it. In the case of 7-Eleven, they didn't do that and it's really hurting them. Long-form video about the rise and fall of 7-Eleven and why they turned down a $47 billion offer for a company of theirs without much of a future. You can check that in the comments below or on my bio.
