7-Eleven

7-Eleven, retailer that operates more than 60,000 convenience stores, mostly in North America and Asia. The typical outlet is small in size and carries a limited stock of food, drinks, and other high-turnover products but stays open long hours. Although a subsidiary of the Tokyo-based Seven & i Holdings, 7-Eleven is headquartered in Dallas.

The stores called 7- Eleven trace their origin to 1927, when several icehouse companies—which primarily sold block ice for food preservation to households without electric refrigerators—merged to form the Southland Ice Company in Dallas. Either after the merger, or shortly before it, one of the icehouses also began selling food items. Southland Ice soon took up general retailing, installing attention-getting Native American totem poles in front of some of its stores and adopting the name Tote’m Stores, which served as a punning invitation to customers to “tote” their purchases away. Joe C. Thompson, Sr., became president of Southland Ice in 1931. During the Great Depression the company went through bankruptcy. It emerged with a new emphasis on food and drink, especially after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, when beer and liquor were first offered for sale.

In 1946 the stores were renamed 7-Eleven to call attention to their extended hours of operation—from 7:00 am to 11:00 pm, seven days a week. About the late 1950s, Southland began to expand beyond Texas, opening 7-Eleven stores on the East Coast. Joseph Thompson’s son, John P. Thompson, became president in 1961 and further expanded operations in the United States and elsewhere. Starting in 1963 some outlets stayed open 24 hours a day, and the following year the company began to franchise its stores.

Southland licensed a Japanese affiliate in 1973, and by 1974 there were 5,000 outlets worldwide. The company expanded beyond food, drink, and conveniences into other fields, purchasing such businesses as Chief Auto Parts (1978). Because many of its stores also served as automobile filling stations, Southland bought CITGO Petroleum in 1983 as a supplier. The company sold off 50 percent of its stake in CITGO in 1986.

During the heyday of corporate raiders in the 1980s, the Canadian financier Samuel Belzberg threatened a hostile takeover of Southland. In response, the Thompson family took the company private in a leveraged buyout in December 1987. Many subsidiaries, including Chief Auto Parts, were sold off in order to pay the heavy debt that resulted from the repurchase of shares. Even so, the company went bankrupt for the second time in 1990, the same year that it sold the remaining 50 percent of CITGO. It emerged the following year with 70 percent of its stock owned by the Ito-Yokado Co., a Japanese retailer, and Seven-Eleven Japan, the company’s Japanese licensee.

In 1999 Southland Corp. renamed itself 7-Eleven, Inc. Continuing to expand, the company opened its 25,000th convenience store in 2003. In November 2005 the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Seven & i Holdings, a diversified retailer formed only a few months earlier by Ito-Yokado.

The 7-Eleven company’s signature products are the Slurpee, an iced drink introduced in 1966, and the Big Gulp, a 32-ounce (946-ml) cup for fountain drinks, introduced in 1976. After the Big Gulp proved highly popular, the company added even larger-sized “gulps.”