The largest convenience store chain in the United States announced in late 2025 that it would close 645 American stores over the following year. That marked the fifth consecutive year that 7-Eleven had closed more locations in the country than it had opened. For a company that had dominated the industry for nearly a century, the announcement signaled something unfamiliar: a period of transition, uncertainty, and doubt. The story of 7-Eleven goes back almost exactly one hundred years.
In 1927, before home refrigerators were common, affordable, or even safe, families kept food cold with ice boxes that required regular replacement of large melting blocks of ice. The Southland Ice Company in Dallas, Texas, began selling basic items like milk and bread at one of its ice docks. That modest operation is believed to be the first convenience store in history. Over the following decades, as refrigeration and car travel became standard, the company shifted direction with the times.
In the 1940s, it adopted the name 7-Eleven to advertise that its stores were open from seven in the morning to eleven at night, hours far longer than most retailers offered at the time. The industry that 7-Eleven created has since exploded. Today there are more than 150,000 convenience stores in the United States, and over eight percent of them are 7-Eleven locations. The company is more than twice the size of its nearest competitor, Circle K, and four times as large as Casey’s General Stores.
According to the company’s own claims, more than half of the North American population lives within two miles of one of its stores. That dominance, however, masked signs of trouble. In 2016, 7-Eleven announced an aggressive expansion plan for the United States with the ultimate goal of reaching 20,000 locations, a figure that would have meant more than doubling its presence. In 2018, it made its biggest acquisition to that point, spending over three billion dollars to buy more than 1,000 Sunoco convenience stores across 17 states.
Only three years later, it made a far larger purchase, spending 21 billion dollars for Speedway, a deal that included around 3,800 locations across 36 states, concentrated mostly in the Midwest. Many of those stores were converted into 7-Elevens or integrated into the system to sell Slurpees and other 7-Eleven branded items. But even after those acquisitions, reaching 20,000 American locations came to seem unrealistic. Following the Speedway deal, most news about 7-Eleven turned negative: declining foot traffic, weaker profits, and closing locations.
Some of this could be attributed to broader economic conditions, including high inflation and slower consumer spending among lower-income individuals. But much of it had to do with complacency and a company falling behind its competitors, perhaps focusing too much on quantity over quality. 7-Eleven had long been the industry’s innovator. Throughout the 1960s, it continued to define what a convenience store could be.
In 1963, it experimented with the 24-hour format. In 1965, it began selling coffee to go, and in that same year it introduced the Slurpee, a product originally created a decade earlier by someone at a Dairy Queen but popularized only after 7-Eleven licensed the machine and made the drink widely available. Five years later, it introduced the Big Gulp fountain drink. Many of the staples of the modern convenience store were pioneered or popularized by 7-Eleven.
Over time, however, many argued that the company had not maintained that innovative attitude, particularly when it came to food service. The coffee market had become ultra-competitive. Gasoline was low-margin and hard to differentiate. Cigarette sales had declined.
The biggest trend in the industry over the past two decades had shifted toward fresh food, and smaller competitors were leading the way. The head of the global parent company acknowledged the problem plainly: in the United States, many smaller competitors were focusing more on food and doing it well. As the environment changed, 7-Eleven needed to step up. The company began trying to catch up.
It acquired Laredo Taco Company, which currently operates over 600 locations commonly found inside 7-Eleven stores and Stripes locations in the southern states. In 2020, it launched its own chicken restaurant called Raise the Roof Chicken and Biscuits. It emphasized private label brands and expanded their offerings. Most notably, it began opening larger stores that prioritized fresh food, starting in 2019 with what it called its evolution store concept, which became the central focus of its transformation plan.
The closing of 645 smaller locations was part of that transition. In the same period, the company planned to open over 200 new stores under the larger, food-focused format. But the transition was complicated. Unlike most prominent convenience store chains in the United States, 7-Eleven operates mostly through franchises, meaning the parent company does not own and run most of its stores.
The transformation would require effort and cooperation from franchisees who might not be skilled in, or interested in, the food service industry toward which the company was pushing them. The transition would also be expensive. The company’s ownership structure added another layer of complexity. In 1969, after establishing its store format and expanding through a newly created franchising system in the United States, 7-Eleven opened its first international location in Canada.
Mexico followed two years later, and Japan two years after that. In 1990, 7-Eleven filed for bankruptcy, at least partly the result of four billion dollars in debt incurred from a leveraged buyout three years earlier that had been a defensive move against a takeover attempt. Through that bankruptcy, majority ownership of 7-Eleven was acquired by the Japanese company that had been licensing the brand. By 2005, that company had essentially become the full owner.
For the past two decades, the largest convenience store chain in the United States has been completely owned by a Japanese firm. In Japan, 7-Eleven had long since surpassed the 20,000 store mark, in a country with considerably less land and fewer people. The same industry pressures affected 7-Eleven’s main rival. Circle K, the second largest convenience store chain in the US, also filed for bankruptcy in 1990.
That later led to its acquisition by a foreign company called Alimentation Couche-Tard, headquartered in Canada. By the early 21st century, the two largest convenience store chains in the United States were both owned by companies from other countries. The rivalry between those two owners intensified in 2010, when both companies attempted to acquire Casey’s General Stores to further consolidate the market. Both were unsuccessful.
Then, in 2024, a massive story broke: Circle K’s owner offered 47 billion dollars to acquire 7-Eleven’s owner. The deal would almost certainly have faced antitrust challenges and might have required the sale of thousands of stores. That acquisition never happened, but the attempt sparked major changes at 7-Eleven, including a new CEO at the overall company and multiple management changes at the US operation. Notably, CEO Joseph DePinto retired in early 2026 after holding the position for 20 years, with no permanent replacement yet named.
The company also lost its chief marketing officer and other executives in that department and elsewhere. In 2025, 7-Eleven announced plans for an initial public stock offering of its North American operations in 2026, but the date was recently pushed back to 2027. Under that plan, the North American stores would become publicly traded, while the Japanese owner would continue to hold a significant portion of the company. The primary motivation behind the IPO was likely to raise money for the transformation plans: building larger locations, converting smaller ones, and placing growing emphasis on fresh food.
Some observers pointed out that splitting the company in this way could also make it easier for 7-Eleven to be acquired by Circle K’s parent company. Looking at the facts, there was reason for concern: falling traffic, closing stores, a delayed IPO, management changes, the possibility of becoming an acquisition target, and a major need to refocus and expand thousands of locations. No one suggested that 7-Eleven would disappear anytime soon, but it was clearly a story to watch, a company with a century of dominance now facing an uncertain direction.
Whether it could build a reputation for fresh food in the United States as strong as the one it had built in Japan remained an open question, and the answer would depend on how it managed the difficult transition ahead.