When I was in high school a 7-11 planned to open nearby and people back then actually protested it as if it were a strip club or adult book store or something. “Teens will hang out there!!!” " It will bring traffic in all hours of the night!!". And then it opened and the world didn’t end and people had a place to go to get a snack at 2 am.
They were right about teens sometimes hanging out there but it was fine. SOURCE: I was a teen that sometimes hung out there. As far as I know it is still there 30 something years later.
Heheh, that’s kind of hilarious. For decades 7-Eleven was the one convenience store chain around here that didn’t sell porno mags or rolling papers - yet another reason I preferred Stop & Go stores.
I’m at 7-Eleven multiple times a week, at least during the late spring to fall (I tend to on the road then for work more often). The only time I get food is when I need calories and have no other options on the way to where I’m going. All the food looks like it’s been sitting for hours under the heat lamp or the roller, and the sandwiches I’ve had of theirs are always dried out. Their coffee deals are okay, especially since they have caffeine shots in the creamer section for free, so if it’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m about to work at 6, a cheap-ass 7-Eleven coffee with a couple of caffeine shots works better and is cheaper for me then their energy drinks.
But for actual food? Casey’s kicks ass. I don’t like their pizza as much as everyone else seems to, but their sandwiches do the trick for me and generally taste fresh. Hell, I’ve had better food at Speedway than 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven is just not a place I stop to eat if I have any other reasonable option.
Their Angus Burger is cheaper than a Quarter Pounder by $2 and just as good. Further, the 7-11 is a local shop. You may be waited on by the actual owner. Your local McDonalds is owned by some faceless far-away corporation.
In the U.S., very likely not. Something like 95% of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. are owned by a local franchisee; that franchisee may own several stores, but they are probably not a “far-away corporation.”
I play tennis with the owner of the McDonald’s I frequent. He owns quite a few franchises in the area. All three of the ones I go to. Near home, near work and near kid’s school. But he’s very much a local Chamber of Commerce kind of guy. Sponsors little league teams and local events (under XYZ Restaurants Group Inc, not McDonald’s).
Maybe there are parts of the US (or the world) where the franchisees control hundreds or thousands of locations, but not in my experience for McDonald’s.
Wendy’s definitely. There was once a franchise dispute over Wendy’s and the franchisee had over 1000 Pizza Hut locations and hundreds of Wendy’s, including all the Wendy’s in the Baltimore/Washington area. NPC International. Apparently they went bankrupt in 2020 and were swallowed up by an even larger operator, Flynn Restaurants, which controls thousands of restaurants of a variety of “banners”.
ETA: Ninja’ed in the relevant part, while I was rambling on and on.
I have a certain nostalgia for 7-Eleven. We didn’t have comic book stores in the early '70s but the 7-Eleven just a block away from home had two spinner racks of comics and half an aisle of paperbacks and magazines that would appeal to a 12 year old. Even the Slurpee cups often had Marvel characters on them. I had a huge collection after the summer they were available. I would have traded to 8 “Kull” cups I had for one “Super Stan”
I think that McDonald’s discourages (if not outright prohibits) their U.S. franchisees from operating non-McDonald’s restaurants.
Some years ago, I had Applebee’s as a client; their restaurants were nearly all franchisee-owned, but their franchisees were big-time operators. For one thing, to be an Applebee’s franchisee, you were responsible for owning and operating all of the Applebee’s restaurants in your market area/region (i.e., all of the Chicago-area Applebee’s were owned by the same franchisee).
A number of their franchisees actually operated the restaurants in multiple regions, and nearly all of them had made their money by operating other franchised restaurants (Burger King is one that stands out in my memory), and were operating restaurants for multiple chains simultaneously. I think that, at that time, Applebee’s wouldn’t allow them to operate other “casual dining” restaurants (TGI Fridays, Chili’s, etc.), but that was the only restriction.
And, in fact, they’ve been wholly owned by their former Japanese franchisee since 2005 (though, as noted earlier, a Canadian company is currently trying to buy them).
Not just international; it’s bigger in Japan than it is in the United States. And supposedly Japanese 7-Eleven stores have pretty good food. Their egg salad sandwich is supposedly excellent.
Same, until recently. We were visiting Copenhagen this past spring, and were very surprised to see 7-Elevens all over the place, including branded vending machines at the airport (beverages and sandwiches). That prompted us to look up the company, and we were flabbergasted at their reach. We’d always thought of them as a largely American phenomenon, but nope.
7/11’s food isn’t bad, but the main reason I partake in it is because it is because I know what it will reliably have compared to other convenience stores other than Wawa and Sheetz, both of which have an ordering process which I am not used to. Bucee’s has better food but is not in convenient locations.
But the real reason I go to 7/11 is because they also reliably don’t have video ads at their gas pumps in Central Florda. Every other chain place does around here. At some point I vaguely remember blasting audio ads for their food products over the intercom but I don’t remember the last time I heard one of them.
I hope that a revenue idea that they implement isn’t one of those unstoppable video players. It would lose them my loyalty.
I’ll point out that CA has 10% of the total US population. Along with TX & FL, the Big Three represent 27% of the total US population. My general impression is that within those states 7-11 pretty well controls the convenience store market. There are random Mom & Pops or small chains here and there, but pretty much 7-11 is the only game in the state. As a result them having ~20% of their stores in CA & ~50% in the Big Three isn’t as surprising as all that.
IMO/IME that near-monopoly is much less true in many other states.
Ref the OP’s POV, it’s easy to forget that small town living might represent the bulk of municipalities by name, but it’s a tiny slice of the largely urban population of our country. The people who live out in the country think everywhere is like that. They’re kinda sorta right as to everywhere. Where they go totally off the rails is when they think that means everyone lives that way. Nope; nearly nobody lives that way. It’s just miles and miles of sparsely- or un-occupied dirt & vegetation with nearly nobody on the land.
Possibly a duopoly with Circle K, though it looks like 7-Eleven outnumbers Circle K in locations, pretty handily, in CA and TX.
Here in the Chicago area, 7-Eleven dominates (having built on all of the old White Hen locations), but they’re close to non-existent in Illinois outside of Chicagoland.
Interestingly, the only time I go into a 7-11 is to buy a Lotto ticket if the numbers are high enough. There was one in the small minimall where we used to take the dogs we had over 8 years ago to be groomed. Other than that, even if they’re on every corner I’ve no desire to shop in one. The smell of their hot dogs makes me want to retch.
And now? If I have a sudden desire to buy a lottery ticket, I get one at the independent minimart a block and a half away owned by a Korean family. Less corporate. But I don’t think I’ve done this since pre-Covid.
Ha, I knew a kid that was part of a “gang” – LOL – that called themselves the 7-11 Boyz.
