7-Eleven - History

History

The company has its origins in 1927 in Dallas, Texas, when an employee of Southland Ice Company, John Jefferson Green, started selling milk, eggs and bread from an improvised storefront in one of the company's ice houses. Although small grocery stores and general merchandisers were present in the immediate area, Joe C. 'Jodie' Thompson, Jr., the manager of the ice plant, discovered selling convenience items, such as bread and milk, was popular due to the ice's ability to preserve the items. This significantly cut back on the need to travel long distances to the grocery stores for basic items. Thompson eventually bought the Southland Ice Company and turned it into Southland Corporation, which oversaw several locations which opened in the Dallas area.

By 1928, a manager of one of these locations brought back a totem pole from Alaska and placed it in front of his store. Due to the attention received by the totem pole, additional totem poles were placed at each of the locations and all the stores began operating under the name "Tot'em Stores" (a word play on the totem poles as well as the idea that customers toted away their purchases). In that same year many of the locations also began selling gasoline. Although the Great Depression caused the company to go bankrupt in 1931, it still managed to continue operations.

In 1946, in an effort to continue the company's post war recovery, the name of the stores was changed to 7-Eleven to reflect their hours of operation—7 am to 11 pm, which at the time was unprecedented. By 1952, 7-Eleven opened its 100th store. It was incorporated as Southland Corporation in 1961. In 1962, 7-Eleven first experimented with a 24-hour schedule in Austin, Texas after an Austin store was forced to remain open all night due to customer demand following a University of Texas football game. By 1963, 24-hour stores were established in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas as well as Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the 1980s, the company encountered financial difficulty, selling off its ice division, and was rescued from bankruptcy by Ito-Yokado, its largest franchisee. In 1987, John Philp Thompson, the CEO of 7-Eleven, completed a $5.2 billion management buyout of the company his father had founded. The buyout suffered from the 1987 stock market crash and after failing initially to raise high yield debt financing, the company was required to offer a portion of the company's stock as an inducement to invest in the company's bonds.

The Japanese company gained a controlling share of 7-Eleven in 1991, during the Japanese asset bubble of the early 1990s. Ito-Yokado formed Seven & I Holdings Co. and 7-Eleven became its subsidiary in 2005. In 2007, Seven & I Holdings announced it would be expanding their American operations, with an additional 1,000 7-Eleven stores in the United States.