Back in Year 1927, “Uncle Johnny” Jefferson Green, an employee of a local icehouse in Dallas, Texas, USA had come out with bright ideas to make his customer’s life easier with a new concept of convenience retailing. Southland Ice Company had started their business as an ice vendor by selling blocks of ice to refrigerate foods. After realising that most of people had to travel a distance to grocery stores and general merchandisers to get basic food provisions such as eggs, milk, and bread, “Uncle Johnny” Jefferson Green had come out with the new ideas to make this basic food provisions more accessible to customer by selling them on Sundays and evenings when grocery stores were closed.
This new business idea had tremendously boost their sales and produced more satisfied customer and, this is how the world’s first convenience store was born. In Year 1937, Southland Ice Company President and Founder Joe C. Thompson Jr. extended Uncle Johnny’s idea of convenience retailing and they were eventually moving to a store setting. This new “convenience stops” are called as Tote’m Stores as their customers can simply “toted away their purchases”. Few years later, in year 1946, they had changed the name from Tote’m Stores to 7-Eleven to reflect the new extended hours – 7am to 11pm, seven days a week. However, the corporate name was only changed from The Southland Corporation to 7-Eleven, Inc. back in Year 1999.
7-Eleven had started it’s 24/7 operating hours back in year 1963 as one of its stores which is near to a university in Austin decided to open all nights to accommodate demand from the students. This 24/7 ideas became hit and the Texas’s main stores had decided to expand this 24/7 operations hours to all locations. 7-Eleven started its franchising business in year 1964 with the purchase of several Speedee Mart franchises in California. After 5 years, 7-Eleven had expanded their operation internationally by opening their Canadian stores in year 1969. Since then, 7-Eleven had been continuously growing internationally by opening more international stores including Australia, Sweden, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Guam, the Philippines as well as, in Malaysia, back in 1980s.
As of today, 7-Eleven have almost 60,000 stores worldwide and still counting.
