storewanderer wrote:The fuel branding is meaningless. 7-Eleven kept the 76 brand on some of the former Circle Ks they bought on the west coast from Pacific Convenience and Fuels, too. Since in a typical 7-Eleven franchise agreement, the gas operation is still handled (priced and inventory carried by) by 7-Eleven Corporation, the gas brand does not have any impact on the attached 7-Eleven Store at all from an operational perspective.
Eliminating back office support at Sunoco could mean many things it is hard to read into it at this time. If we hear they are rebranding the Stripes to 7-Eleven then I think we know what it meant. But they have not announced that yet.
I assume that Stripes will be rebranded to 7-Eleven, as is usual for 7-Eleven. The exception appeared to be TETCO and Speedy Stop, where they used TETCO in the Houston market (with only three stores in the entire market), though internally it's all 7-Eleven from receipts to advertising. With Stripes, the 7-Eleven name has enough "traction" to work in those markets. The real toss-up is what stores and what stores go. TETCO lost a number of small town stores, so there's precedent for that. Stripes is a mixed bag, there were the West Texas/Oklahoma stores which were ancient and are being disposed of. So looking at some of Stripes' work beyond that, we have
- The flagship stores built in the last few years built with Laredo Taco Co., these are fairly large stores that are 6k-7k square feet, much larger than a standard 7-Eleven at 2.5k square feet
- Sac-N-Pac, a San Marcos convenience store chain that was bought in the mid-2010s but only rebranded around late 2015. The modern stores, even in more isolated areas (like Fentress, Tx.) were kept, older, smaller stores got the axe. The newer stores weren't as big as modern Stripes, lacking LTC but still over the size of a 7-Eleven.
- Town & Country Food Stores was San Angelo. I don't know enough about it other than it got rebranded, but some of the locations seemed old.
- They also own some Quick Stuff stores, which were bought from Jack in the Box. They kept the branding, and these are in Texas and Louisiana. The name may be contractual so these will be likely be re-sold if the contract doesn't allow for it.
- Rattlers is a mixed bag and was bought by Sunoco itself. Some of the stores were in small towns with "window dressing" to make them more modern, some are large new builds (larger than average, about 4k square feet), and were often paired with Burger King (which the former owner franchised, and still holds franchise rights to). A few of the canopies have been rebranded as Sunoco and internally have been remerchandised with Stripes stuff but no actual rebrands yet.
There are going to be a significant number of stores in odd locations, too old, or too big for 7-Eleven. I'm a little surprised that Sunoco is focusing on layoffs and not on dismantling the store base that 7-Eleven will likely reject.