7-Eleven to buy Stripes

pseudo3d
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

Slurpees in Stripes already!

http://www.cspdailynews.com/category-ne ... s-slurpees

A few thoughts:
- The Sunoco AMarts are excluded?
- The "best of both worlds" and them keeping the Stripes spokesperson implies Stripes will be kept as a brand name for probably longer than we think.
- No talk of 7-Eleven expanding the Stripes brand, even temporarily?
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

pseudo3d wrote: January 8th, 2018, 8:34 pm http://www.cspdailynews.com/mergers-acq ... 0-c-stores

The end is near. I'm surprised they aren't mentioning divestments in the overlapping markets, though only one market I can think of (Waco) really has actually has overlap. Circle K got away with keeping almost everything, so I suppose 7-Eleven will too (just as Stripes had when they bought Rattlers). My top 6 questions which will probably be answered one way or another by years end are...
1. Will 7-Eleven keep the Stripes name on stores?
2. Will 7-Eleven keep the larger Stripes stores at all?
3. A few years ago, Stripes acquired Sac-N-Pac out of San Marcos. A few years later, the stores were all either rebranded, closed, or sold off. The only exception is a Sac-N-Pac in Cedar Creek that still operates with their name and logo. I assume that is a franchised operation, will they keep that name or will they be forced to change?
4. A number of stores (mostly Rattlers) have co-branded food service operations (Wendy's, Burger King, KFC) connected to the store. Will 7-Eleven keep these stores or change them?
5. Several years ago, Susser acquired a number of "Quick Stuff" convenience stores from Jack in the Box that were co-branded with a Jack in the Box. What will 7-Eleven do with these?
6. Will 7-Eleven continue to expand in Susser's former market areas?
#5 seems to be answered--at some point relatively recently, Sunoco sold them off it appears. Also, when I was at a Stripes store a few days ago, beyond Slurpees, there was a sign talking about the 7-Eleven careers page, and how APlus, Tigermarket (of Nashville), and Stripes were now part of the 7-Eleven family.

Looking at Stripes' website, it looks like the last "grand opening" was a 7,000 square foot store in Corpus Christi in February 2017, that was supposed to be a "next generation" store. The sale was announced about six months later. This suggests that the big Stripes stores Sunoco was building in the two years or so prior was putting a drain on the company. Maybe not "losing money" but certainly a bad ROI.

I'll be on the road this weekend, and I'll see if the Sac-N-Pac stores are still going as usual, including the one actually still a Sac-N-Pac in Cedar Creek (to my knowledge).
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

The absorption process seems to be taking faster than I might have thought, was at a Stripes (actually still branded as a Rattlers) and noticed several "7 Select" branded items like their Rice Krispies Treats knockoff, the packaged fried pies, and a few others. The ICEE machine was still there (not even replaced by a Slush Monkey--the Rattlers buyout and absorption was never really completed), and all branding seemed to be related more to Stripes. I don't think it had even the "corrugated metal" décor Rattlers had because it was one of the stores that Rattlers' owner, Kolkhurst Petroleum, owned before they started to have a cohesive brand, or at least before they started putting that in their stores, so maybe mid-2000s since it has a beer cave area.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by jamcool »

Apparently 7-11 is losing its largest franchiser

https://www.cspdailynews.com/company-ne ... s-7-eleven

This means 7-11 will disappear in NM and W Texas. I wonder if Circle K and Burger King (BK)will have problems with the DK name?
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by storewanderer »

jamcool wrote: March 2nd, 2019, 10:16 am Apparently 7-11 is losing its largest franchiser

https://www.cspdailynews.com/company-ne ... s-7-eleven

This means 7-11 will disappear in NM and W Texas. I wonder if Circle K and Burger King (BK)will have problems with the DK name?
The DK logo looks pretty distinct...

Those 7-11s in NM and West Texas are largely junk. There are some larger more modern ones scattered around but they are the exception. Delek is talking about building nice large format stores and those 7-11s in NM and West Texas are just standard old 7-11s with few gas pumps and very old simple convenience stores (typical 7-11 build stores from the 70's). Put the DK name on those stores and it is immediately tarnished. They would be better off keeping 7-11 on the junk locations as that name and format seems to work on those types of locations, and put their DK name on the newer larger sites that are more up to modern standards.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

I'm not exactly sure of their history. The company mentioned they bought Alon USA, which was the one with the license, and that makes their placement of stores even more confusing. In Waco, there used to be Fina and "Skinny's". I don't know what the original brand was, but Skinny's had the same colors of Circle K in some cases, because they were Circle K stores, and many of those stores were 7-Eleven stores prior to around 1990. When they became Alon (due to losing the Fina licensing contract that dated back at least to 2000), Alon just made them generic food mart stores (the ones that didn't close, at least) but almost of them were just nasty-looking old stores from the outside.

For all intents and purposes, 7-Eleven in Texas (despite being located in the Dallas area) really only starts at the I-35 corridor. Meanwhile, in places like Llano, which is west of Austin but not quite "west Texas", had a 7-Eleven/Fina as of 2015, with a new-build Stripes across from it (pretty sure this was NOT one of the ones spun off). But it wasn't always 7-Eleven, according to GasSigns.org, it was still Skinny's in 2004, meaning sometime in the last 15 years it was turned BACK into a 7-Eleven (possibly with the Alon conversion in 2012), but this didn't apply to the Waco stores, possibly because by that time 7-Eleven was rebuilding stores in that market. (Also, recent news is Delek is selling off a few sites in the Waco stores, likely because those stores WERE old and nasty).

On Stripes, they seem to be becoming a 7-Eleven in all but name. Some bags of ice read "Stripes LLC" based out of Corpus Christi (presumably the new name of Susser Holdings) while some bags still had the Stripes logo but were listed as 7-Eleven based out of Irving.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by klkla »

"Organic Slurpees and a quick-service taqueria menu from its Laredo Taco Company highlight the offerings at 7-Eleven Inc.’s new testing-ground store in Dallas."

Article:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... -lab-store

Photo gallery:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... as/gallery

Looks interesting for a 7-11.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by storewanderer »

klkla wrote: March 28th, 2019, 4:28 pm "Organic Slurpees and a quick-service taqueria menu from its Laredo Taco Company highlight the offerings at 7-Eleven Inc.’s new testing-ground store in Dallas."

Article:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... -lab-store

Photo gallery:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... as/gallery

Looks interesting for a 7-11.
The reality is 7-Eleven with its US model that is mostly small old sites and heavily skewed toward a franchise model (one where the franchisees work very many hours every day in their stores, or just have one employee on duty if they're not there) will never be able to make a format like this work on a wide scale unless they completely overhaul their US store base and the franchise model they currently favor.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

storewanderer wrote: March 28th, 2019, 5:46 pm
klkla wrote: March 28th, 2019, 4:28 pm "Organic Slurpees and a quick-service taqueria menu from its Laredo Taco Company highlight the offerings at 7-Eleven Inc.’s new testing-ground store in Dallas."

Article:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... -lab-store

Photo gallery:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail- ... as/gallery

Looks interesting for a 7-11.
The reality is 7-Eleven with its US model that is mostly small old sites and heavily skewed toward a franchise model (one where the franchisees work very many hours every day in their stores, or just have one employee on duty if they're not there) will never be able to make a format like this work on a wide scale unless they completely overhaul their US store base and the franchise model they currently favor.
They say it's a "lab" prototype, so it's unlikely we'll see anything out of it except with 7-Eleven stores that already have taquerias (Speedy Stop acquisitions) getting LTC branding. The problem is not just the franchise model, 7-Eleven had up until purchasing the Sunoco stores been very restrictive with its stores, with a square footage they wanted to aim for and disposing stores and formats that didn't reach that. If they bought any stores, they would dispose of anything "unusual" that would make it significantly different than a typical 7-Eleven. But now they have Stripes stores, which are at least 50% bigger than the typical 7-Eleven, and a lot of them have co-branded food locations which were rare under the old 7-Eleven way (the result, usually, of another store that Stripes bought), but even Stripes is largely dead--Susser (and later Sunoco) was building them everywhere up until around 2015, and then they just stopped. I'm hearing rumors that Buc-ee's is selling Stripes a few of their stores that are the smaller, older stores, but it's in no way what Stripes was doing before. Even if 7-Eleven reinstituted what Susser/Sunoco did but on a larger scale, it would only create a bigger discrepancy between the "flagship" stores and the regular stores.
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Re: 7-Eleven to buy Stripes

Post by pseudo3d »

storewanderer wrote: March 2nd, 2019, 10:30 am
jamcool wrote: March 2nd, 2019, 10:16 am Apparently 7-11 is losing its largest franchiser

https://www.cspdailynews.com/company-ne ... s-7-eleven

This means 7-11 will disappear in NM and W Texas. I wonder if Circle K and Burger King (BK)will have problems with the DK name?
The DK logo looks pretty distinct...

Those 7-11s in NM and West Texas are largely junk. There are some larger more modern ones scattered around but they are the exception. Delek is talking about building nice large format stores and those 7-11s in NM and West Texas are just standard old 7-11s with few gas pumps and very old simple convenience stores (typical 7-11 build stores from the 70's). Put the DK name on those stores and it is immediately tarnished. They would be better off keeping 7-11 on the junk locations as that name and format seems to work on those types of locations, and put their DK name on the newer larger sites that are more up to modern standards.

OK, I did a bit of research and I found that the 7-11s that Delek operates have been only branded 7-Eleven in THIS DECADE. Most of them did indeed start out as 7-Eleven stores or Circle K stores (7-Eleven sold some stores to Circle K in Central Texas, as in, Waco and areas around it, Llano may have been included in this as their Skinny's stores still had the Circle K stripes), and Alon branded those stores as "Skinny's", which were all trash. These were places like Llano, which is one of the stores Delek owns.

In 2012, Alon retired the Skinny's name along with Fina, and branded all of the Skinny's stores it owned as 7-Eleven, or at least the remaining Skinny's stores it owned. The only ones that weren't branded as 7-Eleven were two dozen in the Waco area, and those just became generic Alon food marts. I believe Alon was restricted from operating the 7-Eleven name in the Waco area, so they just became Alon, because 7-Eleven was opening new stores in the Waco area. Like I mentioned before, 7-Eleven had pulled out of a good part of Texas (basically east of I-35), so places like Waco, Corpus Christi, and Houston all got excluded. The Waco area got 4-5 built before construction petered out again. (Meanwhile, 7-Eleven had entered Houston and Southeast Texas again, like Victoria, with the purchase of TETCO, but they never did rebrand all the stores officially).

The problem is that Delek/Alon hasn't really been building any stores for years, and many of the Alon stations have shut down, so whatever their plan is probably won't work.

Meanwhile, Stripes is becoming 7-Eleven slowly but surely. The cups and the coffee are still Stripes, but the merchandise mix has moved onto a lot of 7-Eleven branded products, and the stores are moving into their numbering system. They probably already moved what was left of Susser into Irving, and despite their posturing about keeping Stripes, nothing really seems to indicate that in the long run. A big but subtle indicator to me is still hanging onto Rattlers, despite changing a lot of the stations Rattlers was in (usually Shell) to Sunoco, they haven't converted it to Stripes officially yet, probably because 7-Eleven isn't sure if it will get converted to 7-Eleven down the line.
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