7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

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Alpha8472
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7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by Alpha8472 »

The company is testing a cashier-less convenience store. You use an app on your mobile phone to access the store, and then you select your items. The store will watch you and then charge you for your items. Your receipt appears on your phone's app. The store is currently only available to corporate employees right now.

How will they handle cigarettes and alcohol?
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Re: 7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by BillyGr »

Alpha8472 wrote: February 7th, 2020, 7:02 am The company is testing a cashier-less convenience store. You use an app on your mobile phone to access the store, and then you select your items. The store will watch you and then charge you for your items. Your receipt appears on your phone's app. The store is currently only available to corporate employees right now.

How will they handle cigarettes and alcohol?
Maybe a vending machine type setup, which would require you to scan an ID before you could buy it? That has been done with the lottery ticket vending machines in some states, so it doesn't seem too hard to apply to any other age restricted items. And we've seen plenty of vending machines that handle glass containers, so that shouldn't be an issue either if they sell alcohol in glass bottles.
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Re: 7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by storewanderer »

What 7-Eleven does is pretty meaningless given their lousy operation and 5th (I'm being generous) rate operation at least in the US.

Their largely franchised store base with locations often not in the best neighborhoods with a large percentage of sales from tobacco, alcohol, hot dogs, coffee, cash fuel prepays, or fountain soda is not really a good fit for cashierless technology.

Instead of investing in this crap maybe they should try to actually corporate operate some stores and get the level of the stores up to a Quik Trip, Maverik, or some other appealing c-store chain.
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Re: 7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by mbz321 »

storewanderer wrote: February 7th, 2020, 6:36 pm What 7-Eleven does is pretty meaningless given their lousy operation and 5th (I'm being generous) rate operation at least in the US.
100% agreed. I live in Wawa territory, although in my region, there are still somehow a lot of 7-11 stores (many however, have closed in the last few years). The only ones that seem to do well are ones not anywhere near a Wawa, which is harder and harder as Wawa has aggressively expanded to what seems like every piece of open land in the Philadelphia suburbs. The 7-11's are all old and dumpy and offer nothing of value (although they have been running a promo for a long while now for $1 any size coffee with their App). Only a small handful even offer gasoline, so they don't even have that going for them.
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Re: 7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by Brian Lutz »

7-Eleven seems to have the benefit of having little significant competition in some regions. I know here in the Pacific Northwest they seem to do pretty well, but none of their main competitors here (which would probably be Jackson's, ExtraMile and AMPM) really do much of anything that 7-Eleven doesn't, and are mostly just glorified gas stations. If Maverik ever started expanding much into this area I suspect 7-Eleven might have a problem, but they seem to hold their own against what competition they have here.
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Re: 7-Eleven Testing Cashierless Store

Post by pseudo3d »

storewanderer wrote: February 7th, 2020, 6:36 pm What 7-Eleven does is pretty meaningless given their lousy operation and 5th (I'm being generous) rate operation at least in the US.

Their largely franchised store base with locations often not in the best neighborhoods with a large percentage of sales from tobacco, alcohol, hot dogs, coffee, cash fuel prepays, or fountain soda is not really a good fit for cashierless technology.

Instead of investing in this crap maybe they should try to actually corporate operate some stores and get the level of the stores up to a Quik Trip, Maverik, or some other appealing c-store chain.
The Stripes stores seem to be okay, though the upkeep for Laredo Taco Company has been slipping (like serving scraped-up leftovers with half the menu missing at 6 pm when it didn't officially close for another hour), and the Stripes stores still seem to be corporate-owned. Most of the 7-Eleven stores I've visited are pretty okay, but then again, I've only visited stores in Texas (and a few in Florida).
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