7-Eleven and Speedway are set up very differently from a corporate perspective. The gutting that took place on the 7-Eleven side I find very interesting as it was heavily field support roles for the franchised stores (Speedway doesn't have this function because they don't do any of those things with franchised stores).BillyGr wrote: ↑July 23rd, 2022, 8:42 am
Not sure why this is any issue - of course when you combine two similar companies, there will be people that are not needed, given that each company has similar positions, and you don't need two people doing the same job.
Could just be that they are (sensibly) choosing those who are the best for each type of job - that is, if the Speedway HQ or field personnel did better at those jobs than the existing 7-11 ones, keep the better ones, while keeping others from 7-11 that also did better (apparently the finance/legal/marketing departments).
I am curious if 7-Eleven is on the cusp of doing a major culling of its stores. They need to. But that wouldn't be consistent with their ego goal to have the largest number of convenience stores by store count. What good is it if the vast majority of your stores are complete garbage? You are just embarrassing yourself. These stores are unbelievably poorly run. In Reno a few weeks ago they did a free small slurpee, it was a week or so long promotion. Most stores don't want to participate so they just don't put out any small slurpee cups. I went to 3-4 different locations before I found one who had small cups (I asked the others- the franchisees/family of the franchisees who are incredibly rude and don't communicate well mumbled things to me or said no or waived up their hands, and no cups ever appeared, so I eventually left). The filth of these locations and mess of their drink stations was incredible.
The issue I am seeing is Speedway's performance has deteriorated significantly since 7-Eleven purchased Speedway. 7-Eleven moved Speedway to 7-Eleven's fuel pricing model (resulting in noncompetitive fuel pricing) and then the total screw up with Speedway's fountain/frozen program where they basically doubled prices on everything was also a fantastic way to eliminate hundreds of daily customers. I also don't think the 7-Eleven private label program brought anything to the table for Speedway at all.
And that deterioration of Speedway doesn't even get into whether or not the actual operation of the stations has deteriorated since 7-Eleven, who is in my opinion a terrible operator, the worst operator in the US as far as c-store chains go, as such operational quality declines would also hurt customer traffic. The Speedways in Northern California were never great and from an operational perspective since 7-Eleven took over, they don't seem any different than they have been in the few years they've been there.