How Has the Convenience-Store Concept Evolved in the United States?

1. How has the convenience-store concept evolved in the United States?

The idea of convenience-store develops gradually along three masterstrokes: meet requirements for convenient shopping time, convenient access to daily consumer products as well as convenient shopping. Consequently, the interpretation of evolutional history of convenience store will correspondingly divide into three parts: extended hours, expanded product portfolio and convenient parking.

Extended Hours

Even though 7-Eleven (named Tote’m before 1946) was founded as an ice block seller in 1927, the concept of convenience store existed when one of Tote’m stores started to sell basic foods on Sundays. This is because the conventional groceries, the source of daily-use items purchasing, only work during weekdays therefore creates opportunity for 7-Eleven to fit occasionally Sunday daily-items purchasing needs. Welcomed by customers, 7-Eleven extended their business hour to extended hours during weekdays, too. Gradually building their brand, 7-Eleven extended their business hour to 7am-11pm during weekdays and rebranded them as 7-Eleven. 1n 1962, one of 7-Eleven stores started to adopt 24/7 model, operate 7 days a week and 24 hours per day to cope with emergent new business hour need resulted by social changes. Afterwards, all 7-Eleven stores begun to operate 24/7 to meet requirements for unconventional shopping time caused by the increasing number of night-workers or people who stay up late.

Expanded Product Portfolio

From the very beginning, 7-Eleven only provided 3 kind of basic necessities: milk, bread and eggs to function as a primary Sunday grocery supplementary. Gradually realised requirements for other kinds of daily-items, such as cigarette, tobacco, beverage, fast food and frozen ice cream, 7-Eleven extended their offerings and inevitably changed their store layouts to convenient customers’ purchase.

Convenient Parking

Considered Americans’ transport and usual 7-Eleven locations (rural areas), every 7-Eleven store has abundant car parking positions to benefit customers.

Although the deconstruction of the evolution of convenience store is divided into three parts, the three masterstrokes are intertwined and developed simultaneously and collectively contribute to the final positioning of the convenience store in US market: the supplementary daily-item supplier that can be easily accessed at any time.

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2. Is the Concept universal across all markets, including Taiwan?

Based on analysis above, it is clear that the U.S. concept of convenience store consists of 3 notions: 24/7 shop hours, daily consumer products supply and easy parking. These ideas are presumable to be generally

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