I wonder how 7/11 in the US will change now that the Japanese version bought out the US version. Will we actually have hot and prepared food like Japan? I doubt it, seems the supply chain infrastructure just isn't there.
As others have mentioned, 7/11 in the US has been owned by 7/11 (Japan) for quite a long time, now.
There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.
It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.
But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.
There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).
Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.
5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.
Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."
As someone who remembered 7/11 commercials as a kid in Texas in in the 80s, I thought they had completely died out in the USA until I spent a summer at a university in Mexico and there was a local 7/11 which was surprisingly nice. But unless they up their game in the USA, I see all the typical gas stations we grew up with as fading due to changing standards. Buc-ee's started in a tiny Texan town where some relatives live and now stretches from Colorado to Virginia to Florida. In addition to the vast amenities, including delicious fresh barbecue and salads, they have clean bathrooms and treat employees well. There's no going back (I hope), and I'm surprised they're not in California yet, though I guess California has stuff like EddieWorld. I recognize that this leaves an opportunity for smaller gas stations to try to improve to offer good-enough service since Buc-ee's focuses on larger stores, but my hope is that the elevated standards will trickle down to forcing smaller ones to raise standards. Seems like 7/11 would be well-positioned to adopt that strategy to become that dominant smaller store, if they're paying attention.
I agree with you. I really think that big-chain gas stations need to race to the top, not the bottom. If what I usually hear is true -- that they can make some money on gas but the real profit center is inside the convenience store -- then making the stores and their offerings maximumally appealing should be a top priority.
Here in Ohio (the former(?) home of Speedway) things are looking up. We've got Casey's and Racetrac, each with generally-tidy stores and usually a decent selection of tasty, hot food. We've got Sheetz and Wawa expanding, with always-tidy stores and an outstanding selection of fast, made-to-order food. And as of April, we also have Buc-ee's: That place can be a destination in and of itself just for the brisket sandwiches and Beaver Nuggets, but the wall of hot sauce and the beef jerkey bar pull quite a lot of weight as well.
That leaves plenty of room at the bottom for the locally-owned bodega. These places are trash, there's usually no prepared food, and I do not wish to see the bathroom (ever), but they serve their neighborhoods' needs. It's easy to walk over there and buy whatever (I just got back from visiting the one down the road, in fact), and the bodega man is a genuinely-friendly dude who remembers his regular customers and is responsive to whatever they want him to stock. Despite the clear limitations, a good local bodega is a thing to be treasured.
But I don't see 7/11 making moves in that direction -- at least here in the States. They're moving so far down-market that they're approaching the bodega space, but they're doing this by shedding all of the redeeming qualities they may have once had. They're both blind and unresponsive to customer needs, and they don't care. That's all bad.
7/11 Japan really benefits from urban density, which in turn makes the distribution of fresher food and smaller footprint stores much more of a factor.
The distribution network even shows up in maps. There will be clusters of 7/11 in Japanese cities which is more efficient than spreading them equally.
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
Badly. Until a few years ago there was a franchise-wide rule that no food could be discounted even if it was close to expiry, so either the staff/owners bought them and ate it themselves, or it went in the dumpster.
Giving expired food to homeless people is not really a thing there either.
Convenience stores changed a lot around 2010 when they started real time tracking Every Damn Thing. Even in the mid 00s staff ate, took home, or gave away whatever they wanted to from the expired pile.
I was merely answering your question about how Japan deals with it (by trashing it, mostly). I guess the US could do that but unlike Japan, I'd expect people to break into the dumpsters and steal the food out of it. The trashing of food might offend people more in the US.
In terms of geography though, Japan has an extremely efficient and well developed cold chain and the country is pretty much a line from north to south. The US is clearly more spread out and significantly larger than Japan. That causes problems with both delivering the food to stores and (as other people have mentioned) efficiently moving waste to food banks.
People and customs related to food are not primarily geographic in nature. Japan is a strongly ordered society, not a roiling chaotic mess like the US. When people run into trouble they often hide their shame and starve themselves rather than beg for food. And it isn't like the network of food banks in the US was easy to set up or keep running.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
That's kind of what I was leaning towards. It's a problem that needs solved, but it's not necessarily hard to solve, nor does it need solved in advance.
It's the kind of problem can often very nearly resolve itself.
Here in the States, I've seen what can happen at the end of the night at a busy Little Ceasers in a not-great part of town. They've got a lot of unsold pizzas, already boxed, that they simply need to get rid of so they can close up and go home.
So they walk out the back door with armloads of pizzas and... casually give them away to the people who are waiting out there. It's a very calm and surprisingly tidy process that goes by quickly. This happens at the same time every night.
The only apparent cost is whatever it takes to maintain the base amount of humility required to let this happen instead of dutifully marching the pizzas over to the dumpster and tossing them in.
This routine is almost certainly an invention of evolution, instead of planning.
The stores in Hawaii are certainly nicer and more full-featured than the ones on the US mainland, but the stores in Japan and Taiwan are still light-years ahead.
Did you try one? Egg sandwiches really aren't my thing but I've always wondered if the US version comes close to the quality of the Japanese version even if some of the details (like presence of bread crust) differ.