It’s because of football that we have 24-hour convenience stores

The company now known as 7-Eleven has a history of being ahead of the curve. Back in 1927, when its founders were running the Southland Ice Company in Texas, an executive recognized the potential of selling basic provisions like milk and bread alongside the ice blocks that were so essential to households in the days before refrigerators were common. With a little company restructuring, the first convenience store chain was up and running. (The name was changed to 7-Eleven, a reference to the hours of operation, in 1946.)

In 1963, 7-Eleven opened its 1,000th store, but a more significant milestone in the convenience store realm was also about to happen. Around this time, according to Oh Thank Heaven!: The Story of the Southland Corporation, one store located near the University of Texas campus in Austin found itself unusually busy in the hours after a school football game, to the point where employees never had the chance to shut the doors for the night. When this situation unfolded again following the next football game, the company's brain trust sniffed a potentially transformative moment for the business, and established 24-hour shops near Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Meanwhile, another 24-hour experiment was unfurling at a 7-Eleven near the Strip in Las Vegas, a move that yielded an increase in profits and the surprise side effect of deterring burglaries. Eventually, both 7-Eleven and their competitors realized that it wasn't just the amped-up college students and gamblers who sometimes needed a 24-hour pit stop, paving the way for the proliferation of these ever-open outposts to provide soda, chips, and a range of other goodies to help folks everywhere make their way through the night.

A Swedish entrepreneur and the trend of unmanned stores

In 2016, IT specialist Robert Ilijason rolled the dice on a new business model by opening a nonstaffed, 24-hour convenience store in the small town of Viken, Sweden. Registered customers used their smartphones to enter the store and scan items, for which they received a bill at the end of the month, while a half-dozen security cameras served to dissuade shoplifters from snatching freebies. At the time, Ilijason was hopeful his idea would spread to other villages, but the appeal turned out to be far broader than he thought. After selling his business in 2017 to a Swedish startup, which promptly opened an unmanned store in Shanghai, China, Ilijason founded his own startup to send a wave of these phone-operated shops snowballing through his home country. But the biggest sign that his idea was here to stay? When the big dog of the industry, 7-Eleven, decided to make another corporate leap with the opening of its first unmanned branch in Seoul, South Korea, in 2017.