Canada’s most familiar late-night glow is starting to go dark — and the speed of it is what’s rattling people. 7-Eleven, the chain built for permanence, just announced it will shutter 444 underperforming stores across North America. The parent company, Japan-based Seven & i Holdings, blamed a six-month slide in sales, inflation-hit traffic, and a sharp drop in cigarette purchases — the once-reliable high-margin engine of convenience retail. cspdailynews.com+2ABC7 New York+2
On paper, 444 closures is “only” about 3% of the chain’s regional footprint. In real life, it feels like a siren. Canada has more than 600 7-Eleven locations, and a noticeable slice of the shutdown wave is landing north of the border. CCentral Communities are walking up to doors that used to be open no matter what time or what season — and finding papered windows instead. The shock isn’t just that stores are closing. It’s that they’re closing fast, with little warning, and in places that relied on them like infrastructure.
Because for a lot of Canadians, 7-Eleven isn’t just a place to grab a coffee. It’s a safety lantern. It’s the bright corner where teens meet after school, where shift workers stop at 2 a.m., where travelers know they can find light, fuel, and a bathroom when everything else is shut. When those signs go dark, the street feels different. The neighborhood rhythm changes.
What’s making this cutback feel bigger than retail is who is taking the hit first. Western Canada is absorbing a brutal share of the closures. Nearly half of Canada’s 7-Eleven stores sit in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, with Alberta holding the largest concentration. Connect CRE Canada+1 In dense metro cores, losing a convenience store is annoying. In prairie towns and outer neighborhoods, it can rupture the daily supply chain. Some of these stores are the only accessible option for miles — especially after pharmacies, groceries, and smaller independents reduced hours or vanished under the same pressure.
And pressure is the right word. Even before the closure list surfaced, store owners and local business groups had been warning that Canada’s convenience model was cracking. Theft surged, especially in Winnipeg, where multiple 7-Elevens closed after repeated shoplifting losses overwhelmed staff and security budgets. Retail Insider+1 Insurance premiums jumped. Utility bills climbed. Staffing got harder. Meanwhile, tobacco and vaping rules tightened across provinces, draining traffic from products that used to keep the lights on. When your high-margin items evaporate but your overhead keeps inflating, you don’t just wobble — you fold.
That’s why this retreat feels so ominous. 7-Eleven is basically engineered to survive turbulence. Its model is thin margins, fast turnover, and being the last store standing during recessions. So when a chain like this says certain locations are no longer workable, it’s a signal that the ground underneath Canada’s street-level economy has shifted more than people want to admit.
There’s also a buried geopolitical plotline here that makes Canadians even angrier: control. The transcript points to the attempted takeover by Alimentation Couche-Tard (Circle K’s parent), which launched a massive bid to buy Seven & i and bring the 7-Eleven empire under Canadian ownership. That bid was resisted for months and ultimately collapsed in July 2025, with Couche-Tard walking away after saying Seven & i wouldn’t engage constructively. Reuters+2AP News+2
The “what if” haunts the closures. If Couche-Tard had succeeded, Canada might have had a direct lever over store strategy — which regions to protect, which to reinvest in, which to modernize through crime and cost shocks. Instead, the decisions stayed overseas. And now entire Canadian neighborhoods are living with the fallout of a boardroom thousands of miles away.
So yes, these closures are about slower sales, inflation, and fewer cigarette purchases. But they’re also about something deeper: a country watching one of its most dependable everyday systems buckle. If a 24-hour chain built to outlast downturns can’t keep doors open in parts of Canada, what else is quietly approaching the same tipping point?
Canada isn’t just losing convenience stores. It’s losing a layer of certainty.
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