The businessman who turned 7-Eleven into the world's largest retail chain has died

Toshifumi Suzuki, the founder of 7-Eleven Japan franchise Toshifumi Suzuki, who turned the convenience store chain into the world's largest, died of heart failure, Seven & i Holdings said on Ma. 25. It all happened on Ma. 18. Suzuki was 93 years old.

Toshifumi Suzuki is widely recognized as the "father" of Japan's convenience store industry ("combi"; combini), writes Reuters.

Suzuki revolutionized the way people in Japan shop when he opened the country's first 24-hour - at the time American - 7-Eleven franchise in 1974 - at a time when the local retail market was dominated by small family-owned stores, Bloomberg notes.

"When I first decided to bring 7-Eleven to Japan, everyone said the idea was doomed to failure and opposed it - top managers, university professors, consultants, absolutely everyone. But I knew they were wrong," Suzuki told Bloomberg in 2013.

Suzuki learned about the existence of the American 7-Eleven chain during a trip to the United States while he was a top manager of the then small Japanese supermarket chain Ito-Yokado. After 7-Eleven's American parent company, Southland, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, Suzuki bought it out. Over time, Ito-Yokado became Seven & i Holdings. It is the one that now controls the 7-Eleven chain. Suzuki was its head until Ma 2016. By the time he left the company, Suzuki had expanded the convenience supermarket chain to more than 55,000 outlets in at least 16 countries - up from about 7,300 at the time of Southland's bankruptcy. Under Suzuki, 7-Eleven stores opened in Indonesia and Denmark, among other countries, and the chain expanded further in the United States.

The group now has more than 85,000 stores worldwide, with about a quarter of them in Japan.

Seven & i nearly became a takeover target in 2024 - Circle K's owner, Canadian company Alimentation Couche-Tard, made an unsolicited offer to buy the retailer for $46 billion. However, negotiations on the deal never moved forward, and the Canadian side pulled out last year.

In recent years, the chain has attracted customers by expanding its range of fresh produce, ready-to-eat box lunches (bento) and private label products. In addition to shopping, customers can pay bills, send parcels and withdraw cash at combi stores.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor