Image via Complex Original
Cities, New York City in particular, would like to believe that they are the vanguard of everything—innovators of technology, trailblazers of culture and art, the trendiest of trendsetters.
But progress is a two-way street. Sometimes the world of suburbia creeps in over bridges and through tunnels and wraps around metropolitan avenues like white, homogenized vines. And perhaps no institution embodies the suburbs more than 7-Eleven, the quintessential convenience store that even God uses when he needs to pick up some milk and a few scratch-offs on the way home.
7-Eleven has been hiding in the shadows of Manhattan for a very long time, but only recently have the men behind the Slurpee curtain started making a big push into the city center. Using all of the corporate superpowers at its disposal, 7-Eleven hopes to replace the corner bodega, a New York institution as time-honored as homeless people with dogs.
This gentrification nightmare is an insult to everything the Big Apple stands for. Shopping at 7-Eleven is as un-New York as rooting for the Red Sox, and city-dwellers should be getting their pitchforks and gearing up to throw these conformist jerky-pushers into the East River.
Except we’re not. We’re too busy buying Big Gulps and buffalo chicken taquitos. Apparently, a little suburbia is turning out to be good for New York. In fact, it’s turning out to be awesome. Here are seven reasons why.
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7. 7-Eleven is Cheap
The 7-Elevens we grew up with are long gone. Like a lot of American megachains, 7-Eleven has evolved with the times, now focusing on getting the consumer's money as quickly and easily as possible while providing a safe, clean vacuum where we can forget about foreign wars, national debt, and Lindsay Lohan.
This overarching policy has included using its considerable resources to make its products as dirt cheap as possible, leaving Mom & Pop bodegas incapable of competing. In the grand scheme of things, this is a cynical, morally questionable way for us as a society to conduct our daily business.
But in the smaller scheme of things, it means dollar slices of pizza and eighty-nine cent iced coffees. You won't be getting that at your local organic co-op.
6. 7-Eleven is Fast
7-Eleven may have been born in the 'burbs, but it definitely has a New York sense of timing. Sure, your coffee is just a coffee and not a double soy hazelnut mocha with extra foam, but it definitely makes it faster to pour. Rather than loitering in front of the counter long enough to watch an Adult Swim cartoon, you're in and out in under a minute, even during the morning rush.
7-Eleven keeps their fast food hot and within arms' reach of their cashiers. But by keeping more than half of their products self-serve, you'll never have to worry about getting stuck in line behind a waffling moron asking about the gluten content of their blueberry muffins. It's a self-maintaining system: Peer pressure and sheer New York pushiness will keep anyone from hogging the self-serve microwave longer than is absolutely necessary.
5. The Big Gulp Belongs in the Big Apple
New Yorkers never even realized how much they wanted ridiculous amounts of sugary beverages until their grumpy old mayor tried to take it away from them. Now that Bloomberg's sugar ban is in judicial limbo, we're free to drink as much soda as we want, and nobody has bigger cups for cheaper prices than 7-Eleven.
Even better than performing ad hoc blood transfusions with Dr. Pepper, 7-Eleven offers New Yorkers the Slurpee: a beverage that replaces all those non-sweet ingredients in soda like water and carbon dioxide with even more sugar. Short of opening a bag of Domino's granulated sugar and eating it with a spoon, there's no better way to rub it in Bloomberg's face that we're freedom-loving Americans who will slowly poison ourselves in any way we see fit.
And the limited edition Shrek-flavored cherry on top? According to the NYC Department of Health, 7-Eleven is still technically considered a convenience store and not a fast food establishment. Even if the mayor manages to get his way, Big Gulps are as untouchable as Tony Soprano.
4. 7-Eleven Has Room
7-Elevens aren't just multiplying—they're getting bigger. Several in the city now have seating, and at least until more New Yorkers get used to the idea of actually relaxing in a convenience store, those seats will remain empty.
There's now an alternative to the congested, cacophonous FEMA refugee camps that pass off as Starbucks these days. And not only can you get a seat at 7-Eleven, but you don't even have to share your table with a gamey yoga instructor and a slightly unhinged middle-aged woman loudly Skyping with her sister-in-law.
3. 7-Eleven Is Delicious
7-Eleven might not use the highest quality ingredients in their snack and fast foods, and the chicken wings may or may not actually be wings (or even chicken), but one thing is for sure: Their food tastes amazing.
From their mini-tacos to their breakfast biscuit sandwiches, their dollar-slice pizza to their mini-jelly donuts, 7-Eleven gets it right. The trick 7-Eleven uses that other chains like McDonald's refuse to employ is their embracing of their junk food status. They know they're not healthy. They know that, if the world was an ideal place, you'd have a personal chef using ingredients straight from your rooftop garden, and that if you're in 7-Eleven, it's because the world is not ideal and you've got to stuff something, anything, into your mouth before your break is over.
By acknowledging that their junk food is junk, they can let it reach its junkiest potential. That means it's going to taste great, because really, if junk food didn't taste so fantastic, we probably wouldn't put so much of it in our bodies when we know just how bad for us it truly is.
2. 7-Eleven Has Free Stuff
God knows New Yorkers love their free samples, whether it's tiny cups of Vita Coco on the sidewalk or Shakespeare in the Park. 7-Eleven caters to that perfectly with their frequent free samples (usually with purchase.)
Currently, stores across the city are giving free bottles of water away with their sandwiches. In another time and place, free water wouldn't seem like such an exciting concept, but we're probably only a decade or so away from overpaying for our own bottled air, so we'll take what we can get. Also, 7-Eleven has its own brand of bottled water; how adorable is that?
There's also one day a year where 7-Eleven gives out free Slurpees to anyone who asks. That day is July 11, or 7/11. (You see what they did there?) So this summer, make sure you take advantage of 7-Eleven's deep pockets, especially if you've never been to one before.
Just remember, you'll always be chasing that first sugar high.
1. 7-Eleven is Everywhere and Anywhere, 24/7, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega
As 7-Eleven makes its push into New York, more and more keep popping up. They're quickly becoming as ubiquitous as Duane Reade, and may soon even reach Starbucks-level omnipresence. And if there's one thing New Yorkers can get behind, it's something that's literally connected to their place of work or living. We need everything to be within eyesight so we can find it when our iPhone battery dies and leaves us without the dropping thumbtacks we navigate our lives with.
Also, 7-Eleven is open 24 hours—a day, not a week (you're not fooling anyone, C Train). Sure, so are a lot of smaller bodegas, but it's hard to keep track of which close early on weekends, which consider Halloween a business holiday, and which are just inexplicably closed on Tuesdays.
7-Eleven is a mainstay, and will continue to be into the foreseeable future, assuming New Yorkers don't reject it outright like we did Tim Tebow and Redbox. And really, for the City That Never Sleeps, we couldn't ask for a better fit.
So, open wide and gulp.