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The story
A post by a rookie 7-Eleven franchise owner airing grievances to headquarters on X (formerly Twitter) went viral on 5ch. Despite running multiple stores with average daily sales of 600,000 yen and a 31% gross margin in September, the owner said profit didn’t even reach 300,000 yen. It has long been pointed out that under convenience store franchise contracts, headquarters secures stable earnings through structures like royalty fees and the owner’s burden for discarded/expired goods, while owners see little increase in their take-home share even as they boost sales. The thread saw a stream of doubts about the power imbalance between headquarters and owners, and about the franchise structure itself, which locks in who benefits before the contract is even signed.
What people said
To 7-Eleven Headquarters,
My multiple stores' average daily sales in September were 600,000 yen with a 31% gross margin, and profit didn't even reach 300,000 yen.
But starting a franchise is 100% on you
It's not "the sales rep tricked me!"
You're both businesses here
It's a battle of who cons who
Good gig if you've got land, money, and time to spare
The moment HQ gets an owner to open a store, HQ already wins
The sales rep gets credit for landing another contract too
Once a single store opens, a certain level of sales is locked in
And the royalty fee, or whatever % of profit, comes in automatically
HQ rakes it in automatically
Owners just do the grunt work
If it were really that profitable, HQ would run every store itself
What even is an "owner" anyway, lol
Just a sole proprietor
Nothing more than a subcontractor for a giant corporation
If you're clueless about everything, of course you get taken advantage of
A bit better than being a salaryman at a small/mid-size company
They're really threading that "keep you alive, but not too alive" line
I was taught it comes from "own" because you bear the responsibility
Whoever coined that term is something else
HQ rakes it in risk-free
Once an area becomes a convenience-store desert, I stop trusting them entirely and stop going
They'll ruthlessly shut down even a shop that's been a neighborhood fixture for 30-40 years
Just a few years ago it was all 7-Eleven's dominant strategy (saturating an area with stores)
Five would pop up within walking distance
Now three of them have closed
I shall erase every store around me
And in the end, erase myself too
There's no way 7-Eleven HQ, or any franchise headquarters
Would hand over the kind of profit
That lets an owner's family build a new house
Drive around in a foreign car
And travel nonstop
So just sleep in the store's back room and you won't need rent or utilities elsewhere
And that 300,000 yen in discarded/expired food loss is huge too
Eat the discarded bento and your food costs drop to zero
Not spending a cent on living expenses while banking your entire 6-million-yen-plus salary — that's huge
HQ collects money just for lending its name, and after that it's all about how much profit the owner side can generate
If they can't turn a profit, the store just goes under
But it's not an employment contract
So it ends up being the owner's fault for signing it
HQ has nothing to do with it
The question is who decided to start this on their own
Why hand a profitable deal over to some clueless kid who doesn't know any better?
That's the basics of exploitation
They get an owner to open a store, and once it's clear "this spot makes money!"
HQ swoops in and opens a company-owned store to crush the owner's shop
There are probably quite a few people who get a kick out of being called that
7-Eleven stubbornly refuses to discount, though
Customers are lined up but the staff just stand around dazed, the fried food case is almost always empty even when it's nowhere near midnight
Even in winter they're often out of meat buns too — way too little motivation
A store opened there and became a huge hit maybe over a decade ago, back when there were probably only five 7-Elevens in the whole city
Now it's dead quiet
The bento, onigiri, and bread are priced so high that regular people can't afford them anymore
Background and key points of this discussion
In convenience store franchises, the way royalty fees paid to headquarters and the cost of discarded/expired goods are structured can heavily determine a store’s profit — so much so that even with identical sales, the profit left over can end up barely changing, or barely existing, from store to store. Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has previously flagged issues such as headquarters restricting markdown sales of near-expiry items and the abuse of a dominant position at contract renewal time, and the power imbalance between HQ and owners has long been a social issue. Opinions in the thread split between those who say that once you’ve signed the contract, the outcome is on you, and those who question the franchise contract structure itself for favoring headquarters from the start. A daily sales figure of 600,000 yen might look like plenty of revenue on its own, but once HQ royalty fees, labor costs, and losses from discarded goods are subtracted, the profit that remains can be razor-thin — a detail the raw sales number alone doesn’t convey.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “7-Eleven Owner: “My multiple stores’ average daily sales in September were 600,000 yen with a 31% gross margin, and profit didn’t even reach 300,000 yen. There’s no way to recover the initial investment, right?”“
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