Get ready for summer Slurpees: 7-Eleven is coming back to the Triangle.
The Ramones sang that 7-Eleven can take you to “seventh heaven.”
For them, it was an improbable, convenience store love affair that elicited such joy. Brooklyn-based band Total Slacker captured the reason most patrons adore the famous corner store: “You go to the 7-Eleven ... to get yourself a Super Big Gulp.”
The iconic 44-ounce fountain drink and its revered relative, the 7-Eleven Slurpee, evoke summer days and better times. But it wasn’t long after The Ramones wrote their hit that 7-Eleven exited the North Carolina market.
Now the gas station and market combo is bringing its confectionery concoctions back to the Triangle.
In May, 7-Eleven’s parent, Tokyo-based Seven & i Holdings Company, purchased about 3,800 Speedway outlets from the Marathon Petroleum Company for $21 billion. 7-Eleven has not publicized its plans for Speedway, and did not respond to an inquiry from The News & Observer. But several local Speedway franchises seem poised for transition.
“They’re tearing it down and building new sometime in this coming summer,” Amanda Strickland, a worker at Speedway’s South Saunders Street location in Raleigh, said she has heard.
The neighboring Golden Seafood & Chicken restaurant, which shut down earlier in the pandemic, will also be razed and its land added to the new 7-Eleven site.
“I think we’re hoping to open maybe around August 2022,” Strickland said.
At least one local Speedway is already serving up Slurpees. The South Miami Boulevard location in Durham recently installed two Slurpee machines and will add more 7-Eleven products in coming months.
“Basically it’s all going to be better and should bring in more customers, more everything,” said Dontell Turner, a worker at the South Miami site who said managers had filled employees in on the plans. “It’ll be different food, different drinks, different products.”
There are no plans to replace the building, Turner said, but it will transition to a 7-Eleven by the end of 2022.
It’s unclear whether all 10 or so Speedway locations in the Triangle will adopt the 7-Eleven name. A worker at the Speedway on Raleigh’s Western Boulevard had not heard any plans to change the store’s signage.
Three new 7-Elevens are under construction in the Triangle, according to the company’s franchise website: at Airport Boulevard and Perimeter Park in Morrisville; at Louisburg Road and Calvary Drive in Raleigh; and “TBD Green Level” in Cary. All three are slated to open in mid to late summer.
This story was originally published December 30, 2021 at 1:02 PM.
