Why Is 7-Eleven Called 7-Eleven?

In 1946, a Dallas ice company that had stumbled into the grocery business decided its stores needed a new name, and it hired an advertising agency to come up with one. The short answer to why they’re called 7-Eleven is one Mental Floss has given before: the stores were open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The longer answer starts with a man selling eggs off an ice dock.It Started With IceFreezer full of bagged ice for sale outside of a gas station | Melissa Kopka/GettyImagesBefore home refrigerators, Texans bought block ice, and the Southland Ice Company sold it from retail docks around Dallas. In 1927, a dock operator named John Jefferson Green, known as Uncle Johnny, went to Joe C. “Jodie” Thompson, one of the company’s founding directors, with a pitch: he wanted to sell milk, eggs, and bread alongside the ice. “You furnish the items,” he suggested, “and I’ll pay the power bills.” Thompson agreed, and the company now bills that dock as the world’s first convenience store.The stores got their first name a year later. A Southland manager came home from a trip to Alaska with a souvenir totem pole and planted it outside his store, and it drew so much attention that employees suggested putting one at every dock and calling them Tote’m Stores, since customers toted their purchases away. Southland went for it. By 1939, the company had 60 of them in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and its executives were known as the “7-7-7 crowd” for working from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week.The Agency Behind the NameThe Washington Post/GettyImagesThe hours came before the name did. By 1945, the stores were open from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, seven days a week, and that year the parent company reorganized as the Southland Corporation. In 1946, Southland hired the Dallas agency Tracy-Locke to rename the Tote’m stores, and the agency chose 7-Eleven to advertise the long hours. The company remodeled the stores at the same time and doubled their floor space.It was a good shop to ask. A 2013 Texas House resolution honoring the agency’s centennial credits it with Elsie the Cow for Borden in 1936, with coining the word “slacks” for Haggar in 1940, and with introducing Doritos as a brand in 1966. Decades after naming 7-Eleven, the same shop ran the chain’s Simpsons Movie Kwik-E-Mart promotion in 2007.The Lowercase NNurPhoto/GettyImagesThe other thing people notice about the name is the logo, where every letter of “ELEVEN” is a capital except the last one. Even 7-Eleven’s explanation is secondhand: the company has said it is believed that the wife of its president in the 1960s found the all-caps version a little harsh and suggested a lowercase n to make the logo look more graceful.Read More: