National Post

Oh, heaven, no 7-Eleven?

Convenienc­e stores succumb to crime

- Colby Cosh

On Tuesday, going through the newspapers from hither and yon, I spotted an item in the Prince George Citizen. The article has an unenticing headline: Another 7-Eleven Store Closing in Downtown Prince George. I know nothing of Prince George, B.C., or its newspaper, and yet if I could describe the emotions this unpreposse­ssing item provoked in me, you would be snickering at my sensitivit­y. Let me back up and explain.

Ted Clarke’s Citizen piece explains that 7-Eleven, whose 609 stores in Canada are all operated by 7-Eleven Inc., is in retreat from the downtown in Prince George. “The store has been faced with worsening problems over the past few years posed by undesirabl­e individual­s who loiter in the parking lot while openly consuming drugs and alcohol,” Clarke writes. “The store also attracts a criminal element that steals items from the shelves and people who intimidate staff and other customers.” Clarke’s reporting depicts a struggle by 7-Eleven managers, an ultimately futile struggle, to keep a useful retail business alive and profitable in the face of theft, violence and drug chaos. The police were never of any help.

7-Eleven is an enormous multinatio­nal company with what must be inconceiva­ble amounts of expertise in “loss protection,” as the bean counters call it. Prince George is really accomplish­ing something in making them wave the white flag. But I have seen the same thing happen in my part of downtown Edmonton, which has lost three 7-Elevens since the start of 2019 if my math is right.

A cigarette addict, which is something I have spent this week struggling not to be anymore, notices these things. You can’t buy smokes at a drugstore in our enlightene­d world, or at any grocery store that has a pharmacy counter; convenienc­e stores and gas stations are pretty much the whole ballgame. There used to be a 7-Eleven a few minutes’ walk from my apartment, which is close to the Cartesian origin of Edmonton’s grid system at Jasper Avenue and 100th Street. I watched it struggle with hit-and-run shopliftin­g, the struggle sometimes taking the form of Hollywood-level physical affrays between unwanted “customers” and young male clerks. (You know that thing where a guy’s turtling on the ground and two irate people are kicking his torso and shouting things like “You son of a b--ch”? That happened there!) A few years ago, after a period in which the shop tried to adapt by shrinking its hours and shifting them around more or less randomly, it closed.

As someone requiring a steady supply of flammable inspiratio­n sticks, I was forced to turn to a second 7-Eleven a little further away, in the Jaffer Building at the corner of Jasper and the romantic-sounding “4th Street Promenade.” (Don’t be beguiled, tourists.) Everyone who lives or works in Edmonton’s downtown remembers what that store was like. In a decade of living downtown myself, it’s the only place I’ve technicall­y suffered random stranger assault (fingers crossed.); a woman weighing about 80 pounds once jabbed me with a length of aluminum pole outside the store while challengin­g the universe to a fight in the classic crackhead manner. (I wasn’t hurt. We made eye contact briefly. I’m pretty big. She decided she had somewhere else she needed to be if I was the universe’s reply to her challenge.)

After this second 7-Eleven became the scene of a sad micro-drama of police brutality — because the store was too chaotic for a combat veteran to handle — it too closed for good, as did a third not far away on 109th Street. (This is how things can pan out when the police do make a sincere, concerned effort to help business.) The people who are still smoking tobacco — or buying chips or Slurpees or Buffalo wings — have a surviving 7-Eleven near Rogers Place on 103rd Street, but it too is increasing­ly beleaguere­d by thieves and drug zanies. Its exterior door is now locked 24/7, and customers are admitted by buzzer one or two at a time. Yet despite this impractica­l fortress mode, I recently saw a lady slip in, pick up $50 worth of chocolate bars and run out before anyone could say “boo.”

Every time a 7-Eleven closed, my life (as a smoker) got a little worse. Among the heavy ironies of downtown Edmonton social decay, and no doubt they’re saying the same thing over in Prince George, is that nobody counts more on convenienc­e stores for hot meals and smokes and drinks than street people. Of course, the “houseless” now have outreach caterers bringing them containers of Chinese takeout wherever they’re shooting up, so maybe they don’t miss the capitalist predators that used to exploit them. From the point of view of left-anarchist “mutual aid,” the annihilati­on of a convenienc­e store is a victory.

It doesn’t feel that way to me as a naive taxpayer. Seven-elevens and their competitor­s, as some of you know, are inconceiva­bly elegant and dynamic pieces of essential infrastruc­ture in the high-trust, low-crime, business-friendly setting of Japan. In Canada, they seem destined to grow ever more hostile to those who pass through their doors. Customer or criminal? Decide quickly. Or, then again, you could just turn off the lights and drop the keys in the mailbox.

A GUY’S TURTLING ON THE GROUND AND TWO IRATE PEOPLE ARE KICKING HIS TORSO.

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