Last week, Mexico-based Oxxo announced its plans to enter the U.S. convenience store market by purchasing DK Gas Stations. The DK brand is most prominent in Texas, mainly in West and Northern Texas. DK is an interesting story, as it is a relatively new company. However, it will come to a quick end when Oxxo converts its stores. Owned by refiner Delek, these DK stores were, until recently, 7-Eleven’s franchisor throughout rural parts of Texas. Delek acquired the stores with 7-Eleven branding in 2017 from refiner Alon, previously known as Fina. When Delek acquired Alon/Fina’s operations, they did not change much until a 2019 announcement that 7-Eleven had terminated their agreement with Delek and the stores would have to rebrand. While no clear reasoning has been provided from either side, a delay in rebranding, which pushed the final conversions back to 2023, signals it may have been related to the tangled web of Stripe’s acquisition. When 7-Eleven picked up Stripes, they opted to allow many Stripes locations in a similar area to these stores to be operated by a franchisee. This may have been their intent with 7-Eleven’s purchase of those outstanding Stripes stores earlier this year. Many Stripes and DK (former 7-Eleven stores) operate nearby, with at least a handful directly across the street. Regardless of intent, it’s evident that DK has struggled to find a foothold in the competitive rural Texas C-store market, and this sale to Oxxo may come out better than DK could have hoped for. DK operates about 250 stores throughout Texas and neighboring states; of those, about 75 are currently branded DK, with other stores only operating as fuel sites and leasing the stores to independent operators. Despite the vast area covered, no Alon or DK stores operate in Houston. Oxxo has yet to announce any expansion plans, as it’s likely they’ll need to right the ship as the stations they’re buying before attempting to expand. Oxxo operates thousands of stores across Latin America. It is owned by FEMSA, a corporation that also owns Coca-Cola bottlers throughout Latin America and previously owned multiple breweries. The creation of Oxxo was initially intended to help with the sales of these products.
The Alon/Delek story does have to do with Waco and involves Circle K as well. 7-Eleven sold their Waco stores to Circle K in 1988 when the company wasn’t doing so well (they had sold the Houston stores to NCS a year prior): https://www.newspapers.com/image/978108862/?match=1&clipping_id=154907367
Then in 1999, Circle K sold those stores to Skinny’s (out of Abilene) which was associated with Fina, so all those stores became Fina. I remember the stores in the early 2000s, they were junk. In 2007, Alon USA bought Skinny’s and converted all of them to 7-Eleven except for the two dozen in Waco because 7-Eleven was interested in bringing the brand back to Waco. In 2012, the agreement with Fina expired and the Waco stores became Alon (both convenience store and gas brand), meanwhile 7-Eleven started expanding and Stripes opened its first convenience store/gas stations (self-branded initially, though that changed when Sunoco bought them). In 2018, around the time of the Stripes/7-Eleven merger, Delek purchased Alon USA, and decided to rebrand its 7-Eleven sites as DK, though there’s also at least one Alon as of 2024 that has 7-Eleven. Of course, during this time, some of the old stores disappeared entirely, like Llano.
There is still an Alon c-store/gas station in Waco (one remaining) that was a 7-Eleven originally. Most of these stores are junk, though…