Updated January 2023

Convenience store robberies in the US

A friend of mine used to work for Southland Corporation when it owned and operated 7/11 convenience stores. Their corporate culture compared admirably to that of IBM in its heyday; strict and procedure-heavy. During its zenith, Southland Corporation raked in obscene amounts of money in blue Slurpees and cigarettes in their 7/11 stores. My friend was a district manager running herd over about 27 stores in the DC- Maryland area and making about $90,000 a year plus perks. Not bad for a 27-year with a rattail in the early 80’s. So why did he quit?

One evening, he received a call at about midnight that one of his store’s employees had been shot and killed in a robbery. The employee, a Pakistani immigrant, had taken a part-time temporary job at the store to buy Christmas gifts for his family.

After that, my friend couldn’t sleep at night. Every time the phone rang after ten o’clock he re-lived the call from the police telling him that the man he’d once seen taking the bones out of an entire chicken from the inside without breaking the skin had been killed in one of his stores (The first question district managers are trained to ask is if anyone was hurt.)

Robberies became such a problem that Southland Corporation hired Ray D. Johnson, the first maximum-security prisoner to escape from Folsom Prison as an anti-crime consultant.

Mexico’s OXXO lives up to the title as a comparable convenience store

OXXO is Mexico’s parallel convenience store chain. In Mexico, they are likely to feature more in your life than 7/11’s ever did. They perform a number of services for the general public. Only 37% of Mexicans have bank accounts. Not that long ago, customers actually had to physically go to electric and utility companies to pay their bills in cash. Now they can do it at an OXXO, simply by showing their bill or a photo of the bill on their phone to the cashier.

At times in the past, I have paid all my monthly electric, gas and utility bills in this way. I have added data to my Mexican AT&T phone plan when I ran low during the month, adding it in increments of 100 pesos ($5 dollars) simply by giving the cashier my phone number. All of these services might lead you to go into OXXOs more frequently in Mexico than you ever would 7/11’s in the US if you live or rent here seasonally.

OXXOs, like 7/11’s, are heightened targets for robberies. I found myself recalling the stories about Southland Corporation when, one Saturday night, I realized that enchiladas would be pretty bereth without tortillas, which would require a walk over to the OXXO across the street at 10:00 o’clock at night. Instead of entering through the store’s door, I found that a window, like a cashier’s window at a bank, had been set up to make purchases from outside the store.

About 10 people waited patiently as the solitary employee asked the first person in line what he wanted through the window, ran around the good-sized store to locate it, rung it up, and made the cash transaction through the window. I stood in line for 25 minutes for ten centavos worth of tortillas.

I’d been to that store a hundred times and had never seen this set-up. This particular OXXO store is located north of the tourist zone, along a green and canopied stretch of boulevard affronting affluent beachfront high rises. It seemed an unlikely place for a holdup.

I was wrong. According to studies, ease of escape, which this wide boulevard provided, made the store an attractive target. That, coupled with the likelihood of more cash in the drawer because it was a huge vacation weekend for Mexican nationals, made the store more vulnerable to robbery than those in the central tourist areas jammed-packed with people and traffic. Being in a very attractive neighborhood doesn’t negate its potential as an smart target.

That same night also marked the first time in my four years in Mexico that the security guard in the parking lot of the resort where I live warned a friend and me not to carry too much cash with us as we walked out that night.

These instances brought to mind how much of a difference four-years in Mexico makes.

If I’d come across these situations in my first six months, that would have reaffirmed my predisposition to believe Mexico as a more dangerous country than the US.

I would have forgotten about the time I went to my stodgy brokerage firm on the 7th floor of downtown building in Richmond, Virginia to pick up up a check and it was delivered from behind a bulletproof glass window. I might have forgotten all the American cities and tourist zones where I had been warned not to walk around late at night.

After four years in Mexico, I’m more circumspect. Instead of surmising in my resort parking lot that “Mexico is dangerous!” I thought about crime wave in New Orleans the year I moved there when they hosted the Super Bowl.

A quick search on the internet (in both English and Spanish) demonstrated roughly the same instances of shootings in and around OXXO convenience stores as 7/11’s in both countries.

Yes, some important things, language, the level of police corruption, cuisine, bureaucratic processes are different in Mexico. After a few years here though, once you start making true comparisons, eliminating the cosmetic, you'll find many, many things are not different at all, it’s only the context in which they’re experienced that’s changed.

Related links

Leave it to a Mexican to really make the apt comparisons between the U.S. and Mexico, as the Mexican I once dated in Denver did. [blog]

Next up:

Preparing you for your first rock concert in Mexico.

About the author:

Kerry Baker is a partner with Ventanas Mexico and author of this blog as well as three book "If Only I Had a Place" a guide to the aspiring expat on how to rent in Mexico properly and luxuriously.  The book gives you both a how-to and a fluid system to establish your best expat life.

Her third recent book is “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico.” Most recently she wrote The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico for travelers, expats and snowbirds who want to maintain a healthy diet in Mexico (spoiler: You must cook.)