What's In Store for 7-Eleven?: "The Japanese influence is palpable in 7-Eleven's information technology. The Dallas-based company is widely viewed as a technology leader, not only among convenience stores but all retailers. That's because 7-Eleven managers in the U.S. can track sales at their 5,300 stores item-by-item, hour-by-hour with one-of-a-kind software hand-coded by programmers in the mid-1990s.

7-Eleven's retail-information system, or RIS, as the company calls it, was built to fulfill Ito-Yokado's philosophy that successful retailers 'hypothesize, take action, then verify.'"