7-Eleven’s Expanded Store Concept Struggles to Convince Shoppers

The 7-Eleven store in Chiba prefecture, a suburb of Tokyo, isn’t like the the 21,000 other ones across Japan. It’s almost double the size of regular ones with more than twice the number of products and carries baby products, trendy makeup and foods such as frozen bread.

Opened a year ago, Seven & i Holdings Co. conceived it as a prototypeto test the synergies between the company’s retail supermarket chain and its more-successful convenience stores business — and find out if shoppers had any appetite for a hybrid of the two.

Initially, monthly floor sales and customer numbers jumped ...