This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

This is our American stories.

And as you all know by now, some of our stories to tell, or stories about businesses.

Because these are the American Dream, often. The American Dream is starting your own place.

By the way, it also means coaching a football team, or starting a church, or being a nurse.

But we have a general fondness of people who start businesses because where the jobs come from. We previously told you the story of Jim Keys and how he rose out of poverty

to become the CEO of 7-Eleven and save the company from collapsing after filing for bankruptcy.

Today, Jim joins us again to tell another story of 7-Eleven.

Here's Jim with the story. Around the time the company that filed for

bankruptcy, I went to my mentor at the time, the person who had encouraged me to come to 7-11,

a guy named John Thompson. He was the son of the founder of 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven started in 1927 with an

ice house, an ice dock in Oak Cliff just south of Dallas.

And it was selling 50 pound blocks of ice to people to put in their, quote, their ice box.

Literally, there was no refrigeration at the time. You couldn't just plug in a refrigerator.

So it's hard to imagine that in 1927 we were still doing this.

And how did you get ice to Dallas, Texas?

So they were a very successful company, but it was quite a process to mine ice literally

from the north, get it to the south, store it in an environment with no refrigeration.

They had to store the ice literally underground and to sell it in small blocks that people

could put in their ice box to keep their

milk and their eggs cold. So I went to John Thompson and said, should I leave the company?

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