Amid soaring living costs, America’s biggest convenience-store chains quietly overcharge consumers
“Circle K and 7-Eleven routinely overcharge customers, failing up to 82% of price inspections in some areas. Complaints cite shelf-to-register discrepancies and fuel price mismatches; regulators often lack resources to inspect.
Marco Cruz pulled off a four-lane road into the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store in McAllen, Texas, 12 miles north of the US-Mexico border. It was 1.20am on a mild November night in 2025, and Cruz was looking for a bedtime snack after a day of visiting family and friends. He grabbed a pack of beef and jalapeño cheese sticks from the shelf, where they were priced at $3.99. At the counter, though, they rang up at $4.19.
Cruz asked the cashier to charge him the lower shelf price. The employee refused, he said, and threatened to call the police when Cruz grew more insistent. “All I’m asking you is honor the price,” Cruz told the attendant before leaving the store and, later, filing a complaint with the Texas attorney general.
Problems like these – register prices that exceed shelf prices, or advertised sales that don’t materialize – were becoming a regular annoyance for the 29-year-old. In just six months, Cruz said, he had run into similar issues at convenience stores at least five times. Earlier that day, he tried to buy two bottles of water at the same Circle K after seeing an in-store promotion offering a free energy drink with any such purchase. At the register, he said, the manager told him the offer was no longer valid.
Cruz is not alone, a Guardian investigation has found.
The country’s two biggest convenience-store chains – 7-Eleven and Circle K – routinely charge customers more than the shelf prices for snacks, beverages, toiletries, tobacco and medications. Between 2023 and 2025, Circle K locations failed 35% of their government price-accuracy inspections in Florida, 62% in North Carolina and 82% in Columbus, Ohio. Over the same period, its larger rival, 7-Eleven, flunked 47% of inspections in both Colorado and Utah and 79% in Ontario county in upstate New York.
In some cases, inspections turn up multiple overcharges in a single sample. This February at a 7-Eleven in Cruz’s home town, Casa Grande, Arizona, a state inspection found that 12 out of the 25 items rang up higher at checkout than what was listed on the shelf – a 48% error rate.
These included a 10-cent bump on dill-flavored Pickle Bites and a 40-cent bump on a KitKat bar. A “mega pack” of Wrigley’s watermelon gum, priced at $3.99 on the shelf, came up as $4.99 at the cash register.
These kinds of overcharges – inside convenience stores and outside at their fuel pumps – put added stress on family budgets already burdened by years of high inflation. As tariffs, war in the Middle East and other economic turmoil have helped drive up prices for groceries, fuel and other products, consumers are not inclined to overlook even the smallest overcharge.
“We expect to pay what we see on the shelf,” Cruz said, “even if that already doesn’t seem like a good deal.”
Circle K and 7-Eleven declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both provided brief statements.
“Delivering value and maintaining trust amongst our customers is a top priority and we take pricing accuracy very seriously,” a spokesperson for 7-Eleven said.
A spokesperson for Circle K said that the company is “committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations”. The spokesperson said the chain’s mission “is to make our customers’ lives a little easier every day, so their satisfaction is a top priority. We take customer concerns seriously and are always working to improve their experience in our stores.”
David Friedman, a legal scholar at Oregon’s Willamette University who has written extensively about deceptive pricing in the American marketplace, says major merchants have no excuse for charging customers more than the prices they promise on shelves and gasoline signs, especially given how advanced their inventory management tools have become.
“It strains credibility for them to say, ‘Well, we’ve invested in all these sophisticated systems,’” but they’re “not really capable” of ensuring that all prices are correct, he said.
Complaints by Cruz and other convenience-store shoppers about overcharges come at a time of consumer anger about how big companies treat their customers. In a 2024 poll by Navigator Research, 72% of respondents agreed that big corporations are pocketing large sums by “overcharging American consumers”.
According to court claims, government reports and interviews with consumers, Americans get soaked by add-on costs built into a wide range of transactions, such as “junk fees” tacked on to apartment rents and big-league baseball tickets, and hidden charges on auto sales and home loans – as well as overcharges at brand-name chains across the bricks-and-mortar retail sector.
Customers frequently pay more at checkout than what shelf tags promise not only at convenience stores but also at chain supermarkets, big-box stores, drug stores and hardware stores. In December, the Guardian revealed that Dollar General, the nation’s largest dollar-store chain, continued to overcharge customers after paying millions of dollars in penalties to officials in multiple states. In Wisconsin, for example, the chain failed 31% of its price inspections in the 23 months after its $850,000 settlement with the state.
Convenience stores are the worst offenders among all retailers in the US, according to a little-noticed 2024 report by the National Council on Weights and Measures. They failed 34% of price-accuracy inspections by regulators in 26 states, followed by dollar stores (29%) and auto parts stores (27%), the report found.
Despite evidence of overcharging at convenience stores, most government authorities are not paying attention.
Many states give low priority to inspecting convenience stores – responding only to consumer complaints in some cases – and instead focus their inspections on grocery and big-box stores. Others, including Illinois, South Carolina and Wyoming, perform no retail price-accuracy inspections at all.
Texas is home to 16,500 convenience stores – more than any other state – but Lone Star state officials rarely inspect them. Though the Guardian accessed 51 price-disparity complaints against 7-Eleven and Circle K stores that consumers filed with Texas authorities between 2023 and 2025, the state’s agriculture department conducted just 32 inspections at the two chains during that period.
Texas officials did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment. But even regulators in states that do inspect convenience stores say their resources are limited.
“We have very few bodies to check a whole lot of stuff,” said Mike Brooks, program administrator for Arizona’s office of weights and measures. “So we do the best we can.”
Brooks oversees 14 inspectors who are responsible for monitoring every retail outlet across the state’s 114,000 sq miles. Between 2023 and 2025, Circle K failed 39% of its 739 Arizona inspections and 7-Eleven failed 41% of its 151 inspections there.
Miland Kofford, the weights and measures project manager for Utah’s department of agriculture and food, said that in many cases overcharges are caused by suppliers, rather than in-store employees – a harried vendor for, say, Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay might stock the products on shelves and affix them with vendor-generated sale tags but then fail to update them on later visits. Stores are sometimes too understaffed to catch these vendor errors.
In the end, Kofford said, “the store is still responsible, regardless of who put the price up”.
In its statement, 7-Eleven said: “There are on average more than 3,000 products per store, and prices are adjusted as needed based on a number of external factors including manufacturer and distributor cost changes. When a discrepancy is identified, we have processes in place to correct it promptly, and we continue to invest in technology and operational improvements to help ensure accurate pricing in stores.”
‘Distracted, hurried, desperate customers’
Convenience stores and their signature products – including 7-Eleven’s Slurpees and Circle K’s Polar Pops – are inescapable fixtures of the American landscape. As much as 57% of the population shops at these quick-in, quick-out retailers at least once a week, according to a 2025 study by the National Association of Convenience Stores.
7-Eleven, based in Irving, Texas, operates more than 12,000 stores across the country. With origins dating to 1927, when a group of Dallas icehouse companies merged and began selling food and beverages, the company changed its name in 1946 to reflect its extended hours – from 7am to 11pm, seven days a week. Now owned by Tokyo-based Seven & i Holdings Co, Ltd, 7-Eleven was the first convenience-store chain to sell gas and to offer coffee in to-go cups.
Circle K, the nation’s second-largest convenience-store chain, with roughly 7,300 outlets in 48 states, also has roots in Texas. In 1951, an El Paso-based entrepreneur named Fred Hervey bought three Kay’s Food Stores in that city and rechristened them “Circle K” stores before rolling them out across the south-west. Circle K is now owned by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard. Like 7-Eleven, it oversees a mix of company-operated locations and franchises.
The Guardian examined 153 consumer complaints alleging overcharges at Circle Ks and 7-Elevens across 17 states. Nearly half focused on overcharges on purchases of candy, food, drinks and other items within the stores. The rest cited overcharges on gasoline – reporting that stores displayed lower prices on their big outdoor signs than what was being charged at the pumps.
Many shoppers’ complaints accuse the two chains of deceptive business practices and “bait-and-switch” pricing tactics. They described in-store promotions for nonexistent sales and employees who shrugged off overcharges.
“These places count on distracted, hurried, desperate customers who are already in line to pay whatever prices are presented at the register,” wrote Joe Lunsford, a 7-Eleven shopper in Virginia, in a complaint to his state’s attorney general. “The operators and clerks make it seem like you are out of place to challenge a price off by pennies, and I agree I felt a little ridiculous, but these small ‘pricing errors’ add up in their favor at the end of the day and harm consumers.”
‘Paying the price’
Often, the two retailers’ customers are families and individuals struggling with their day-to-day finances. Though different chains appeal to different demographics, 7-Eleven and Circle K compete in the “low-income tier”, according to a 2026 report by the market research company Morning Consult. The Circle K brand, in particular, comes to mind quickly for shoppers earning less than $50,000 a year, but not for consumers earning $100,000 or more.
“Convenience stores are often used by a lot of shift workers, blue-collar workers, seniors and people that have limited transportation options,” a finance staffer for a Circle K vendor in Ohio told the Guardian, speaking on the condition that her name not be used. “The people who can least afford being overcharged are the ones paying the price.”
In California, home to an estimated 15% of all US 7-Eleven stores, regulators have found that price can be steep. Between 2023 and 2025, 7-Eleven stores in Los Angeles county flunked 335 out of 909 price-accuracy inspections – a failure rate of 37%.
One inspector there noted a 67% overcharge rate at a 7-Eleven in Huntington Park on a Wednesday in 2024, and the next day recorded a 50% overcharge rate at a location in North Hollywood, 19 miles away.
A Pomona store failed four times, including during a 2025 inspection in which five out of 13 items rang up higher than their shelf prices. An energy drink supposed to cost $1 with a rewards card came up as $3.49 at the register. A tropical fruit-flavored snack priced at $1 rang up at $2.89, and a $2.29 Hershey’s Mr Goodbar at $3.49.
In July, a Guardian reporter visited 10 7-Eleven stores in Los Angeles county that had previously failed price-accuracy inspections, including the North Hollywood and Pomona locations.
The reporter bought batches of 10 items at each of the 10 locations. Half of these shopping tests resulted in overcharges.
The Pomona store, for example, failed to honor a two-for-$5 discount on Quest protein chips. The North Hollywood location rang up overcharges on five items.
At the Pomona 7-Eleven, an employee said a phone number was needed, even though that was not specified anywhere on the sticker price. At a 7-Eleven in Highland Park, a manager blamed a night shift worker for not updating shelf prices.
Workers at all five stores that overcharged the reporter acknowledged that the sticker prices were out of date, and that employees could not always keep up with updating thousands of individual items’ prices.
“It’s not about overcharging or something like that,” an employee at the North Hollywood 7-Eleven said, asking that he not be named out of fear of getting in trouble with management. He said that workers are already expected to run registers, clean stores, manage deliveries and stock shelves, and that it sometimes takes the store two weeks to update stickers after the company issues new prices.
‘Everything was just consistently mislabeled’
Convenience stores sell roughly 80% of the gasoline purchased in the US, according to industry data. But government price-accuracy inspections of retail stores typically cover in-store items, not gasoline.
As fuel prices have surged – hitting an all-time Labor Day record of $4.15 a gallon this month for regular gas – car and truck owners don’t take inaccurate price listings lightly.
One evening in March, Rachel Hays stopped at a 7-Eleven near her Austin, Texas, home after noticing its large sign advertising diesel at $4.199 a gallon. “I was so happy because I was like, ‘$4.19, that’s a great price,’” said Hays, a 50-year-old veterinarian and single mom who hunts deer and wild boar on a ranch east of the city. She planned to fill her Ford truck’s 34-gallon tank but noticed the price on the pump read $4.499.
“The lone employee in the store made no attempt to change the price on the sign,” Hays wrote in a complaint to state authorities. “This has happened multiple times at this particular gas station.” Driving by the following day, Hays saw that the prices still had not been aligned. “I pay a lot of attention,” she said in a June interview. “I mean, it costs me 150 bucks to fill up my truck.”
In several complaints, consumers accused the stores of using false gas prices as a way to lure shoppers inside. Indeed, more than half of customers who stop for gas go inside to make purchases, according to the industry’s trade association.
The Circle K vendor in Ohio said that when she stops for gas at her local Circle K, she often lets her seven-year-old go inside to pick out a treat. But pricing disparities have become the norm. “They would have old sale tickets up that said two for $5 and then the promotion had ended,” she said. “I saw it on the candy. I saw it on energy drinks. Everything was just consistently mislabeled.”
In its statement, Circle K said “pricing discrepancies can sometimes occur between shelf labels and point-of-sale systems, resulting in either an undercharge or overcharge at the register”. When this occurs, the company said, it works “quickly to support our store teams to correct any unintentional pricing errors and ensure prices are accurately reflected across our products and offers”.
Repeat violations
Last year, a state inspector in North Carolina named Tripp Foltz responded to a complaint that the pump price at a Circle K in Hillsborough was significantly higher than the road-facing sign. The sign said $3.459 for cash or credit. The pump said $3.799.
After Foltz explained the situation to the manager, she fixed the problem. But when he returned twice more over the next couple of weeks, he noted two more overcharges – 14 cents and then 24 cents a gallon. His agency imposed a $500 penalty. Weeks later, another consumer complaint prompted a return visit.
Foltz recorded another 14-cent overcharge.
Because of limited staffing, North Carolina only inspects in-store pricing at convenience stores when it receives complaints. Of the 28 failed Circle K inspections between 2023 and 2025, 16 were follow-ups from previous failures. One store in Kernersville failed five times in a row.
Repeat pricing violations are also common at other types of retail stores, the Guardian’s reporting has shown. Even wide-ranging investigations and millions of dollars in fines often do not stop big companies from charging customers more than their posted prices.
In 2021, state and local prosecutors in California informed Carquest Auto Parts that their investigation had found that the chain’s stores across the state were routinely overcharging customers. Despite the warning, the problem got worse, authorities claimed in a lawsuit. At one point, the suit said, Carquest stores flunked 39 of 43 price inspections across 20 counties, overcharging on 23% of the items pulled by inspectors.
The chain paid $750,000 in 2024 to settle the case.
In another example, Walmart agreed to stop overcharging customers in a 2008 settlement with California officials, then paid $2.1m in 2012 to settle claims that it had violated that deal by continuing to ring up higher-than-posted prices at checkout. In August 2025, it agreed to pay state authorities another $5.6m to address claims it had once again overcharged customers at checkout as well as selling produce and other groceries with less weight than promised on the label.
Carquest and Walmart did not reply to questions from the Guardian about these settlements.
Friedman, the law professor, said that making real progress against rip-offs at checkout counters will require a national commitment.
“There are a lot of people who get speeding tickets and the next day they’re speeding again,” he said. “Unless you have the Federal Trade Commission or state attorneys general stepping in aggressively and repeatedly as a strategy and saying, ‘We are going to litigate against all of the retailers that do this, and we’re going to do it on a broad scale,’ the practices are going to continue.”
‘Screwing people over’
On a Monday evening in August 2024, Alexander Stout, a 43-year-old retired military reservist who lives with five dogs on a six-acre ranch in Somerset, Texas, pulled his Dodge truck into his local 7-Eleven. He had spotted a roadside sign touting regular fuel at $2.859 a gallon.
In an email to his state’s department of licensing and regulation, Stout explained that he discovered the price on the pump read $2.999. He offered to share a video of the 14-cent disparity with the agency. “This gas station has done this before,” Stout wrote.
Three months later, he got an email informing him the case had been closed for “insufficient evidence”. An agency attorney said he had tried to contact Stout and indicated that, having performed an on-site inspection and determined the marquee had not been “operational”, he “did not feel it was warranted to move forward to a penalty”.
“This closing letter is a joke,” wrote Stout, who says his phone did not register any calls, texts or emails from the state at the time. “Imagine my frustration to do something right and this is how investigations are handled.
“I’m pissed about this because you keep screwing people over. Fourteen cents doesn’t seem like a lot,” he added, but “for somebody who’s already hurting” that 14 cents could add up to “a meal their kids miss”.
During a June visit to the Somerset 7-Eleven where Stout spotted the overcharge, a Guardian reporter brought two 14-ounce bottles of 7-Select cold-pressed juice advertised on the shelf at “2 for $6” to the counter only to have them ring up at $7.78. Presented with the discrepancy, the cashier counted out a $1.78 refund, suggesting that the sale had probably ended but “we just haven’t removed the sign yet”.
In fact, the fine print on the sign indicated that the offer was valid for another three weeks.“
