June 2009. It was supposed to crack 100 degrees that day — one of those suffocating New Jersey summers where the heat hits you before the sun even rises. By 5 AM, it was already 80 degrees and muggy, the kind of morning where the air feels like something you have to push through.
I'd just finished sophomore year at St. Joe's. I was sixteen. And like every summer before it, I had a job.
A co-worker — an older woman in her late twenties who lived nearby — would pick me up and drive the thirty or so minutes down to 828 North Olden Avenue. We'd pull into the parking lot, and there it was: the old, tired facade wearing its signature red, green, and orange stripes.
The Trenton 7-Eleven.
My dad and my uncle owned it. They didn't work in it — they just owned it. There was a full-time manager who was my actual boss. What my dad and uncle had was something I wouldn't fully understand until years later: they had the lease. They had the numbers. And every month, without standing behind a single register, they collected.
But that summer, I was behind the register.
Behind the Counter
The morning shift was the best one. Trenton's central location near the New Jersey state offices meant the clientele was a cross-section of humanity that no private school in suburban New Jersey could have prepared me for.
Government officials on their way into work. Truckers. Blue-collar workers starting early shifts. And some others — women walking over from the motel on the corner in heels and heavy makeup, tired from whatever their long night had held. Every type of person, every walk of life, filing through those doors before 9 AM.
I greeted all of them with a smile. That was my favorite part — standing behind the register, engaging with this fascinating, unpredictable mix of people I would never otherwise intersect with in my comfortable suburban life. It was part work experience, part life experience, and one hundred percent character building. You learn quickly that everyone — rich or poor, suited or scrubbed — has needs. Coffee. Cigarettes. Milk. Bread. A lottery ticket. A banana. A Gatorade. The store existed to fill those needs, and it did so around the clock, seven days a week, rain or shine, recession or boom.
After the morning rush came the pre-lunch lull. I'd refill the coffee carafes, mop the floors, stock shelves, take out the trash. Then back behind the register for the lunch shift.
The Number That Changed Everything
By the end of my shift each day, the registers had already rung somewhere north of $4,000. And that was before the afternoon. Before the evening. Before the overnight. This was a 24/7 operation — $10,000, sometimes $20,000 in total daily revenue, flowing through a single storefront on a corner in Trenton.
That number was bewildering to a sixteen-year-old who had been told his whole life: get good grades, go to a good college, graduate, and find a good job. A job that might pay $50,000 a year. Per year.
Before Wednesday, this store had already matched that.
"At a young age, I had learned: why work all day in a store when you can own the property — make the same money, without lifting a finger?"
Dinner and the P&L
At home in the evenings, I'd sit down with my dad over dinner and talk through my shift. But once a month, those dinners had a different character. He'd pull out the numbers — the full P&L. Sales. Cost of goods. Payroll. Operating expenses. And then 7-Eleven Corporation's cut, the franchise royalty that came off the top before anything else.
The take-home was less. A lot less. The franchise model is designed that way — the corporation extracts its share at every level, from the inventory to the system fees to the real estate itself. But even after all of it, what remained had made my father a very wealthy man by the time he was in his thirties.
The 7-Eleven wasn't the only business in his orbit. There were liquor stores. Laundromats. Dry cleaners. Independent convenience stores operating outside the expensive, restrictive franchise model. Each one its own LLC. Its own bank account. Its own P&L. I learned them all.
And one thing became undeniably clear across every single one of them: no matter how different the businesses were, no matter how good or bad the month — they all made rent. Every one of them. And in some cases, the rent was close to the EBITDA.
I was seventeen years old when I understood, in my bones, what that meant.
The Lesson That Stuck
Why work all day in a store when you can own the building and make the same money without lifting a finger?
These were essential businesses. Recession-proof — I'd gained a lot of that early retail experience right through the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, and not one of those stores closed. They are the backbone of local economies. A meeting place for neighborhoods. An institution for the community around them. And so long as you have a dedicated, diligent operator in place, the real estate underneath them will thrive indefinitely.
Businesses come and go. Concepts evolve, fail, reinvent themselves, turn over. But the bones remain. The foundation. The walls. The parking lot. The address. They go right on generating income for a new generation of operators, under a new sign, with a new concept, serving the same neighborhood they always have.
Where That Store Is Today
The Trenton 7-Eleven at 828 North Olden Avenue is still open. It's been operating for over 40 years now — nearly 30 of which my dad and uncle owned the franchise. They sold to a newer, younger, hungrier operator in 2019, ready to pass the torch.
The landlord — Southland Corporation, a subsidiary of 7-Eleven Inc. — still owns the property. Still collects the rent. Didn't lift a finger for the transition. Didn't care who was behind the counter. The tenant changed; the rent check didn't.
The Other Side of the Table
Since then, we've refocused and reinvested — building Brunswick Properties around neighborhood commercial centers. Strip malls, retail corridors, service-based tenants. The asset class is fundamentally the same business I grew up in, just viewed from the other side of the lease.
The things I learned in that Trenton parking lot at 5 AM still apply every single day: what makes a good operator, how to read a P&L, what drives foot traffic, how cash flow actually works, what the difference is between revenue and income, and why a dark storefront is a problem that doesn't fix itself.
I'm just sitting at the landlord's table now. And those things still matter — maybe more than ever.
Join our investor mailing list.
Deal flow, market updates, and future articles delivered directly to your inbox.
— Kish Patel, Founder, Brunswick Properties