Born in Dallas from a series of ice docks, Southland invented the concept of the convenience store whole cloth. If that sounds absurd, get used to it. Innovations in grocery skirt an intellectual line where, on one hand, they seem so blindingly obvious you can’t tell if it’s abusive to true ingenuity to use the term “innovation” at all, or, on the other, whether they only appear that way because they have sprung so completely from the consumer unconscious that their absence is unthinkable once they are here.
