Richard Crawford remembers the day he opened his first Green Valley Grocery store on September 1, 1978 in Las Vegas. “It was Friday, and it was the start of a three day Labor Day weekend,” he says. “And at about 4 p.m. that day, all of my equipment froze.” With a store full of quickly-thawing refrigerated products and nowhere cold to store them, Crawford called another member of the Las Vegas retail community for help. “I finally wound up calling the local dairy because I knew they sold ice cream and would have freezers. They came out and picked up all of my frozen food and took it away,” says Crawford.
Because it was a holiday weekend, it took until the following Thursday for someone to come out and repair the refrigeration system, but when everything was back up and running, Crawford knew he had a debt to repay. “I called David Coons, who was the president of Anderson Dairy, and said, ‘David, how much do I owe you?’” Crawford recalls. “He said, ‘I want you to continue to do business with me for 50 years.’ It’s been 45 years now, we still do business with them. All of our dairy products come from Anderson Dairy.” While Crawford’s business has expanded quite a bit since 1978, his loyalty to those he does business with, his customers, and Las Vegas as a whole, has remained intact.
For his loyalty to the Las Vegas community and his dedication to providing Green Valley Grocery customers with exceptional service and product selection, Richard Crawford has been named a 2025 Market Watch Leader.
Viva Las Vegas
When Crawford moved to Las Vegas in 1971, it was not quite the dining and gambling destination that we know it to be today. “Back then, the whole valley had maybe 200,000 people in it,” the retailer notes. “Today, there are close to 3 million people.” At the time, Crawford was working for 7-Eleven, a job he says was never built to last. “I did not want to work for 7-Eleven. It wasn’t that they weren’t good; it was that once you were promoted, you would get transferred elsewhere,” he explains. “I really didn’t want to leave Las Vegas. I had kind of fallen in love with the valley. It was just a nice, small town.”
In order to avoid relocation, Crawford franchised his own 7-Eleven store in the area. His plan was to make enough money from owning that 7-Eleven location to open his own store within five years. In the end, it didn’t take quite that long to make his plan a reality. “I owned that 7-Eleven store for one week short of five years. I’d already opened my first store by that time, which was the first Green Valley Grocery.”
Today, Green Valley Grocery has grown from one 2,400-square-foot convenience store right off Green Valley Parkway to a collection of 84 stores scattered across southern Nevada, with two more locations in the works at press time, set to be finished by the end of 2025. The Green Valley Grocery store located off Grand Teton and Hualapai Way is the largest at 6,100 square feet, with six multi-product dispensers, or gas pumps. The original location is still operating today, nearly 47 years after it first opened. “We’ve come a long way since 1978,” says Crawford. Green Valley Grocery is a family-owned and operated business, with Crawford and his wife, Jeri, at the helm and some 750 employees working across all locations.
No Dark Times
According to Crawford, Green Valley Grocery is not your “typical” convenience store. “We go after business in all realms,” he notes. “I wanted to have the word grocery in my name to send a different message to people and to let people know that we’re not just a little store—even though our first store was just 2,400 square feet, now we’re building stores that are 5,000-6,000 square feet.” Green Valley Grocery stores sell a wide variety of goods, from packaged snacks to drinks to beverage alcohol, all of which are available to shoppers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Nevada’s liquor laws are incredibly flexible, Crawford notes, and acquiring a liquor license there is much easier than it is in some other states with stricter rules and regulations. Of the 84 Green Valley Grocery locations scattered throughout Las Vegas, all of them are able to sell beverage alcohol and eight of them sell full liquor 24 hours a day. “There’s no dark times when it comes to selling liquor,” Crawford says.
Spirits account for about 2% of sales at Green Valley Grocery, as just eight stores carry full liquor. Despite that, the chain stocks a whopping 1,031 active spirits SKUs in those eight stores. Some top-selling spirits products at Green Valley Grocery include Tito’s vodka ($23 a 750-ml.), Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee whiskey ($25), Blanton’s whiskey ($99), and Don Julio Blanco Tequila ($50). Green Valley Grocery stores also see a big business with small-format spirits SKUs, such as Fireball flavored whiskey and New Amsterdam vodka, both of which retail for $1 a 50-ml. An emerging product for the chain is Soon Hari soju ($5 a 375-ml.), a Korean distilled spirit offered in a variety of different flavors.
Evolving Offerings
Wine offerings at Green Valley Grocery have evolved quite a bit in recent years according to Crawford, who says that the chain has become somewhat of a destination for wine drinkers in the Las Vegas area. “Over the last five years, I have expanded our wine offerings because typically up until about six or seven years ago, everybody in town, ourselves included, only offered a select amount of wine, but not a whole lot,” he says. “I said ‘instead of selling these cheap old wines, let’s start offering some quality wine labels. Now, over the past five or so years, we have become a pretty good wine destination in the area.”
Green Valley Grocery offers 567 wine SKUs in its stores, accounting for 4% of total in-store sales. Best-sellers on the value end of the price spectrum include Yellow Tail Chardonnay ($5 a 750-ml.), Starborough Sauvignon Blanc ($12), Menage à Trois red blend ($10), and Josh Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon ($15). On the higher end of pricing, both Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon 50th Anniversary ($75 a 750-ml.) and the 2023 Orin Swift 8 Years in the Desert Red Blend ($49) see strong sales at the chain. In a smaller format, Sutter Home’s 187-ml. mini bottles are popular among shoppers who are looking for a more portable option. “We’re not afraid to try and sell a quality bottle of wine, because people will buy it. Pricing is a key to it,” says Crawford. “We’re certainly not giving it away, but we are offering very compelling pricing on quality wine. It continues to grow every year.”
More than other alcohol categories, beer and RTDs do a big business at Green Valley Grocery, making up a collective 21% of sales for the convenience chain. Tallboy cans like 16-ounce Miller High Life ($1), 19.2-ounce Voodoo Ranger ($2), and 700-ml. High Noon ($4) perform particularly well. On the beer side, multi-pack offerings such as Michelob Ultra ($17 an 18-pack of 12-ounce cans) and Heineken ($14 a 12-pack) are popular, while High Noon ($19 an 8-pack of 355-ml. cans) and Cutwater ($11 a 4-pack) take share on the RTD side. Customers also enjoy the 500-ml. Beatbox and 187-ml. Buzzballz, both at just $3 a piece.
Finally, the bulk of Green Valley Grocery’s sales are made up by miscellaneous food and drink items, such as energy drinks ($4 a 12-ounce can of Red Bull), sodas, and candy. According to Crawford, total sales revenue for the chain in 2024 was about $379 million, and he expects the 2025 fiscal year to exceed that. The stores also make revenue from in-store gambling machines, with about seven machines in each store operating all day, every day.
When asked what the key to running a successful business like Green Valley Grocery is, Crawford says, “Cleanliness, friendliness, and having complimentary pricing,” are some of the most important values behind the chain. “We offer better pricing than some of our friendly neighborhood competitors.” Despite Green Valley Grocery’s success, Crawford has no plans to expand outside of Nevada. “There’s plenty of opportunities here in Southern Nevada in particular,” he notes. “Las Vegas is growing, and there’s a lot of room for growth here.”