Branded fast foods are major league players in today’s convenience channel. Indeed, the 45 chains recently surveyed by Convenience Store Decisions rang up some $380 million in branded foodservice sales last year. A pretty impressive figure, and one that is likely to make any c-store owner’s mouth water at the mere thought of adding a…
Technology: Plural Platforms Top Priority
Today’s c-store retailers want technology platforms that will allow them to manage fuel brands, foodservice operations, remain PCI compliant, easily access data and help improve customer service simultaneously. Sound like a tall order? It’s really not, said Jenny Bullard, chief information officer of the Jones Co., which owns 177 Flash Foods stores in Georgia and…
Security and operations: Security and operations: Security and operations: Operating Costs Rise Across the Board
The cost of operating a convenience store is up significantly thanks in part to a number of factors, the most glaring being interchange fees and credit card costs. But labor and utilities also experience significantly higher year-on-year gains. The industry’s operating expenses on a per-store, per-month basis rose across the board in 2007, according to…
Car Wash and Motor Fuels: Fueling Frustration
Fuel price volatility is here to stay. Marketers must learn how to manage it to their advantage. That was the cold, hard message conveyed in the 2008 NACS State of the Industry (SOI) report. Marketers are urged to pay attention to sales volumes, but also focus on gross margin dollars and to always look at…
The Competition: Discretionary Spending Looms Large
For the past decade, the list of retailers that have cut into the convenience store industry’s consumer base has included the usual suspects: Wal-Mart, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walgreens and a slew of other national brands in a smattering of channels. C-stores are predictably pitted against those same powerhouses in 2008, but the environment is far more…
The Customer: Wine Appetites and Beer Wallets
The 2008 consumer, complex and roiling in its many needstates, has become a multi-headed hydra whose rituals and habits are being altered by external forces. It is, however, a creature predictable on at least one front: It always appreciates the convenience and value of the neighborhood c-store. Pinched by rising costs of fuel, food and…
Faith-Fueled and Furious
At a jail in Valparaiso, Ind., there’s a rebel musician who’s probably wishing he’d sung just a little bit louder. At a church in San Francisco, there’s a holy man wishing he and his flock had prayed just a little bit harder. And in a backwater town just outside Kansas City, Mo., there’s a new…
Technology Driving Safety and Cash Management
Safeguarding c-stores and the people and property in and around them is getting easier and more economical thanks largely to incremental advances in a variety of technologies. Among them: safes that do more, software systems that communicate better and electronic eyes that see more. Theft and mayhem of all types, from gas pump drive-offs and…
Corralling the Customers
There’s little debating the sort of purchase Buffalo Bill Cody would make these days if he could ramble into one of the southwest Missouri corner stores that brandish his name. “He seemed like a beef jerky kind of guy to me,” Curtis Jared, president and CEO of Cody’s Convenience Stores, said of the cowpoke-turned-entertainer who’s…
By the Numbers
» 15 Cents Discount per gallon Kroger is offering customers as part if its enhanced fuel discount program by accumulating credits through purchases made at the company’s U.S. stores. » 33 Zip Trip stores that are rebranding from 76 to Cenex. The initial conversion covers the fuel offering. Once completed, the c-stores will also be…