The location sits right in front of a 280-unit apartment complex, with a demographic of young professionals. "These young apartment dwellers are the ones that really buy the wine," Meiners, one of the partners in the family-owned company, told CSP Daily News.
The 3,800[image-nocss] -square-foot store now has about 20 feet of linear space dedicated to wine, plus space in the cold vault.
"I'd say one of the most important things about selling wine is you have to let people know you're in the wine business," he said.
In addition to the shelf space, Meiners also achieves that goal with annual wine tastings in the apartment complex lobby. The tastings are a team effort, with Meiners supplying the wine and door prizes, Dallas-based Glazer Distributors on hand to provide information about the wine, and the apartment complex management supplying food and sometimes even a band.
When the tenants walk into Meiners, the wines featured at the tasting are marked with eye-catching labels. Meiners also passes savings from distributor sales on to the customers, sometimes featuring six to seven sale-priced wines each week.
Those efforts have paid off to the tune of an average $2,500 in wine sales per month, more than triple NACS' 2008 average for c-stores, and putting wine in a healthy sixth place among the store's best categories behind cigarettes, beer, packaged beverages, cold fountain, tobacco and liquor, and about even with salty snacks and hot fountain drinks.
There's a substantial selection of the wines available. Meiners estimated that the store could have 50 to 75 SKUs in stock at a given time. Wines vary in price from about $3-$12. The most popular brand is Barefoot, with Meiners selling about 50 bottles per month at $6.99which translates into a 35% to 40% profit margin for Meiners.
Also popular are 187-ml wine bottles, which retail for $1.99 each and also mean a 35% margin. Gallo and Sutter Home are also popular, retailing for less than $10, with similar profit margins.The six Meiners' convenience stores, located in the greater Kansas City area (two in Kansas and four in Missouri) are family owned and operated by six of Jerry and Kaye Meiners' children, plus a son-in-law. The Lee's Summit store is one of the largest sellers of wine in the Kansas City, Mo., area, according to their sales representative from Glazers Wine and Liquors. (The sales rep is another son-in-law, Meiners pointed out.)
One of the Kansas locations has a similar demographic to Lee's Summit, but while Meiners would love to repeat the success of wine there, Kansas law prohibits the sale of wine or liquor at c-stores (and beer has to be below 3.2% alcohol). He is currently working on building wine sales at the company's latest store in Harrisonville, Mo., which is about one year old, and he has high hopes."We've found that it's becoming more 'politically correct' to be drinking wine," Meiners said. "And more and more in our area of the country, the young people are involved in drinking more wine and less of the beer and hard liquor."
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