BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- The 37-store Shop-A-Snak Food Marts chain in Alabama didn't experience too much damage from Hurricane Katrina. Most of its stores are east of the main path of destruction. But the nimble chain can withstand a little battering by hurricane-force winds; it proved that when Hurricane Ivan came ashore last year.
Regardless, Robert Fuentes, director of marketing for the Birmingham, Ala.-based chain calls Katrina a nightmare compared to Ivan. Katrina shutdown pipelines, which was terrible from a gasoline standpoint, Fuentes told CSP Daily [image-nocss] News. The other one was mainly just wind damage and small structural damage. This one affected our business in terms of gasoline sales and sales as a whole. [It affected] our gasoline supply. It was clearly a lot more damaging to us.
With gasoline supplies put on allocations, Shop-A-Snak, like most gasoline retailers, saw prices rise. It went up tremendously, Fuentes said. We went up on retail, especially on cost increases, pretty significantly in the beginning. Now, it's been reduced by roughly 20 to 25 cents, but it stayed up for a pretty long time.
Fuentes said the chain saw its share of panic buying by consumers. They were filling up two to three days in a row. We had people out there with gas cans. It was amazing, he said. Price didn't even matter. They just wanted to get fuel because they didn't know what was going to happen.
But for the most part, consumers were understanding about the increased gasoline prices. The week that [the storm hit], we had a tremendous amount of business on Wednesday and Thursday, he said. The run we had on mainly gasoline purchases was tremendous those days, but after that, it fell off because everybody had what they needed. The week following that, we were really down, volume-wise, because everybody had filled up their tanks.
[To read CSP Daily News' complete interview with Fuentes on how his chain weathered Hurricane Katrina or to offer your own story or comments, please click here.]
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