CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Six months after announcing plans to pull its gasoline brands out of all or part of seven states, ConocoPhillips officially pulled the plug in South Carolina this month.
Cloths draped over part of the gas-price signs at Li'l Cricket stores in the Charleston area signified the change. But it wasn't until patrons tried unsuccessfully to pay for fuel with their Phillips 66 gas cards, which had worked for 16 years, that the exact nature of the change became clear, according to a report in the Charleston Post and Courier.
Phillips 66 pulled out of the greater Charleston market effective Aug. 3, the last place in South Carolina, where the company was still selling gas through its network, Terry Lehman, chief operating officer of Spartanburg, S.C.-based Li'l Cricket Food Stores, told the newspaper.
"It was completely beyond our control," he said. "They cut it off."
Houston-based Conoco-Phillips announced in late January, as previously reported in CSP Daily News, that it would pull its branded gasoline and diesel sales out of Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina and parts of Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona and Nevada.
The change is part of a portfolio rationalization strategy designed to focus the company on areas where we can concentrate our resources, where we have more refining and transportation logistics and the advantages of that, spokesperson Kelvin Covington told CSP Daily News in January.
For Li'l Cricket, a chain of 51 c-stores and one of Phillips 66's largest customers, the change means it will have to rebrand 12 upstate South Carolina outlets under the Marathon name. Meanwhile, a handful of stores were branded under the Valero name and will stay with the San Antonio-based oil company. Other stores, including 14 in metro Charleston, eventually will sell gas under the Li'l Cricket name without a brand designation.
"Obviously, we're not real happy with the change," said Lehman, noting that the c-store chain absorbs the cost of remodeling signs and making other changes to remove the Phillips 66 name. The statewide conversion has taken a few months. "There's no way we could change (every store) the first day," he said.
The loss of a specific gas-card brand isn't so critical today, when nearly all service stations accept debit cards and major credit cards, such as Visa and Mastercard, Lehman said. "Our records show most people use a bank card," he added.
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