ANKENY, Iowa -- Casey's General Stores Inc. will take a purposeful break from remodeling its convenience stores to its newest design as it reviews the success of the new format and makes necessary improvements to recently purchased sites.
"We're looking at about 130 of those completed, and we made a decision to stop at that point to evaluate those because we have a diverse group of stores up and running, so we can make some decisions going forward," said CFO Bill Walljasper on an earnings conference call with analyst yesterday. "Also, we are now in the process of going back [image-nocss] to the acquisitions that we did in the third quarter and putting in a kitchen. We want to get those completed by the end of the calendar year."
The break, expected to last "for the next couple of quarters," will also give the chain an opportunity to see some year-over-year comparisons of the summer selling season, "specifically as regards the coolers," Walljasper said.
"Arguably, we opened these remodels in some of the worst seasonality of our business, so they did come out [with] a little slower [results] because of that," he said. "But we are starting to see them gain more traction. It's a little premature for us to give any kind of ROI at this point instead of getting through a full cycle of the summer."
Casey's launched the remodel project in August 2010, with the remodeled stores getting larger coffee and fountain offerings, made-to-order sub sandwich programs and expanded cooler capacity.
For its fiscal 2011, which ended April 30, the chain completed 120 major remodels, well ahead of original plans. For 2012, has planned for 10 major remodels, most of them largely complete already; however, Walljasper said Casey's executives may revisit that number later in the year.
"We expect to pick that program back up again," he said. "In addition to the 130 that we've already accomplished, we've identified about another 400 locations that we think this could be applicable to. We just want to make sure that we're as efficient as possible with that program going forward."
Ankeny, Iowa-based Casey's General Stores has approximately 1,620 stores in 11 Midwestern and Great Plains states including: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Arkansas.
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