Bill Nolan, a partner with the Phoenix-based Business Accelerator Team, said unit growth in certain cold vault subcategories is very good news considering a declining c-store customer count versus pre-COVID conditions. Customers are down, he said, due to the pandemic’s stay-at-home effect and inflation belt-tightening.
“For the last two years, if you’re holding flat on your customer count, you’re doing better than most,” said Nolan, who worked for 30 years at Irving, Texas-based 7-Eleven in management and for eight years as vice president of marketing at Family Express, Valparaiso, Indiana . “The fact that the cold box is still generating sales and unit increases in a few of the key subcategories amongst this customer count decline is a very good thing. It shows the cold box continues to be one of the industry’s core strengths.”
Keeping the cold vault organized with today’s proliferation of flavors has been a challenge of late for Jeff Taylor, director of stores, Last Minit Mart, New Castle, Pennsylvania, which has six locations. Taylor said with manufacturers trying to cater to everybody, displaying the array of flavors becomes tricky.
More flavors to display means fewer facings in the cold vault for each flavor, which requires restocking more often. And while he wants to offer customers variety, innovation and new flavors, when a flavor is less than 1% of sales, he might let it fade away.
Typically, he said, a retailer wants to turn inventory at least monthly. “If you have $100,000 in sales, you don’t want inventory of retail value more than $100,000 in your store,” he said. However, the wide flavor variety means Taylor must carry a higher value of inventory compared to sales, meaning he isn’t getting the turns he would like.