Chain Executives

Best of Times, Worst of Times

For most people, shopping with us is a routine, ho-hum part of their day that ranks up there on the excitement scale of life with clipping toenails.

What to Ask About In-Bay Washes

When it comes to taking the leap into refitting an existing automatic in-bay car wash with new equipment, it is important to consider some key factors before you sign on the dotted line.

In the early days of the dot-com era, a Roaring ’20s euphoria permeated the air. A new economy—one virtual, without bricks and stones or checks and balances—would rapidly transform the Macy’s, IBMs and Coca-Colas of the world into anachronisms.

Breaking into the mindset of the many groups making up modern consumers—from social-media-savvy millennials to yoga-centric females and construction-working Bubbas—can be a daunting task. Take millennials, for instance: By time a retailer can gather data on the latest Gen-Y food trend, most of that group has moved on to the next hot-ticket item. Yet with deep pockets and a willingness to embrace the c-store channel, millennials are hardly a group that can be ignored. What’s a retailer to do?

A decision tree can serve as a helpful map of the likely behavior of these consumers. It also can highlight opportunities for guiding the purchase to completion and making the shopping experience as convenient and smooth as possible.

Canadian Convenience Stores Association releases 2013 State of the Industry Report

Below is a true story and one that I believe is happening in our industry, all across the country, in all sizes of business. To paraphrase what was said on “Dragnet”: The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been left out to protect the innocent.

It seems c-store retailers are always looking for the “next big thing” or the “magic bullet” to help them take their operational performance to the next level. In today’s economic and competitive environment, that is understandable.

The revolution did not start in the c-store channel. It started out quietly, from your home, where you, the customer, browsed the Internet and found vendors from the Asian continent and Western countries selling something different, something revolutionary, something not found in your local c-store or drug store: electronic cigarettes.

For anyone in charge of a network of roller grills, coolers or heating bins, a modern convenience might be a smartphone app, something that would send an alert if coffee temperatures at a store were too hot or deliver efficiency reports on a chain’s refrigerators. Unfortunately, such apps are largely food for the imagination.

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