4 Spicy Takes on C-Store Strategies

CSP’s Outlook Leadership Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, has been a stew of hot ideas, strategies and opinions. The industry leaders have covered so many topics, some more controversial than others.

But what got retailers attention was the spicy takes on questions that don’t often get asked in an event setting. What is overrated? What programs have caught the eye? And how would you improve your relationship with vendors?

Check out retailers’ point of view on these topics. ...

Food-ordering kiosks are overrated, said Billy Colemire, director of marketing at Stinker Stores, and Kristina Anderson, chief service officer at Midwest Petroleum.

“I think kiosks can work in the right environment, but I don’t think it’s the end all be all,” Colemire said.

Factors not done properly, like signage and instructions, make kiosks very confusing, said Anderson. Seniors and kids have trouble with kiosks, she said, and customers abandon them to find a sales associate.

“If you’re staffing and thinking that the kiosk is going to take on most of that POS [point of sale] for you, that may not necessarily work for customer interaction,” said Anderson.

Peter Rasmussen, founder and CEO of Convenience and Energy Advisors, disagrees. Kiosks can make an impact on reducing labor models, he said.

“I think if you follow the money on it, you’ll find a lot of success with it in a lot of different ways,” said Peter Rasmussen, founder and CEO of Convenience and Energy Advisors. “You have to put in the effort to teach your customers how to use it depending on the part of the world that you may be operating in.”

There are also opportunities for saving money on labor and increasing basket size, he said.

“As you roll it out, you statistically can absolutely have an impact on reducing your labor model because you don’t have to have someone who is physically taking the order,” said Rasmussen. “If you build it out correctly, there’s different opportunities to have upsell, and you’ll find that transaction size grows with it as well.”

The technology also allows for tying loyalty and personalization to it. 

Retailers were open about desires they have when it comes to vendor relationships.

A dedicated representative would result in smoother communication, Anderson pointed out. That way, retailers don’t have to go through the process of calling a help desk and working their way up to a specialist. That help-desk model is outdated, and even if it’s as simple as vendors taking detailed notes so that retailers don’t have to start over every time they communicate with a vendor, that is worth it, said Anderson of Midwest Petroleum.

The ability to tailor and customize programs is something that Colemire likes.

“They try to sell this cookie-cutter program, and they’re not always open to customization,” said Colemire. “Over the last almost three years now, we’ve reached out to a lot of vendor partners that we previously did business with for the rebrand, and they didn’t have the bandwidth or the desire to do so. And we left pretty quickly and found someone who could do that.”

While in the hot seat, retailers at Outlook revealed some of their favorite unique marketing campaigns that drew attention from consumers.

Stinkers Stores, for example, reveled in an in-store signage and billboard campaign that featured a customer review. The review, claiming that the customer “would poop here again!”, resonated with shoppers, Colemire said. First, it was displayed as a sign inside the store, and after attention from customers, Stinkers decided to take it outside on a billboard.

“There’s not a week that goes by that customers aren’t writing in, either on social media channels, Google reviews to let us know that they like this,” Colemire said.

And at Midwest Petroleum, stores in college towns took a popular Super Bowl commercial for Dietz Nuts and played it on repeat inside stores.

“If you remember, it was two guys sitting on a couch and they kept saying the name of the brand over and over again, and I don’t know why that’s funny, but everybody thought it was,” said Anderson.

While it didn’t work in all stores, the younger customers in college towns loved it, said Anderson. The store could hardly keep the product on the shelves and cheese sales also went up.

C-stores are not outdated, according to Anderson, because they are an integral part of people’s lives. Even as people become more and more removed from community, there’s still people who come into the store to say good morning and talk about their grandkids, she said.

“It’s more than just the chip bag or the candy bar when they come in our stores,” Anderson said. “Amazon can ship it to their house, let’s be honest, but people still come into our stores so that they can have a personal conversation with someone, and that still matters.”

The industry isn’t outdated as long as retailers evolve with it, said Rasmussen, especially because there’s the ability adapt to the future model alongside other channels.

“The reverse would be that if you’re a QSR [quick-service restaurant], it’s a lot harder to add gas,” he said.