The only thing faster than the race cars at the Texas Motor Speedway may be the team at Allsup’s. The convenience-store chain, owned by Yesway, opened its first location at the racetrack on April 1, Yesway Chief Marketing Office Derek Gaskins told CSP Daily News.
“I honestly signed the deal, and three weeks later we had the store branded, constructed and cooking and selling food,” Gaskins said.
Yesway already had a sponsorship deal with the Texas Motor Speedway—which is less than 10 minutes from Yesway’s Fort Worth, Texas, corporate office—and the Circuit of the Americas, so the Allsup’s store was a “perfect brand fit,” he said.
The 1,600-square-foot store is on the main concourse at the speedway, which hosts NASCAR events, IndyCar races, concerts and more throughout the year. The Allsup’s is a micro-version of the brand's typical new-builds that highlights the brand’s “World Famous Burrito,” private-label snacks, beverages and more. It sells beer and other general merchandise items that people might need at events, too, like sunscreen and pain relievers, Gaskins said.
- BW Gas & Convenience Holdings, which owns Yesway, is No. 18 on CSP’s 2023 Top 40 update to the 2022 Top 202 ranking of convenience store chains by store count. Watch for the full 2023 Top 202 in June.
Allsup’s will stay open whenever there’s an event at the speedway to “sell our food, sell our snacks and build the brand,” he said.
“That’s the most important thing. It’s exposing the brand, because people travel far and wide for NASCAR,” Gaskins said, adding the store sold thousands of burritos during the first two days it was open.
The store doesn’t have any traditional cash registers—employees use hand-held card readers to check customers out. Gaskins said he would’ve loved to include Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology at the store, which allows customers to purchase items without waiting in any line, but there wasn’t enough time to implement that before the store’s opening.
The Allsup’s store is under a five-year deal at the racetrack, Gaskins said, so it will be a fixture over the next several years. While there are no plans for other stores just like this, Allsup’s is planning on expanding its other small-format concept Allsup’s Express, the first of which opened in August in Lubbock, Texas, near Texas Tech University.
“This smaller format, we’re going to keep testing,” Gaskins said.