Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. continues to focus on its Inner Circle loyalty program, Brian Hannasch, president and CEO of the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain, said during the company’s fiscal third-quarter 2024 earnings call on March 21.
Launched in 2023, Inner Circle is a free membership program with food, merchandise and fuel rewards. It now has close to 16 million members signed up and almost 5 million fully enrolled members in the United States, he said.
“Inner Circle is providing a differentiated personalized experience to our most loyal and valuable customers,” said Hannasch. “Registrations and full enrollments have doubled over the quarter, and we continue to see steady growth in enrollments in the program. We now have over 4,000 locations on Inner Circle, and we’ve expanded to three new business units in early March, bringing the total to 10 and covering over 30 states in the U.S.,” he said.
“We’re seeing that our highest-penetration sites that have more than 25% of the transactions coming from Inner Circle are outperforming our nonloyalty sites and that these loyal customers are visiting our locations more frequently and with a higher basket,” Hannasch said.
- Alimentation Couche-Tard is No. 2 on CSP’s 2023 Top 202 list of convenience-store chains by store count.
Laval, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard operates in 29 countries and territories, with more than 16,700 stores, of which almost 13,100 offer road transportation fuel. Its network includes more than 7,100 stores in the United States, primarily under the Circle K and Holiday Stationstores banners, and approximately 2,100 in Canada under the Circle K, Mac’s and Couche-Tard banners. In Europe, under the Circle K and other banners, Couche-Tard operates a retail network in Scandinavia, Ireland, Poland, the Baltics and Russia with more than 2,700 stores and unmanned automated fuel stations. And under licensing agreements, more than 2,200 stores operate under the Circle K banner in 15 other countries and territories (Cambodia, Egypt, Guam, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Jamaica, Macau, Mexico, Mongolia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam). This brings Couche-Tard’s total worldwide network to approximately 14,400 stores.
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