InConvenience Inc., which owns The Goods Spot and The Gas Spot convenience-store brands, aims to set itself apart from its competitors by focusing on being “community stores,” Amanda Lobes, center store category manager, said during a retailer panel at CSP’s Center Store Forum on Sept. 10.
The Chicago-based company’s stores, which are in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri, “are in such small areas that we want to get to know all the people in those towns and really drive what they want in our stores and make them happier, want them to come in, Lobes said. “We want them to know us and be comfortable coming in and knowing our employees.”
When aiming to build a basket, Lobes said, InConvenience knows that most customers enter a location for a beverage. To get the edge, she said, they try to “merchandise as a personality and really make something a showstopper, make people want to stop and take a second look at a product.”
Such a product might be something made locally, bolstering the vibe of a community store, she said. One location, for example, sells locally made peanut brittle.
Another product is Shatto Milk, “a big brand at our Missouri locations, and the amount of flavors they have is bananas, and the locals just flock to the store just for milk, and then they’re purchasing other things like your cookies and your snacks and all the other things to go with it, so, I call it a personality just because it’s the little extra.”
Shatto Milk flavors include chocolate, strawberry, coffee, egg nog, pumpkin spice egg nog, root beer, cookies n’ cream, cotton candy and ... banana.
Good 2 Go
At Idaho Falls, Idaho-based Good 2 Go Stores, the chain’s tagline is “We’re Gonna Make You Smile,” said the other panelist, Sean Carroll, director of category management.
Carroll said the company does “a lot around that in terms of trying to do a lot of fun and creative things for our customers. We’ve brought in ice cream machines and we do floats and we do a lot of different, unique stuff to just make people’s day better.”
Carroll said it’s important to differentiate one’s chain.
“You need to have a brand identity, and I think that you need to go ahead and set yourself apart, like why would a customer come to your store versus someone else’s.”
And there are a lot of customers in play right now, he continued.
“I think at [CSP’s] Outlook [Leadership conference], a great stat was that 84% of customers would go to a different c-store for fuel depending on price, and so there’s a lot of customers right now that are not very loyal and you need to go ahead and differentiate and try and acquire those customers.”
Good 2 Go does this two ways, Carroll said, the first being leaning heavily into beverages.
“If you walk into any of our prototype stores, three walls are going to be beverages,” he said: a beer wall, packed beverages and dispensed.
“And we try and make dispensed a really fun activity, a whole bunch of slushie-type drinks, obviously the ice creams,” he said. “We give people recipes to combine those together and make really creative drinks.”
It's the same with dispensed beverages, he said. “From a cold dispensed standpoint, we have recipes for dirty Dr Pepper and all those different types of beverages.”
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