CHICAGO — Looking out for employees—and customers—is a strategy in full force at the 36 Lyn c-store in Minneapolis. An initiative started last year by owner Lonnie McQuirter was giving his employees T-shirts that read, “The world is short-staffed right now. Be kind to those who show up.”
“It’s just something that helps build morale,” he says. McQuirter is eager to maintain a positive perception of the c-store industry as tobacco sales decline and the rise of electric vehicles threatens the forecourt.
“Why would anyone want to build a career in an industry if it’s dying?” he asks.
Similar concerns have led Lee Harrill, c-owner of six Drop-In Food Stores in North Carolina, to alter his long-standing hiring practices, such as eschewing the hiring of part-time employees.
In the past, he says, “we would turn down a lot of part-timers.” Today, however, if he finds solid candidates, even those working multiple jobs, he will hire them to rotate days working in Drop-In Food Stores and their other employer. “If a person can work only two days a week, we’ll take it,” he says.
Harrill says the average age of new employees is now a good deal older than it has ever been, “probably in the 50s,” he says, because the person who can work two days weekly generally is older and already has another job. “Or they’re ready to get off the couch for a little bit, so we’ve been glad to have them.”
Harrill also has loosened his rules about allowing family members to work together, something he would never allow in the past to avoid supervision problems. “Sometimes they’re tougher on their relatives; sometimes they’re more lenient on their relatives,” he says. “You just keep the family dynamics out of it. Also, if one of them gets upset with you, or gets upset [in general], they can take that other one with them. So all of a sudden, instead of one person quitting, you can have two people quit.”
Today, he says, he has one deli with four people from the same family, “and they’re all good people.”
Still, Harrill has found it necessary to tighten his store hours of operations. “We have one deli that closes after lunch on Monday,” he says. “We have from time to time had to close prior to dinner due to staffing. Normally, I would find this unacceptable, but if you don’t adjust, you chance wearing down the employees you do have. Overworked employees are much more likely to quit.”
82%
Amount of c-store operators who said “staffing/labor—hiring at store level” was the top foodservice operation pain point in a 2022 Technomic survey
Ultimately, there’s no going back to the way things were before the pandemic. “You’ve got 5 million workers that are no longer in the workforce,” says Laura Varn, vice president of people, culture and communications for Parkland USA, Calgary, Albert,. “We’ve got to remember there’s 1 million people that have died in this country because of COVID-19. It’s really having a very significant ripple effect through the whole market.”
Amid this drastic drop in the U.S. working population, Parkland has grown 10 times as large as it was four years ago, and the company aims to grow five times larger still by 2025. But how does a company navigate adding employees at such a breakneck speed during a hiring crisis, especially for hourly store employees?
“I wish I could tell you we have a silver bullet and have got all this figured out, but we’re probably like a lot of other folks,” says Varn. “It’s just an unprecedented tight labor market.”
She points to a long list of factors working against hiring managers these days, from a changing workforce to stiff competition and everything that comes with the fallout from the pandemic.
Varn says Parkland has taken a “surgical and comprehensive” look at its recruiting and retention, especially for hourly workers, including store employees and drivers. This review has led to shortening the hiring process and focusing on stores with gaps in talent.
Another focus: reducing turnover.
“Just to give you some sense, we have 212 c-stores right now. At any given time, we’re probably actively hiring for about 180 roles,” she says, and that’s with turnover at 100%, meaning that every employee leaves their job within one year, “which I know is much better than the national average. It’s still way too high.”
Part of that challenge is finding a balance between benefits for new employees and respecting current ones, according to McQuirter. No retailer, he says, wants to have an existing employee ask, “Why are they doing so much for all these new people to come in when we’re picking up the slack right now?”
This is particularly important for frontline workers who must come to work while corporate employees might have been working from home since 2020. “Some of those dynamics have kind of fed negatively to those front-line employees, where they haven’t seen their district manager in two years,” says McQuirter. “They keep hearing these stories of people quitting their job and pursuing their dreams when they’re sitting there making people’s dreams possible by showing up to work and providing a lot of services that allow society, if you will, to function in a way that allows people to work from home.”
For retailers looking to fix short-term problems, the gig economy has officially entered the c-store space.
At Pilot Co., Jamie Landis, vice president of team member experience for the Knoxville, Tenn.-based company, works to stay in constant contact with store employees.
Landis covers every part of the employee experience from their first application through their career with the company. “My team looks at these key critical make-or-break moments for somebody that’s deciding to join us or to potentially stay with us. And we curate the experience around it to protect it,” she says.
Simply listening to employees is an important step to improving the team member experience, says Landis. “Most folks may be surprised at the cognitive dissonance between what the world looks like and what the support center looks like,” she says.
Most of Landis’ time on the job is spent in the field with employees, building relationships and “getting a really good understanding of the vibe and the culture in each individual store and their needs,” she says. There are also multiple channels employees can access if they have an idea for a new employee benefit or other innovation.
Landis says Pilot’s employee fuel discount—15 cents off per gallon for up to 75 gallons per month—and its improved onboarding
program both came from store employees. Additionally, Pilot offers paid parental leave. The company offers tuition assistance up to $18,000 and health plans that cost employees as little as $10 a week. It also offers financial and physical wellness programs, among other benefits aimed at supporting employees.