Despite being in only his second year in the convenience-store industry, Mark Meisner is tackling retail technology head on.
Meisner, Kwik Trip’s director of marketing and advertising, fronted the chain’s new digital messaging program in June 2018. The program features a set of TV screens set throughout the chain’s stores to effectively merchandise products and drive engagement with millennials.
Today, these screens are used in nearly 60 Kwik Trip locations in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The goal is to have them in all of the more than 600 Kwik Trip stores by October 2019, Meisner says.
But the digital messaging boards are merely a glimpse at Meisner’s tech plans for Kwik Trip. He’s intrigued by delivery, both curbside and home formats, and even through third parties such as Grubhub and Uber Eats. He says Kwik Trip is keeping tabs on what grocery and QSRs are doing with delivery to see how their methods apply to convenience.
“Convenience drives our business, and the definition of that will continue to change,” he says. “We want to stay on the cutting edge of what that means moving forward.”
But when it comes to Meisner’s personal tech preferences, he’s all about what’s familiar.
“I’ve always been an iPhone guy over Android,” he says. “It’s a comfort level for me.”
52%—Amount of millennials who say they would purchase from c-stores more often if they offered delivery, per the CSP/Technomic Winning the War for Convenience report