CHICAGO -- It was my 12th or 13th year, probably the last summer before innocent pastimes dissolved and made way for more teenager-esque attitudes and activities. Every single Sunday, I’d hop on my bike and cruise down to the nearest Kwik Trip with my best friend for an Urge frozen pizza.
We'd bring it back, cook it up and devour it to crumbs while watching a movie we’d seen a thousand times already.
It began well before then, the instances of c-stores threaded through my most nostalgic memories. The texture of the air outside a middle-of-nowhere highway gas station in the depths of the night. I’d inhale that air—at once crisp with twilight and heavy from the day’s humidity, charged by the blazing canopy lights—time and time again as a kid, making epic family road trips. Or on other days closer to home, the city of Milwaukee gliding past my car window, listening to my dad as he pointed out where our family’s handful of gas stations once sat.
On the night I met my future husband at what constituted a “cocktail party” for people in their early 20s practicing new found adulthood, I stopped at a Holiday station to fill up. I’ve long forgotten far more important moments of my life, but that one is seared into my memory: standing aside that gas pump in my fancy clothes, hands chapping and eyes watering in a surprise March freeze.
In a culture in which everything can be delivered to our doorstep, what happens to moments such as these? Sad as that question may be, it’s not your job to answer it.
Finding Our Place
In this month’s cover story, editors Samantha Oller and Jackson Lewis take the temperature of the on-demand delivery marketplace. They look at the movement both philosophically (will consumers drastically change habits if something meets their needs in a new and better way?) and tactically (yes, they will change their habits and market basket, affecting product mix). They ask a critical question:
Where might c-stores fit into this environment?
One of my favorite retailers we’ve talked about this year is Lou Perrine’s Gas and Groceries and its owner, Anthony Perrine. You likely read about Anthony in our July Indie Influencers issue; he’s back this month, in our cover story, for his efforts to capture the consumer- direct trend through delivery from his single store.
What’s so remarkable about Lou Perrine’s is that it has flipped the script. Anthony is eschewing the idea that brick-and-mortar retail can’t—or shouldn’t—do delivery. And he’s eclipsing the third-party-delivery trend by not only doing delivery himself, but also becoming a third-party service for neighboring restaurants.
And he’s doing it all not on a college campus, nor a burgeoning urban market, but in Kenosha, Wis., a few miles from where my great-grandfather’s pagoda-style service station once sat.
Moving On
Perhaps, ultimately, delivery won’t work for Lou Perrine’s. But Anthony is giving it a try. Sam and Jackson’s story closes with a poignant challenge from the leader of one of these online-delivery startups: Are you avoiding, discrediting or downplaying digital commerce because your business is entrenched in a brick-and-mortar world, and you fear disrupting what has worked so well for so long?
For a long time, I resisted online grocery ordering and delivery. But I love the ritual of grocery shopping, I’d say. It’s my 60 minutes away from home and work, a time to focus on nothing much at all.
One day, someone made the argument that made me an e-grocery convert: Wouldn’t you rather do something even better with those 60 minutes?
Yes. Yes, I would.
Perhaps my kids won’t have the same visceral memories of c-stores, gas stations and even grocery as I do. (Frankly, I think they will—this isn’t an either-or proposition.) But if the industry can make their lives easier in a newfound way, freeing up more time to do even better things, then that’s a worthy sacrifice.
Abbie Westra is director of Winsight’s Retail Content Group. Reach her at awestra@winsightmedia.com.
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