Convenience-store retailer Maverik Inc., Salt Lake City, leverages technology to enhance operations for employees, Chad Kobayashi (right), senior director of retail technology at Maverik, said at the 2025 Conexxus conference in Tucson, Arizona.
Kombayashi spoke on a panel with Jeff Carpenter (second from right), director of education and training at Clifford Fuel, New York; Gary Hoover (second from left), manager of point of sales product team at CHS Payment Solutions, Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota; and moderator Ed Collupy (left), innovation facilitator at Conexxus, Austin.
Maverik is No. 12 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.
The convenience-store chain, which acquired Kum & Go in August 2023, currently uses point-of-sale (POS) terminals, self-checkout terminals, tablets, Chromebooks, personal devices for store leadership and more at the front of house. In the back, employees use kitchen production terminals, back-office computers, training computers, tablets and more.
In the future, Kobayashi said that Maverik will focus on transitioning all of the store devices to Androids, both tablets and mobile devices. Mobile devices allow employees to carry the system around with them as they’re doing tasks, such as scanning inventory, instead of having a central device like a computer to continue going back to. Tablets can be used to see bigger things like planograms.
“We're doing it because that's how people see mobility today,” said Kobayashi. “They're trying to use their phone for everything, so we're trying to facilitate that function within our environment.”
There will be two tablets and four to eight handheld devices in each store, he said. This also reduces the risk of employees using their own devices.
“As the back office evolves and we can use Android in these devices, the need for this central computing goes away,” he said.
The change aims to bring about a future-proof and scalable solution. There should be an overall cost decrease as well, Kobayashi said.
There’s an accountability aspect too, he said. Leaders can see when and what employees are doing when they’re logged into the devices.
Plus, if the company wants to add or remove something, it’s easy, he said.
It’s beneficial for employees because they have a single authentication across all the functions it provides, and it’s a consistent experience with all functions on a single device. That translates to less time on more tasks. “This makes a much simpler environment for us. We're able to deploy these handhelds so quickly because of the single-scan provisioning and set them all up,” he said.
Employees will be able to use devices for training, time clocks, communications between employees and stores and help desk software.
If something breaks, the employee can scan it, create a ticket and take a photo, all in the moment.
It also helps communication between store employees and other stores.
Maverik has more than 500 Maverik-branded locations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. It has approximately 400 Kum & Go-branded locations in 12 states: Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.
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