In 2020, there have been many rapid changes that made planograms obsolete overnight, but Hard Seltzer has been the champion “planogram destroyer,” causing headaches for purchasing departments across the country.
Independent c-store operators face a difficult problem: it’s an unfair game against the big chains. Why unfair? Because the big chains can afford to spend millions of dollars gathering and analyzing data, giving them greater understanding of the performance of every store, product and employee. Independents are forced to run their stores based on intuition and industry experience, without the help of computer analytics and data. Because of this advantage, large chain stores beat independents on every yardstick, they average 11 times greater EBITDA , and they double in-store sales per square foot ($66.15 vs $32.23).
C-store operators know that the big chains achieve better margins because of their analysis – but the product costs, labor required, and logistics of gathering the information made this strategy too expensive for even mid-sized chains to generate a positive ROI. Taiga has released new tools to give independent c-store operators an affordable way to perform real Category Management analysis.
When prices change frequently and your margins depend on meeting the market price, you need to be aware of price changes and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
Covid has forced c-store operators to work remotely, revealing some operational weaknesses that were there before the pandemic, but were more obvious once staff had to work remotely. The good news is that strengthening these operational processes will be helpful even when the pandemic dies down.
In this week’s edition, we’ve focused on the challenges covid has caused with inventory management. C-store operators have frequently mentioned new problems that illustrate the difficulties. To successfully adapt to the New Normal, you will need better analysis and be willing to spend a little more time managing your inventory.
In this week’s edition, we focus on explaining the changes taking place within alcohol sales. Three different operators reported that alcohol sales were up but they were getting confusing signals from inventory counts and out of stock items. Why were some of their best selling products stacked high in the cold vault while they sold out of Craft Beer?
In this week’s edition, c-stores everywhere have gained an important new group of customers due to the coronavirus pandemic. We refer to such a customer as a “Grocery Buyer” or GB because they are now visiting your store to purchase items that they used to buy at a grocery store. How can you work to keep them?
Fuel sales used to be a reliable indicator of how in-store sales were performing and depending on which source you use, fuel demand is down at least 50% across the US. Surprisingly, since the Lockdown began, most stores have only seen a decline in retail sales of 20%, and, there are a handful of stores that are actually outperforming their numbers from last year. It’s like customers changed overnight along with top selling items. What is driving these changes?
Are you looking into a new tech stack for your stores? Think about what you really need to meet the demands of today and the challenges of the future.