The Beer Cave. The separate space – set off from the rest of the interior of a convenience store – that allows retailers to stock cold, adult beverage selections while giving the beer lover and entertaining consumer a space to browse at will.
Our continued success with growing beer and wine sales, while impressive, holds more great growth promise and Beer Caves are, indeed, the impetus that can fuel that well-paved path. Done right, Beer Caves provide us not only more space for beer and wine products as well as sales, but also free up floor space for complementary items like snacks and party goods.
Beer caves, as we know them, have been around for perhaps 25 years and like any other new addition, took a while to catch on. Do not hesitate to make the investment; in fact, consider making it a mainstay of your store. Light it up extra bright and make it colorful.
Consider these three factors:
- First: Create a sizeable Beer Cave in an existing or new store. Install a 500-square-foot refrigerated room that follows the contour of the dedicated doors for alcoholic beverage storage. This allows you to exclude all or almost all warm beer displays from the store floor, thus allowing you more dry goods selling space. Think of it, you have taken what has always been dead storage space in the beer cooler and turned it into a productive sales space.
- Second:This takes convenience stores from behind groceries in terms of cold offerings and, in my opinion, edges us ahead of them – when you add in our huge edge in ease and customer time spent buying the beer – it adds up to an enviable advantage over average grocery and big box stores.
- Third: By taking packaged beer out of the cooler doors and placing it inside the Beer Cave you will have freed up tons of space in the cooler doors for specialty, seasonal and craft beer offerings. The popularity of these three different types of beers is at an all-time high and the margins collectively are considerably higher than regular brews. Imagine being able to devote extra space for singles that can introduce your beer aficionado customers to new products with higher margins and promos to speed sales of stock that fizzled.
More variety. More happy customers. More sales. With so many different cultures in this great country come so many more popular imbibing flavor demands – the Beer Cave is the answer.
Jim Callahan has more than 40 years of experience as a convenience store and petroleum marketer. His Convenience Store Solutions blog appears regularly on CStoreDecisions.com. He can be reached at (678) 485-4773 or via e-mail at [email protected].