If you’re waiting for the convenience store labor market to loosen up, stop waiting. It isn’t happening.
That’s the blunt assessment from many HR experts across the retail industry. Mel Kleiman, president of Humetrics and one of the most respected voices in frontline hiring strategy, has said that the hiring environment for c-store retailers isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Wages are up, the labor pool is tighter and every retailer on the block is chasing the same shrinking group of reliable, customer-ready workers.
Kleiman’s advice was simple, even if it isn’t easy: retailers who keep recruiting the old way will keep losing. The chains winning the talent war right now are the ones getting creative, and in some cases, aggressive, about where and how they find people. You can bet top-quartile chains like Wawa, Kwik Trip, RaceTrac, Family Express and others aren’t sitting back, waiting for talent to walk through the door. They are always on the prowl for the next great team member.
Here are four strategies worth stealing.
1. Recruit inside your competitors’ stores, literally. Your best future employee might be behind the counter at the gas station down the road right now, restocking coolers and dealing with the same short-staffed grind you are. Train your store managers to notice good service when they’re pumping gas or grabbing coffee on a competitor’s turf, and hand out a business card, not a job posting. A short, direct conversation from a manager who clearly values good work beats any online listing. Some operators are even offering “bring a friend from your old job” bonuses that quietly turn current hires into a recruiting pipeline aimed straight at rival chains.
2. Pay same-day, not every two weeks. Kleiman has long pushed retailers to rethink their pay schedules, and it’s one of the cheapest, fastest changes you can make. Younger workers and second-job workers, in particular, don’t want to wait two weeks for a paycheck. Earned wage access, which lets employees tap into pay they’ve already earned before the official payday, has become a genuine differentiator. It costs you little to implement through most modern payroll platforms, and it can be the single deciding factor between two nearly identical job offers.
3. Sell the schedule, not just the wage. Retailers keep competing on hourly rate, but flexibility is often worth more to today’s applicants than an extra fifty cents an hour. Build shift-swap apps or group chats that let employees trade shifts without the bottleneck of manager approval. Offer guaranteed weekend-off rotations. Let people build their own four-day compressed schedules where staffing allows. A flexible schedule is a benefit you can advertise on a yard sign, and it costs you nothing but a willingness to loosen the old rulebook.
4. Turn your best employees into paid scouts. Your current team already knows who’s good. They worked with them at their last job, they’re related to them, or they see them shopping in your store every week. Formalize that instinct with a real referral bonus, paid in two installments: half at 30 days, half at 90, so the incentive rewards retention, not just a warm body walking through the door. Data consistently show that referred employees stay longer and perform better than applicants sourced from job boards because they arrive with a built-in relationship and a reputation to protect.
None of these ideas require a larger budget than most operators already spend chasing candidates who never show up for interviews. What they require is a mindset shift: treat recruiting as a daily operational habit, not an occasional scramble when someone quits.
The bottom line stands: this labor market isn’t fixing itself. The retailers who win the next two years won’t be the ones who wait for it to get easier. They’ll be the ones who got so uncomfortable they stole a page, or an employee, from the guy down the street.
Elie Y. Katz is the CEO and president of National Retail Solutions (NRS).
