Health and Beauty Care (HBC) has been known to create more pain for c-store operators than it relieves for their customers. Managing it well—knowing the trends, keeping up with new products and line extensions, establishing workable price points and merchandising it carefully—is a precarious balancing act. The trend today is smaller, both for product packaging…
Health and Beauty Care: Health and Beauty Care: Health and Beauty Care: Health and Beauty Care: Competition Impacts HBC Sales
After buying a soda, milk, apple juice, a loaf of bread, paper plates, dishwashing detergent and a bagel, the typical c-store customer might—and that’s a big might—purchase a bottle of aspirin. Make no mistake about it: Health and beauty care in c-stores is akin to an unruly stepchild when it comes to in-store categories. Up…
Health and Beauty Care/ General Merchandise
TOP PERFORMERS BIC Corp. Lil’ Drug Store Products Inc. Novelty Inc. HONORABLE MENTIONS Convenience Valet Procter & Gamble The 63 key decision makers in the HBC and general merchandise segment identified BIC Corp., Lil’ Drug Store Products Inc. and Novelty Inc. as the category’s top performers. Honorable Mentions include Convenience Valet and Procter & Gamble.…
Retailers Salute Their Leading Suppliers
Despite the much-ballyhooed growth of chains like Walgreens, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Wal-Mart, it is convenience stores that remain an important daily stop for the nation’s busy consumers. As a result, convenience stores represent a powerful sales opportunity for product and service supplier companies, CSD set out to find the industry’s top performers as identified…
Making It in the Marketplace
Driving business with new products is hardly a novel idea, but it’s also one that convenience store retailers rarely use to their advantage, said David Bishop, a partner with research and consulting firm Willard Bishop in Barrington, Ill. When retailers actively participate in the process of bringing a new product to the marketplace by helping…
A [Private] Affair
More. That’s what convenience store customers can expect to see of private-label brands–and what convenience store operators need to do in order to make those brands successful. The costs are too low, opportunities to build brand equity and loyalty too high, quality is rising too quickly and the benefits are too numerous for retailers with…
Identifying More Effective Profit-Building Strategies
“In a business like cigars, where unit volume is growing 10% plus year-over-year, emerging strategic thinking in convenience retail suggests that retailers can grow even faster by employing a “price-for-volume” strategy for key products.” David Bishop, partner, Willard Bishop This summer, we examined how convenience retailers could manage the cigar category differently to realize above-market…
a small rush
Living Essentials’ 5-Hour Energy is helping retailers capitalize on consumers’ needs for a timely energy boost. After surveying the flood of energydrinks introduced over the pastfew years, Living Essentials noticeda weakness in the category. Themajority of drinks continued to grow in packagesize and contained too much sugarand herbal stimulants. To fill the void of people…