Imagine a day when your customers pay for coffee by scanning a cell phone, and play their favorite music at the gas pump with a quick swipe of a loyalty card. Well, ready or not, such technology is already out there and it’s coming for c-stores—the only question is how soon. As the Millennial generation…
Swiss Farms Adds Drive-Through Payment Transactions
Swiss Farms, the drive-through grocery store chain headquartered in Broomall, Pa., is adding a fully secure payment processing solution through Columbus IT and Mercury Payments Systems. The enhanced system is designed to meet Swiss Farms’ specific payment processing needs as it launched a national franchising expansion program. The chain needed to accept EBT cards and…
Love’s Completes 230 Store Rollout of Retalix Software
Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores has completed a rollout of the Retalix StorePoint suite, including StorePoint POS, StorePoint Back Office and StorePoint HQC applications, with Foodservice and Commercial Fuel modules. The integrated system went live at more than 230 Love’s locations in 2009, including the rapid installation of 60 stores in 20 business days. …
Mac’s Renews Price Management Solution
Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc., a division of Canadian convenience retailer Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc., has renewed the deployment of DemandTec Inc.’s Everyday Price Management solution. Mac’s Convenience Stores operates more than 800 stores throughout 12 states in the Midwest and Northeast, and has chosen to extend its relationship with DemandTec based on the business benefits realized…
Three Decades of Wisdom and Experience
Chief Financial Officer, Certified Oil I joined Certified Oil in 1975. As a CPA, my background was in auditing and taxation. Being in the gasoline business with Certified over the past 34 years has made me use every bit of knowledge and experience I acquired just to keep up with the fast pace and complexity…
The High Stakes of Compliance
Convenience store operators must stop thinking of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance as a nuisance to be handled when they have time. It is a serious, costly, complex fact of life—one that can potentially put an operator out of business and one that must be faced head on. It was in September 2006 that the…
Cultivating Loyal Customers
Savvy c-store operators are using customer loyalty/scan-data-analysis programs to improve merchandise planning, forecasting and point-of-sale (POS) data management, and to provide a technology platform for long-term growth. When done well, the inevitable result is to empower store personnel to react quickly, make more informed decisions and improve cost effectiveness, so they can simplify customers’ lives.…
Safe at the Store
The times necessitate that store systems do more–and few store systems are more crucial to a retailer’s success than cash handling and security. While retail technology has focused on point-of-sale (POS) systems that integrate everything from transaction accounting to inventory management, one of the most recent areas of opportunity involves the integration of cash handling…
Nice N Easy Named CSD’s 2009 Chain of the Year
Nice guys do finish first. Nice N Grocery Shoppes Inc., the Canastota, N.Y. operator of 82 convenience stores, was named Convenience Store Decisions’ 2009 Convenience Store Chain of the Year. Nice N Easy will be honored at an invitation-only gala at the Wynn Las Vegas during the NACS Show on Oct. 21. “The last line…
Equipment Key to Driving Food Sales
Convenience store operators in search of faster cooking times and longer holding times are finding foodservice equipment that can help. But which pieces, at what price points, with what sort of ROIs and in what sort of configuration remain questions that must be weighed and answered. For an industry whose core competency isn’t food, and…