The Retailer Preference Index (RPI)
Navigating the Future
How Convenience Store retailers can use this report
Relevantly benchmark, prioritize and collaborate – to grow faster, more sustainably, with a customer value proposition customers love
Relevantly
Better RPI Scores mean better financials and customer KPIs. Each banner receives an RPI Score.
Benchmark
Your RPI score can be compared to each of your major competitors and competitors of varying strategies.
Prioritize
You will know how important each dimension of the customer value proposition is in influencing your RPI Score, as well as how you compare to the competition on each dimension.
Collaborate
Our RPI framework identifies key points of cross-functional collaboration important in improving financials and customer KPIs.
Our RPI Score is a measure of customer perception of the c-store offering, giving more weight to those dimensions that have a stronger association with sustainable retailer results
Pillars and data
From June – September 2025, we surveyed 10,500 convenience store shoppers in the U.S. Each person rated up to 2 convenience stores they shop at and up to 2 QSRs they shop at on 34 different customer perceptions of the value proposition. Among those 34 attributes, we identified 6 themes. We did not pick the themes; they emerged from the data, based on which customer perceptions tend to be correlated with each other.
We also collected data on emotional connection to each retailer, stated behavior at each retailer, and combined that with 6 years of foot traffic data, sourced from industry-leading geolocation provider Placer.ai, for each of the 41 c-stores and 51 QSR chains in our survey, to arrive at our findings.
Our analysis is therefore not only cross-validated between two leading sources of data in the retail industry – dunnhumby and Placer.ai – but is also one of the first industry analyses out there that comprehensively integrates foodservice strategy and the QSR competition with the traditional c-store offering and landscape.
