Winners by Pillar
Quality Experience & Products
The Quality Experience & Products pillar is the single most important driver of long-term success for convenience stores, encompassing cleanliness, safety, friendly staff, atmosphere, high-quality products, and great-tasting food.
Buc-ee’s, Stewart’s Shops, and Kwik Trip lead the way, occupying the top three positions overall. Buc-ee’s is the clear standout, ranking 1st or 2nd across all six attributes of quality. Kwik Trip shows similar strength, consistently placing in the Top 2 across the four most critical customer needs.
Several other retailers also shine in specific areas: Love’s Travel Stop earns high marks for cleanliness, GetGo leads on safety, Stewart’s Shops excels with its staff, and Sheetz is recognized for creating a standout atmosphere, each making the podium in their respective strengths.
Pillar Ranking & Scores
Top 3 in Select Levers within Pillar
Cleanliness
Store and bathrooms are clean
Staff
Staff are friendly and professional
Safety
Locations feel very safe to visit
Atmosphere
Store has a great atmosphere
+ Highest Quality Products
+ Food Tastes Great
Pillar Performance for the C-Store Market Overall
Quality, Frictionless Transactions, Affordability are three areas where there is more perceived differentiation between c-store chains, compared to Convenience and Speed. This is one thing that contributes to them being more associated with differences we see in the market between retailer financial success.
Additionally, these pillars also have a few outliers in performance, represented by the dots in the charts.
Buc-ee’s is an extreme outlier on Quality. The box and whisker plot below it represents the natural distribution of c-store chain performance, with the top of the whisker being the natural maximum performance you’d expect, given the patterns in the market. Buc-ee’s score on Quality defies the natural laws of physics in customer perception of C-Store Quality. No C-Store chain should be this good… Being an outlier on the all-important Quality pillar, a pillar where there is already more perceived differentiation between c-store chains compared toward other pillars, is a large part of why they are #1.
Buc-ee’s achieves a similar position on its Visibility score, due mostly to their high ratings on social media visibility.
Affordability outliers are Walmart and Safeway convenience stores, which explain some of why they are in the top tier of the RPI overall.