In our last article we discussed the importance of not forgetting the fundamentals of store appearance and basic store marketing.

While you can get buried in data and the day-to-day store challenges, we must keep the basic fundamental processes in place.

One of the fundamentals is being certain you are aware of competitive fuel pricing.  Our favorite store manager, Darlene, makes it a practice at her store to check competitive fuel prices on first thing each morning and then again before she heads home.  She wants to be sure she is not losing business due to fuel prices.

She records the competitor prices in her CMI software by 7:00AM each day. She doesn’t have to wait to complete the rest of her paperwork.  This specific information is transmitted immediately.

The fuel prices from her store (and other stores within the chain) have been sent to her company’s home office and 5 minutes later are analyzed.  This process is done again in the early afternoon.   Darlene especially checks prices on Friday afternoon as one of her competitors will always drop prices a couple of pennies to get an edge on the weekend traffic.

Again, this may sound basic, but driving down any street you will see a c-store operator who has fallen asleep at the wheel and let his competition win his customers.   Don’t let this be you.

If you want to hear the sound of customer chatter and cash register ka-chings being rung up in your store, remember the fundamentals that made you successful.   Ignore the fundamentals and you will hear the silence of an empty store broken only by the chirping of crickets.