3 Big Numbers is a weekly column that looks at a few key details from around the c-store industry.
Convenience retailers are regularly looking for the next big thing. That can be as eye-catching as a brand refresh or as fundamental as a supply chain update.
We’ve been watching new food offerings and formats over the past few weeks, so today, we’ve decided to get a little more granular. We could have highlighted Poppy Markets getting into the M&A game for the first time or Seven & i’s new CEO, but in the end we settled on three more technical announcements.
In this week’s “3 Big Numbers,” we look at Circle K’s first electric vehicle charging-only site, RaceTrac’s new distribution center and Urban Value Corner Store’s answer for smaller housing complexes.
15
The number of minutes needed to charge an EV to 80% at Circle K’s first chargers-only fueling center.
Alimentation Couche-Tard revealed a week ago that it had opened its first European convenience store with only EV charging — not a fuel pump in sight. It’s a bold step, since roughly 75% of Couche-Tard’s revenue comes from fuel sales, according to its fiscal Q3 earnings report, and a third of that came from Europe.
But in Sweden, where this store is located, EVs are enormously popular. Registration of new battery-electric vehicles fell by 15% last year but still made up more than a third of new car registrations for the year, according to data from Mobility Sweden. Combined with hybrids, more than half of new cars sold in Sweden in 2024 can take advantage of this station.
The company is hedging its bets by offering 400 kilowatt chargers. The Transportation Energy Institute’s Charging Analytics Program found earlier this year that drivers tend to bias toward chargers of at least 300 kilowatt.
99.5%
The expected recognition accuracy of Urban Value Corner Store’s new Smart Store Coolers.
Urban Value Corner Store has made its mark by positioning its convenience stores as an amenity inside housing communities. Its recent rollout of Smart Store Coolers, a frictionless cooler that operates as an unmanned micro-market, lets it operate in smaller developments as well.
Residents scan their payment method at the micro-mart, then open the door and take whatever they want. The cooler, developed with technology from smart retail company Micromart, will automatically register what customers take and charges them after the cooler door closes.
Accuracy is one area of frictionless checkout that gets a lot of scrutiny. Just look at last year, when Amazon had to fend off accusations that its Just Walk Out technology was more powered by human eyes than AI. But if Urban Value can accomplish the 99.5% accuracy rate touted in the announcement, it should be in a pretty good place.
40,000
The square footage of RaceTrac’s new distribution center.
RaceTrac recently opened a new 40,000-square-foot distribution facility in Geismar, Louisiana. The site is “an ideal logistics hub,” the company said, positioned in the Mississippi River industrial corridor and offering access to barge docks, rail service and major highways.
New supply chain support is always helpful for a company of RaceTrac’s size, but one of the more interesting parts of the announcement was news that it would use “advanced technology.”
This could mean a lot of things, but the one thing it underscores is how dedicated RaceTrac is to keeping its operations up to date and applying automation to facets of the business where it makes sense.
