dawgs10 wrote:
again, off brand water and fountain drinks are your highest MARKUP!!! what you are talking about is cash flow not markup or profit skus. as long as the price goes up at the pumps you guys are hurting your in store sales where the money is made. i refuse to buy anything in a station. you guys are robbing people at the pumps therefore i wont buy your drinks and gum and day old hotdogs.
Dawgs, since you know so much, tell me: how much money do we make on a gallon of gas? Go ahead and tell me. I'm going to secretly PM that information to someone I trust on this board. I am NOT going to reveal it, though, because really it is none of your business. But, I'll do this much --- I'll make my word accountable to someone else. If you guess it right on the first attempt, I'll admit it. I will give you a hint, though: for us, there's no additional gain from selling premium or mid-grade. We make the same amount per gallon regardless of the grade. If you're wrong, though, I'll have someone else to back me up on it.
If the price goes up at the pumps, we pay it. We do NOT have control over our own prices. Our gas distributor sets the retail price for our gasoline. That's our deal. When the price goes up, yes it hurts inside sales to some degree (and, it is negligible unless gas goes north of $2.85 or so per gallon and we find some other way to bring value to the customer with more and better deli offerings or what have you). But, we make LESS on each gallon as the price rises, not more. Our 'take' is flat.
It doesn't matter that fountain drinks have a higher markup. I'm never going to sell enough of them to make up for a penny per gallon of gas. If that were so, and I just wanted to help the customer save money, I'd drop my price on the drinks! (Which, actually, we did.) I've got some margin to play with there, but not on gasoline.
So, bro, you're just wrong.
And, let me add this. I don't get offended easily. I'm not offended now, but I'm about as ticked as you can probably get me. We don't serve day old anything. Truthfully, our food in our deli is so good, we have people working all the time to keep it on the steam table. We don't even serve hot dogs, by the way. Our customers don't want them --- they want real food. We have, hands down, the absolute best chicken fingers I've ever put in my mouth at any family restaurant like an Applebee's or O'Charley's or Ruby Tuesday. We have customers who will drive to our store and get chicken fingers (battered in our own handmade and hand-dipped batter by a gal named Judy who has a second job as a DJ at a karaoke bar --- which is just funny to tell and has nothing to do with anything) and then drive 2 miles to the local chicken finger-only restaurant and buy their dipping sauce for about 75 cents for a few little squares of it. We have the best fried chicken in town, too. And some of the biggest honkin' hamburgers you'll ever try to eat. We've never scored below a 95 on our health rating. We've gotten 97's the last 4 quarters in a row. And, the lady has to look hard to find something to count off on because she doesn't give more than a 97!!!
Day old hot dogs. Man, that aggravated me.
We will sell 12-13 pans of 2 dozen biscuits each on any given Mon-Sat morning. We have people lined up 10 deep at the cash register on their way to work and school in the morning for our breakfast. We will go through 3 or 4 cans of creamer and sugar EACH between opening and closing every single day.
We're busy, we're good, and we're proud of the work we do. And, we're not ripping anyone off. Our prices on every single thing we sell are at or below what our competition sells for.
We make our own fried pies, cookies, cakes, pies, you name it. Our cooks come up with some awesome ideas and we figure out what people want and we make it and we sell it. I've had people in other towns ask me what we can do to get our fried pies to them (we can't distribute them wholesale, though, because of restrictions on that sort of thing and it isn't our goal to do that). My brother, bless his heart, works like a DOG at his regular job as a district manager for a restaurant food supplier, and he is always, always coming up with new things to do and try.
We're in the process right now of building a new office in a different part of the store so we can tear out the existing one and install pizza. We've had the equipment since last summer, but delayed putting it in because we wanted to go big time with the pizza. Not frozen pizza pre-plated/pre-crusted, either, but fresh with our own handpicked ingredients and we'll assemble the things ourselves with no pre-packaged H**t Brothers kind of deal (don't want to disparage people's brands, that's why the asterisks).
Want more???
You don't sell NEARLY enough grocery items, even in our extremely busy store, to make up for even a one-cent per gallon loss on gas.
