When Quantum Services auditors walk into your convenience store, they take a mental snapshot. The things they notice often indicate the way the store is managed.
You, too, can learn to take mental snapshots of your stores. What you see will help guide you in making decisions about the overall operational quality of the store.
As a Manager of a convenience store, you have many responsibilities, including, keeping your store profitable. Yet, our research shows many store managers have not been trained in easy and effective ways to increase store profits by reducing shrink. In this Profit and Performance Impact you’ll find two areas that stunned experienced and rookie managers about how they are losing money. And, you’ll read what they are doing about it.
There is a lot to know about running a c-store! And no one can know everything, including c-store managers. Keeping stores profitable and customers happy, while minimizing shrink, is a constant battle.
Large increases in cigarette prices provide opportunity for dishonest store managers to steal thousands of dollars.
Ensuring that shrink measurement and shrink control programs operate at peak levels is an ongoing process. One way to give these initiatives a significant boost is to measure the service provided by your inventory audit team.
It doesn’t matter what industry you research, everybody is outsourcing one service or another. Business management and profitability gurus like Tom Peters, and others, all make the argument to focus on what you do best, and leave tasks that are not part of your core business to specialists in those fields.
Profits lost due to employee theft make up the largest percentage of shrink (approximately 75%). This “tip sheet” will help you address the most common situations related to theft by employees. For more comprehensive information and free copies of training materials, see the information at the end of this publication.
You have the applications for the open position in your store and have set up the interviews… now what?
Follow your company’s procedures for hiring new employees, and consider these step-by-step suggestions to help you make the most of the interviews.
Over the past 20 years, there has been progress toward item-level scan audits, in which every SKU in the convenience store is scanned as a unique auditable item. Our experience indicates about 70% of c-store operators have not chosen to implement full-store item-level scanned inventory audits. They rely on the industry standard of financial audits, which count categories of products (such as “soda”) rather than very specific individual items (Diet Coke vs. Cherry Coke vs. Coke Classic, etc).
Did you know a typical convenience store retail audit requires more than 50,000 individual keystrokes? If you printed out each entry made by the auditors, your report would be more than 100 pages. While no one looks at that level of detail, how do you decide who looks at what? And what is the right amount of data to look at?
4284 North High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43214
Phone: 800-777-9414
Fax: 614-261-8166
askus@quantum–services.com
