“The convenience store leader of the healthy stores movement.” A recent Washington Post article described Kwik Trip this way because you stand out in the field as an innovator when it comes to offering customers a variety of healthy food options – and did so long before many other C-stores joined the healthier eating movement.
Your customers enjoy having the healthy options you offer and they also appreciate the fact that a majority of your products are made in-house, too. Which means food items are fresh – from serving Nature’s Touch milk or ice cream produced by your company-owned dairy – to choosing from 60 varieties of Kwikery bread products prepared in your Kwik Trip’s own bakeries.
Vertical integration has allowed you to control quality and cost of the items you sell – but also has provided your company with additional avenues for growth.
But as successful as Kwik Trip is in 2018, you are still enmeshed in a fiercely competitive battle for customers: from other convenience stores, from quick-service and fast-casual restaurants, from dollar stores, grocery stores and perhaps in the future if it gains traction – from Amazon Go.
Kwik Trip is efficient, innovative and growing. But so is much of the competition, too. It’s more challenging that ever to draw customers into your neighborhood stores – particularly when many locations are a stone’s throw from another C-store or two.
To combat this, many savvy convenience stores are turning to innovative retail technology to drive both growth and efficiency, improve the customer experience, reduce costs and improve bottom-line results. And Kwik Trip is no different.
Whether it’s your first Kwik Trip store in Eau Claire, WI, or at one of your Hearty Platter restaurants in Minnesota, Iowa or Wisconsin, investing in intelligent retail technology that drives efficiencies, protects profits or enhances the customer experience can help your business thrive.
Kwik Trip has an impressive growth strategy and with 620-plus store locations in three states, you are one of the fastest-growing, family-owned and operated C-stores chains in the Midwest. But this growth doesn’t just come in the form of new products offerings – such as adding new dairy or bakery items every week. Sure, new, locally made food choices are important to your time-starved, hungry customers. But so is getting and out of your stores quickly and having an experience that makes them want to come back.
Growth also requires attracting new shoppers and converting them into loyal customers – and this isn’t always easy.
Today’s consumer not only wants – but demands – unique in-store experiences and personal service.
But with tight margins and increasing labor costs, implementing other forms of innovative retail technology would further enable Kwik Trip to offer an even more improved customer experience that could lead to increased customer loyalty and growth.
We’re talking about the kind of technology that sits in the back office, behind the counter, or even in your head office. It’s the technology that helps you streamline processes, drive efficiency and automate manual processes. Because, it’s these innovations that free up Kwik Trip’s managers and cashiers, and allow them to spend more time on the store floor, driving sales through upselling food items and providing a better customer experience for your customers – who are likely in a hurry.
With the help of Tellermate’s cash management technology at the point of sale (POS), Kwik Trip can drive efficiency and provide a better customer experience – not to mention driving adherence to process across your growing portfolio of stores, reducing shrink and cutting labor costs. All this equates to saving money and increasing revenues.
How? Through LiveDrawer®, the intelligent cash drawer that builds Tellermate’s count-by-weight technology into the drawer itself, giving you full visibility of exactly how much money is in the drawer at any one time.
LiveDrawer can help Kwik Trip simplify the traditional cash management process by automating manual cash management tasks such as reconciling tills or preparing banking deposits. With its transaction-by-transaction reporting, you can get a full audit trail of each and every transaction even when multiple operators share the same cash drawer. Not only does this allow you to pinpoint the perpetrators of cash loss, but it also eliminates the need for staff to leave the floor early to reconcile money drawers during shift changeovers. Instead, your staff can stay on the floor longer, stocking items, upselling food and drink orders and interacting with customers, right until the very last moment.
Plus, with real-time alerts and pre-set thresholds your managers can proactively manage change levels and lifts & skims to ensure tills aren’t taken offline during their busiest times.
What’s more, LiveDrawer® Manager provides in-store and remote (read head-office) visibility of the drawer’s contents in real-time at all times. Which could help Kwik Trip in numerous ways…
Shrink costs global retailers a whopping $123.4 billion each year. According to the 2016 Global Retail Theft Barometer, this represents 1.23% of retail sales. More worrisome, employee theft now makes up a large portion of this shrink – even more than shoplifting. And when it comes to internal theft, most incidents occur at the POS. Think about the opportunity that cash in plain sight can bring to a dishonest employee.
It’s no wonder then that preventing loss is usually high on the priority list of most retailers, and Kwik Trip is no exception. Since you deal with large amounts of cash and are hiring new employees to staff your stores, commissary, and restaurants, loss prevention measures are likely on your mind.
LiveDrawer provides real-time cash counting, giving full visibility of the number of bills and coins in the drawer ‒ from anywhere. It knows exactly how much cash goes in a drawer – down to the very last penny ‒ not just how much the POS thinks there should be. LiveDrawer is so smart that it sends an immediate alert when a process is not followed or when an overage or shortage occurs. To sum it up, it makes stealing at the POS almost impossible.
But perhaps cash loss isn’t intentional? What then? Well, LiveDrawer also pinpoints which cashiers consistently make mistakes; and sends alerts when processes are not followed. From here, you can identify the staff or stores that could benefit from retraining.
Plus, the ability to view the contents of each drawer in real-time also allows managers and corporate offices to reduce the vulnerability of cash in the tills – firing alerts when lifts and skims are needed. Less cash on the shop floor means less opportunity for theft.
In fact, a large, multi-store retailer in the UK tested LiveDrawer during a six-week pilot at one of its problematic stores where employee theft was rampant. Prior to LiveDrawer implementation, the retailer’s cash handling process consisted of managers placing uncounted cash in a safe and waiting for a third-party vendor to pick up and count it every two weeks. Once Tellermate’s intelligent cash drawers were placed in the problem store, the theft completely stopped because staff knew it provided visibility for each and every transaction.
And when LiveDrawer is used in combination with an intelligent safe at the POS, notes can be checked for counterfeits and securely stored until the end of day or when the safe is full. It’s a nimble but powerful alternative to bulky and often expensive cash recyclers.
All this means that cash loss can increase security, reduce shrink and provide greater profitability.
For almost 40 years, Tellermate has partnered with businesses similar to Kwik Trip to help lower operating costs, reduce shrink, drive efficiency and growth, and gain better visibility of their cash. Our intelligent cash management solutions help leading companies, including 7-Eleven, McDonald’s and Aldi. How? By helping them reduce the amount of time spent investigating cash loss and discrepancies, reconciling cash drawers, setting start-of-day banks or counting deposits. Which gives them more time to spend with customers.
Tellermate is confident that we could help Kwik Trip drive efficiency, reduce shrink and gain better visibility of the cash across your stores – all of which enables you to optimize your ongoing growth strategy.
We’re so confident, in fact, that we’d like to offer a free pilot of our LiveDrawer solution in your stores ‒ allowing you to experience the benefits first-hand and measure the potential ROI. Get in touch with us to learn more.
