I’ve shared the industry’s story for more than 25 years. In that time, I’ve seen how the importance of storytelling has grown and the impact that it can have.
But storytelling has always been around to bond communities—whether ancient civilizations creating narratives around clusters of stars in the universe or modern filmmakers creating origin stories about a universe of superheroes.
Storytelling also is advocacy, and it’s a type of advocacy that everyone can do—a frontline worker, a store manager or a CEO.
Advocacy is talking about what you care about—and then making your audience care about it, too. Advocacy doesn’t have to be a conversation with a politician that leads to getting their vote on a bill. It just has to make whoever you are talking to become more interested in the industry.
Know Your Audience
A few years ago, I was invited to speak to a group of teens about nutrition. My presentation was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Durham, North Carolina. It was the worst possible group to deliver a standard presentation to. So, instead I opened by talking about something everyone likes: Eating delicious food.
“Before I start, I want to talk about my dinner last night,” I said. “Stuffed pork chops, with garlic mashed potatoes and sauteed veggies—from a gas station just up the road. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in months.” I shared that my amazing meal was from Saxapahaw General Store, a convenience store nearby.
The mood of the room brightened. The kids treated me as if I was a food expert they wanted to hear, not the speaker they were quite possibly forced to hear. And that allowed me to seamlessly weave in some messaging.
The takeaway: Don’t expect that your audience will immediately understand what you know and want to say. Find entry points than anyone can relate to and pull them in.
Know The Right Context
My job at NACS is to tell the industry’s story. In each of the thousands of interviews I’ve done with reporters, I want to tell stories that amplify a point. It could be about gas prices, sales trends or any other issue our industry faces. These stories connect the message I want to convey with industry insights. But insights can sometimes fail if your audience can’t understand them.
That happened to a friend who was disappointed by a newspaper story in which he was quoted. His immediate reaction was, “I can’t believe the reporter got it all wrong!”
My friend had been in the business for 40-plus years and had a 20-minute conversation that he expected was sufficient to explain a complex issue to a news reporter who covers a different topic every day. The time spent on the interview was probably sufficient, but the context was wrong. He was likely too high-level and that’s a lot to digest for someone new to the subject—and on a tight deadline. He should have started the interview with a few minutes of background information, which could have provided valuable context for his later comments to resonate.
Not every one of my interviews with reporters has gone well either. My first one at NACS was terrible. It was with an industry trade publication, so there is no reason that it shouldn’t have gone well. I was asked about a complex government relations issue and simply repeated what someone told me about the issue. I didn’t provide any context and my comments that were printed didn’t present NACS in the best light. Instead of making that my last interview opportunity, my boss made it a learning opportunity. She used a great restaurant analogy: “Don’t just be the server and deliver the meal. Be the chef and prepare it.”
I heard that lesson worded differently by 2001 NACS Show speaker John Major, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. After he concluded his presentation, he said he had time for questions. “You can ask any questions you want, and I will answer them any way I want,” he said.
He gave the audience insight into one of the most important lessons in media training: Answer the question you want to answer—and that may not be the question asked.
The takeaway: Ultimately, you’re in control of your story. Make sure you provide necessary context for what you want your audience to remember, and that may mean modifying the topic beyond simply responding to questions.
Know Your Opportunities
Your opportunities to advocate are limitless, and they also can be opportunities to test things out.
Every now and then I’ll go to the chiropractor to get an adjustment. At some point, he’ll ask me about my family and my job. It took me a while to figure out that maybe he doesn’t actually care what my answers are. Instead, they are incredibly easy conversation starters for him to keep the session lively, even if it’s not always easy for me to answer when I’m face down on the table. But I digress.
When he asks about my job, I don’t talk about how many e-mails I sent, meetings I had or even where the office is located. I talk about things that I think might make him like convenience stores more. Just like the way a comedian might workshop jokes in a small club before going out on tour, I’ll try some material out on him about cool stores, like a gas station that had a swimming pool (Fuel City), a brewery connected with a convenience store (93 Octane) or fantastic birria tacos and quesadillas in a Shell station (Birria Boys). It’s pretty easy to quickly sense what works and what doesn’t, and that is great practice for what I might later say in a speech or to a reporter.
My chiropractor isn’t an elected official, but he has a say in the future of our industry—as a voter and as a consumer. So why not plant a few seeds and see if they take root? You never know how it could play out—he could tell two friends, they could tell two friends and … that was the logic behind that classic Faberge Organics shampoo word-of-mouth advertising campaign from the 1980s.
I do the same thing at meetings outside our industry. I serve on the boards of a few community-focused groups, and there’s always some sort of industry fact or nugget I will add when we go around the room giving introductions. At some meetings, people are actually disappointed if I don’t bring a new one.
The takeaway: As an industry advocate, you’re never really off duty. You can hone your skills wherever you are and with whomever you’re talking with.
Know Your Facts
Okay, so let’s put everything together. Opportunities to advocate are limitless, especially when you properly frame your conversation with stories that are both of interest to your audience and advance a message important to you. The final element is adding facts. But not just any facts. You want fun facts. And fun facts are facts that someone else wants to hear. (Fun fact: Most of the time when someone starts a sentence with “fun fact,” odds are what they next say is not fun.)
Over the years, we have developed some key messages that we have seen work. They are statements that position the industry in a positive light. They provide context so you don’t get lost in numbers that are difficult to follow. And they make someone understand our industry a little bit better.
On a local level, you may not want to use our national numbers, so feel free to instead define how your business hits on some of these message points by defining what you mean to your community.
And share your success stories on advocacy with me. Tell me what connects and what people find interesting. I’m always looking for new material.
Messages That Work
One of the most important tools for me in communications is the extensive research we’ve conducted on consumer perceptions. Understanding what consumers think about our industry allows us to amplify positive attributes and address others that may be perceived as less positive. And those insights allow us to have valuable context around what people think. For instance, 24-hour operations are often perceived as a negative and assumptions are that nothing good happens after a certain time of the day. We have a different take on that, as you’ll see below.
In addition, we’ve also tested messages to see how effective they are, much like how a political campaign is run: Find out what people consider most important and then focus on how you best address those issues of importance. And just like with political campaigns, we’ve seen that messages bringing issues down to a local level are highly effective.
Below are three broad messages that have related context and facts that have been very effective in telling our industry’s story. Most of the statistics are U.S.-focused, but the messages can easily resonate across the globe with different metrics to support them.It was kind of magical and cool.”
C-Stores Are Accessible When Few Other Channels Are Open
Convenience stores are one of the few 24/7 businesses that provide much-needed food, fuel and refreshment for millions of Americans, especially first responders, police officers, firemen, factory workers, hospital workers and restaurant employees.
Increasingly, Americans working later shifts depend upon convenience stores, which are often the only stores open to serve them. More than one in seven workers (15% of all full-time wage-earners) are defined as “second or third shift workers” (those who work between 6:00 pm and 7:00 am).
For some professions, shift work is much more common. Over half (51%) of all protective service workers (police, fire, EMT, etc.) work either second or third shifts—and 28% of health-care support workers (hospital, home care, etc.) work second or third shifts. Workers supporting other critical services are also more likely to work later shifts. Twenty-nine percent of transportation workers (truckers, delivery, etc.) work second or third shifts, as do 40% of those involved with food preparation and related occupations.
As 24/7 operations, convenience stores are in a unique position to address important societal issues, like human trafficking. More than 30,000 stores work with the organization Convenience Stores Against Trafficking, posting “Freedom Stickers” in restroom stalls, while others work with the U.S. government’s “Blue Campaign.” Other convenience stores assist at-risk youth through the National Safe Place Network or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Convenience Stores Invest in Their Communities
Convenience stores are part of the fabric of the communities they serve, and demonstrate that through their charitable giving programs and in their continual enhancements to stores.
The convenience store industry cumulatively collects and contributes more than $1 billion per year to charities. Two in three c-stores (66%) support five or more charitable causes. Local causes are particularly important to c-stores, whether church groups, shelters, food banks or youth groups.
Convenience stores also are there for communities when disaster strikes. They are often the last to close and the first to open during natural disasters, whether that’s forest fires, hurricanes or floods. Countless c-store parking lots have become command centers for first responders to gather.
In addition to serving communities, convenience store operators invest in them. The average cost to build a new store is more than $5 million. In addition, stores are regularly remodeled; the average cost of a remodel is nearly $800,000. With this large investment, store owners have a valuable stake in the community’s success.
Convenience stores also invest in the people in a community. The industry overall adds 2.74 million jobs to the U.S. economy. Every convenience store that opens provides 18.1 jobs at the store level—plus 1.2 jobs for headquarters personnel. These convenience store jobs present great opportunities to establish business skills, whether as good first jobs for those looking to enter the workforce or for those who will work their way up to become managers or even run their own stores. Convenience store jobs are also flexible and offer students, parents, caretakers and others a way to earn a paycheck on nights and weekends.
Convenience Stores Are Intensely Local … and a Huge Industry
Convenience stores are closer to their customers than any other channel: 93% of Americans say they are within 10 minutes of a convenience store, including 86% of rural Americans.
The 152,396 convenience stores in the United States—one for every 2,200 people—are intensely local businesses that are tailored to the needs of customers who are often located within a mile or two of the store. Collectively, they conduct approximately 160 million transactions per day, which equates to nearly half the U.S. population.
C-stores also cater to the needs of commuters and travelers. They sell an estimated 80% of the fuel purchased in the United States, which equates to about 32 million fill-ups every day.
In addition to having convenient locations, convenience stores offer speed of service—the average time spent inside a convenience store is under 4 minutes, which is significantly faster than any other channel.
Convenience store sales in 2023 were $860 billion, which was 3.1% of the $27.4 trillion U.S. economy; that means that one of every $32 spent in the country on goods and services was spent at a convenience store. And if total industry sales were compared to the GDP of countries, the industry would rank at #20, behind Switzerland and ahead of Poland.
As part of these sales, the convenience industry paid or collected $19.7 billion in state and federal taxes. That’s about $350 per store, per day filling up government coffers and helping to pay for essential services.