Some convenience stores are truly minimalist, little more than stopping places for must-haves like gasoline, coffee and restrooms. But Sheetz stores are different. The convenience chain that began in 1952 as Sheetz Dairy Store in Altoona, Penn., now hires baristas to pour gourmet coffee; their store-branded MasterCards have RFID chips.
For the past 10 years, Sheetz stores have leveraged kiosks to move their made-to-order sandwiches. Each of the 327 Sheetz stores has multiple ordering stations. From those stations, customers input their orders, while being automatically prompted for cross-sells and up-sells. The orders are then moved to the appropriate production area of the kitchen, depending on what sandwich the customer selects.
"I do order through a machine and it makes things go a lot more smoothly than ordering with a person, takes away the errors that the person may make," said shopper Krystle Emph, who visits Sheetz two to three times per week. "They are the only place that I know of that does that and that's one of the main reasons I go there."
The company, ranked the 12th best place to work in Pennsylvania, uses automated technology to create jobs for human workers. Its innovative management also won it acclaim from the foodservice industry when it became the first c-store to win Foodservice International's Silver Plate award for management and marketing. Sheetz director of programming Jim Wenner said the system, a novelty among c-stores, would be unmanageable if driven by paper ordering.
"It allows us to produce our food service offer faster," Wenner said. "From customer order to sale, we are more efficient behind the counter. It helps us with queuing of our orders and accurate production of food orders. So it helps us on both sides of the counter. Both our customers and our employees benefit from self-service technology."
The ordering kiosks are made by Radiant Systems with Windows software. Radiant spokesman James Hervey explained the value that kiosks hold for Sheetz.
"First and foremost, it has to do with transaction speed," Hervey said. "You're able to process customers much faster. You can put a whole block of them in there and a bunch of customers can be ordering at one time instead of having a bottleneck at an order taker."
Hervey said the automatic upsells are a huge profit driver, allowing Sheetz to consistently and automatically offer upsells in a way that humans can't, since a human's upsell presentation would change from customer to customer. In addition, he said the kiosks save expensive waste.
"When you put a self-service kiosk in, misorders pretty much drop to zero," Hervey said. "They put it on a bright, easy-to-understand interface and it's easy to go back and change things. The number of misorders pretty much drops to zero."
Radiant builds the systems to be extremely durable. Hervey said even a clean c-store presents a harsh environment for equipment, with dirt, debris and foot traffic. Also, they try to make the units low maintenance, including as few moving parts as possible.
"Our flagship customer self-service terminal has one fan," Hervey said. "And it almost never turns on because it uses the case itself and other non-moving components to take the heat off the chips."
The innovations inside the store have led to innovations outside the store. Thirty-five locations have ordering kiosks next to the gas pumps. And Hervey said they've been popular enough to be included in all forthcoming Sheetz stores.
Each store, which is open 24 hours per day, has 20 to 25 employees — more than the typical c-store, according to Hervey, because each store has a kitchen. Without the kiosks simplifying the ordering, the kitchens would be far less feasible.
