by John Keller | Feb 3, 2015 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Technology, Industry News
According to Convenience Store News, longtime PriceAdvantage customer Royal Farms has opened a new location in Delaware, near the headquarters of Wawa. This is the first Royal Farms location in Delaware County, where Wawa is based. Royal Farms operates 160 Convenience Stores across the east coast.
Royal Farms Marketing Manager said “Every market we move into, we have had competition. And it’s not just from other convenience stores. It’s from grocery stores and fast-food restaurants.” Royal Farms President John Kemp attended the grand-opening event and presented donations to seven local charities.
Royal Farms has been using PriceAdvantage as their fuel price management system integrated with their Skyline Products electronic gas price signs for over seven years. Rob Rinehart, Director of Retail Petroleum had this to say:
“It is a penny up and penny down game. PriceAdvantage presents information to me in a simple and easy way so that I can review each store quickly to determine what price I want posted at the street in the next half an hour. We achieved a return on our investment in 12 months.”
Read more about their solution here.
by John Keller | Feb 2, 2015 | Fuel Price Management, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Industry News, Retail Fuel Margins
Brian Milne, the Energy Editor at Schneider Electric presented some interesting statistics today, via Convenience Store Decisions. Here are the highlights:
- Wholesale spot market is up
- US Crude production growth is predicted to continue
- The traditional trend of the spring season is set to reverse the current 17 week string of declines in US retail gasoline prices
- Futures contracts are at a two year high pointing to expected gasoline price increases
- Amount of gasoline supplied to the primary market is higher than last year and five years ago (consumer demand is up)
- The highest two weekly averages of the year for gasoline supplied to the primary market were the last two weeks of the year
- Oil prices continue to drop on NYMEX
The seasonal trend of every spring time involves the transition from winter blends to summer blends, scheduled refinery shutdown due to scheduled maintenance, and anticipated increased volume usage as the weather improves and consumers drive more.
What does this mean from a fuel price management perspective?
We should see the increase in wholesale prices that we always see this time of year, even if oil prices continue to decline. That means strong retail fuel margins will be hard to come by. As NACS reported in their consumer survey today, consumers are willing to drive five miles out of their way to save five cents per gallon, and 65% of those surveyed said they had taken advantage of a discount such as a loyalty program.
We should also see a prolonged increase in retail fuel volumes as consumers are willing to drive more at current prices.
by John Keller | Oct 28, 2014 | Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Industry News, Retail Fuel Margins
According to Lundberg Survey, Inc., unbranded rack prices are starting to rebound, and that means we may very well start to see the average retail fuel price start to bounce back up as well. Read more at CSP.net here.
The retail price of unleaded has fallen $.1818 over the past two weeks to $3.0759. That’s $0.65 per gallon lower than the peak price of 2014 on May 2, and the lowest price in four years.
If we see rack prices drop again, it will be because global supply continues its downward pressure. As always, eyes are on OPEC to see if they continue their recent strategy of strong sales at current competitive but profitable prices, ignoring requests from Venezuela to cut production levels so prices can increase to a level closer to what Venezuela needs to be profitable. The next OPEC meeting is November 26.
My guess is that prices settle at current levels, with perhaps a slight increase, until the OPEC meeting.
by John Keller | Oct 21, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Software, Industry News
NACS announced new members on their Board of Directors, and two of the five new members represent PriceAdvantage customers.
Anthony Bartys, senior vice president and COO of CST Brands joins the NACS Board, as does Stephen Christopher Spinks, CEO of The Spinx Company.
Other PriceAdvantage customers already on the NACS Board of Directors include Joseph Sheetz from Sheetz, Edward Holmes from Holmes Oil, and Kevin Smartt of Kwik Chek Food Stores.
The PriceAdvantage team is proud to partner with such influential industry leaders as those on the NACS Board of Directors.
by John Keller | Sep 12, 2014 | Fuel Price Management, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Technology, Fuel Software, Industry News
The Pinnacle Summit 2014 event in Dallas this week provided the perfect venue for Pinnacle customers to learn more about the upcoming multi-faceted PriceAdvantage integration. Response to the integration announcement was overwhelmingly positive.
The Pinnacle integration is scheduled for release in Q4 of this year and includes the following elements:
- Pinnacle Palm POS: PriceAdvantage price changes can be executed at the Palm POS. This is now the sixth POS system that works with PriceAdvantage.
- Pinnacle Palm POS: PriceAdvantage receives periodic volume feeds from the Pinnacle tank monitor web service to allow fuel analysts to see fuel sales in near-realtime and make adjustments to fuel pricing strategies throughout the day; get aggressive with margins to make up lost volumes from the morning so as to regain those volumes during the evening commute; leave prices alone if volumes remain strong despite competitive market moves downward.
- Pinnacle Manager Workstation: PriceAdvantage collects fuel and merchandise sales by store for performance reporting to understand customer profiles and market trends in consumer behavior. These kinds of reports can help understand whether or not, and to what degree, fuel sales impact in-store sales.
The folks at Pinnacle are working closely with the PriceAdvantage team, and the upcoming solution promises to be very powerful.
by John Keller | Sep 5, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Technology, Industry News, PriceAdvantage
There’s a great article on CNBC about how “mom and pop shops are flying to the cloud“, explaining how small businesses are now able to leverage cloud technology and bypass large infrastructure investments to level the playing field against much larger companies.
Nowhere are we seeing better examples of this than in the c-store industry, where c-store chains of 100 stores and under are using PriceAdvantage for fuel price management.
Back in early January of 2012, Parker’s was an early adapter of PriceAdvantage in the cloud, managing retail fuel pricing for their stores. Then it was Volta Oil in June of 2012 for their 60 stores, followed by Flyers Energy for all their locations in December, 2012. Then in 2013 it was five more c-store chains deploying PriceAdvantage in the cloud, including Kocolene, Family Express, Slidell Oil’s Purple Cow Stores, Vintners Distributors, and Sam’s Mart.
In 2014 we’ve added several more PriceAdvantage customers to our cloud environment, including Pic-n-Pac, Speedy Q Markets, J & H Oil, and Kwik Chek Food Stores.
Our cloud customers love that they can leave the infrastructure setup to the PriceAdvantage team, and have their fuel price management solution up and running so quickly. Upgrades to new versions are a snap as well, and require little to no IT resources on their end. And since all our cloud customers are using Rackspace servers, we can all trust that the data is safe and secure.
Gone are the days when only the largest companies can afford the investment required to install and maintain a robust fuel price management system. The cloud solution of PriceAdvantage with Rackspace makes it affordable to everyone.
