Pride C Stores

T We have a Pride of Carroll Stream, we have a Pride of Patavia, and we do that intentionally because we not only take pride in how we run the station, but we take pride in the community that we're in. We want to run our stores so well that somebody will come to us even if we're not the lowest on gas on the street. What really drives customer traffic is Pride's Food Service concept, Urban Counter. We really want to come up with a concept where people could come in and get food that they wouldn'typically expect from a convenience store gas station and also have it be just as good as any other place out there and for less money. We wanted to stress that it's local, That is fresh. That's really kind of why we wanted to use the name Urban Counter. Plus we thought it was, cool name. All of our employees wear chef coats. They all have the purple hats on, the purple and counter hats, and it's just an overall feel and appearance that we're trying to push. Some people are kind of shocked when they come in and, So it's been a little bit of a shock at first when we had they didn't realize that when we asked them how they'd like to cook medi We put to go menus for the Urban Counter concept that we have inside. So when people come in, if they don't have time to come in and purchase food, they could take it to go menu, bring it home, take a look at it, and hopefully next time they can come by and purchase food, burgers, whatever we have available. We also have some pictures of the food just so people can see the quality of the food that we have. I don'think you can even think offering new, I mean, people eat with their eyes. The first t We try to give it a separate feel so that people know that it is a separate food offering. It's just not somet So as you can see, the Urban Counter concept is connected to the convenience store. Both stores have a different look and a different feel, different flooring, different weig But someone that's coming into the Urban Counter can actually come into the convenience store or someone from the convenience store can go through to the Urban Counter. One of the client tells that we really want to try and push forward is the female shopper, So we started trying to figure out items that we could bring into the store that would appeal to those customers to get them in that normally might not come in here. The pride has grown wine sales by educating customers. Four years ago, we started upgrading the offering for wine. So went all the way up to $35 a bottle down to $5 a bottle. It's tough to really educate everyone that works in your store because we're not a wine shop. So we thought the wine inspector really was a really help the customer experience. Buying wine can be very confusing. We brought in Wine Spectator Magazine so people can actually look through the magazine to get an idea of what different varieties we have. And we also put Wine Spectator Radians on all the bottles so that anyone can come into the store and actually take a look and see what the Wine Spectator Radian is to help them determine what type of wine they want to buy. We have one location in Wheaton that was actually selling over a case a day in wine, we really, truly take pride in every location that we own and operate. We try to do t We just try to separate ourselves by having just a better experience for the cons The concept is also of interest to other trade groups. United Fresh had a conference in C And from all over, Canada, Mexico, all throughout the United States, they all seemed very impressed and they loved the food, w And I love the coffee, w And it was fun. Hopefully they got a good experience of it, w And then hopefully they'll tell people and then people will come back and they'll buy more stuff from Urban County.