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Open To Change
By Mary Ellen Kuhn
No old-school c-store retailing for Wisconsin’s
Open Pantry. The chain’s elegant new format addresses the needs of
discriminating female consumers without alienating core male shoppers.
New Berlin, Wis. — Chances are that your average working mom in this pleasant, upper-middle-class suburb doesn’t spend much time hanging out in bistros or martini bars. But thanks to the inviting, casually elegant décor of the Open Pantry convenience store here, she can sample that sort of ambiance each time she darts in to buy a gallon of milk, a cup of coffee or a candy bar.
The store, which opened early this year and has become
a prototype for the chain, features a streamlined, Frank Lloyd
Wright-inspired red brick exterior. Inside teal blue eaves provide an
appealing complement to walls that are sponge painted in warm shades of
blue, orange, yellow and green. The expansive coffee bar boasts real wood
cabinetry; the flooring is slate. The piece de resistance is a striking
stone fireplace surrounded by red leather armchairs and wooden tables and
chairs. The store has a wi-fi connection and two computer terminals that
allow for easy, complimentary Internet access.
Call it the coffee house of convenience stores.
It’s all part of a bold retailing experiment launched by Pleasant
Prairie, Wis.-based Open Pantry Food Marts, a privately held company with
33 corporately owned stores and four franchise stores. Open Pantry was
founded in 1966, and for most of its history operated in traditional
c-store mode, supplying residents of Southeastern Wisconsin with the
convenience-store staples of beer, cigarettes and snacks.
A couple of years ago, however, Open Pantry president,
Robert Buhler, who had acquired the business from his father in 1996,
decided that the time had come to try something different. Enter
convenience retailing veteran Jim Fiene, who had spent 17 years with
Louisville, Ky.-based Thornton Oil Co. and joined the Open Pantry team in
2003 as senior vice president of sales and operations.
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A new vision
“When I came on board with Open Pantry, it
really was a fresh slate,” says Fiene. “So Robert and I spent a
lot of time together (some of it in upscale coffee shops) … making
very clear decisions about what we wanted to become and who our customer
was going to be.”
The two men concluded that there was an opportunity to
woo busy female consumers — a target audience whose needs already
were reflected in the words of Open Pantry’s longtime slogan,
“You need time. We can help.” They also acknowledged that
convenience stores had been losing coffee sales for years to Starbucks and
other upscale coffee brewers.
Thus their plan to reinvent Open Pantry included
upgrading the coffee offer with a proprietary, gourmet brew they christened
Willow Creek, adding a burrito bar as a foodservice option, and expanding
the in-store seating area. At the same time, the chain revamped its product
assortment to better address the needs of moms seeking a last-minute dinner
ingredient or lunchbox item.
“If we wanted to be a grocery store alternative,
we needed to have a choice of three or four mayonnaise offerings on the
shelf and two or three ketchup offerings,” explains Fiene. The
challenge, of course, was allocating 600 square feet for seating and the
coffee bar while simultaneously adding new grocery SKUs — but still
keeping the store’s footprint to just over 3,000 square feet.
To accommodate that, the chain did some SKU
rationalization in categories including snacks, “which created a
bigger demand on our snack providers to keep us in stock,” says
Fiene. Fortunately, he continues, Open Pantry’s direct-store-delivery
vendors have been up to the challenge. “We get great support from our
business partners,” he says. “If it’s twice-a-week
deliveries, they do it. If it’s three times a week, they do
that.”
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Display shippers. Despite the emphasis on ambiance inside Open Pantry stores, Fiene doesn’t embrace a “clean floor” policy when it comes to display shippers. Just the opposite. You’ll find two to four candy display shippers on the store floor most of the time. 
Leftover seasonal candy. The chain stocks a small selection of seasonal candy, but is hyper-vigilant about disposing of it after the holiday. “We mark it down the day of the holiday to 50 percent off,” says Fiene. “Then we write it off and throw it away right after the holiday. We try to be very disciplined about that. When you walk into a store in February and see Christmas candy out, that’s not fresh. And then people start to consider everything in the store not fresh.”
Also on the good news front, c-store patrons quickly
warmed to the upscale, but reasonably priced Willow Creek brew. Currently
the average Open Pantry store that has been “fully Willow
Creeked,” as Fiene phrases it, sells between 150 and 225 cups of
coffee daily.
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Plenty of room for candy
The new store design affords ample space for candy,
thanks in part to Open Pantry’s space-efficient system of
72-inch-high chrome shelving on wheels. The inline candy section is located
across from the checkout. The aisles are relatively short, with the
shelving positioned on a diagonal, which makes the candy assortment both
easily visible and readily accessible to store patrons.
At the checkout, two sets of wooden shelves extend out
from the register, thus accomplishing the dual goal of providing a great
home for the impulse candy and gum assortment while also encouraging
shoppers to queue up. In addition to candy bars and gum, the checkout
display in the New Berlin store features a selection of branded peg bag
candy, which makes sense, says Fiene, because the store is located near an
office park. He adds that the checkout candy and gum displays are
plan-o-grammed on a store-by-store basis, taking the needs and
opportunities of the local market into consideration.
Theater box candy is a particularly strong
confectionery performer for Open Panty, as are licensed movie tie-ins. In
addition, as the chain’s Willow Creek coffee sales have picked up
steam, so has its gum and mints business.
“We knew that coffee consumers wanted gums and
mints, so we wanted to expand that category,” says Fiene.
“That’s been one of our true success stories — gum and
mints,” he continues, noting that price points range from $1.29 to
$2.19 for the more upscale offerings.
To further capitalize on the breath freshener/coffee
pairing, the chain has partnered with Wrigley on a customized display
fixture built into the Willow Creek coffee bars. “We display their
products exclusively at our coffee bars,” says Fiene. “And they
determine what goes into that space. … They really pump in the new
brands,” he adds.
Given the chain’s objective of targeting female
shoppers, it’s also been important to stay well-stocked with energy
bars and other products positioned for the health-conscious. That too, has
been a “great market,” for Open Pantry, Fiene reports.
Interestingly, one subset of the confectionery
category that Open Pantry has opted not to embrace is kids’ candy,
despite the fact that the chain is actively targeting moms. “We made
a conscious decision to take that out of our sets,” says Fiene.
“Something had to go.” Although the stores get plenty of kid
traffic, many parents are happy to avoid being pressured to purchase the
latest novelty product, Fiene contends.
You also won’t find any bargain-priced peg candy
(i.e. two for $1 products) in the upgraded Open Pantry stores. “We
don’t offer a budget alternative inside of our stores,” says
Fiene.
“If a shopper is low-price-driven, we’re
not going to get him,” Fiene acknowledges. “We have to allow
someone else to get him.”
Taking that stance appears to be working well for Open
Pantry. One notable measure of success is a nice increase in the size of
the average register ring. “Our average ring today is about $2 higher
than the price of a pack of cigarettes, while in the past it was about the
price of a pack of cigarettes,” says Fiene.
More evidence of the company’s commitment to its
new convenience-store model came late this summer when company president
Buhler announced he was putting 10 existing sites up for sale in order to
generate revenue needed to develop between 10 and 30 of the new Open Pantry
formats in the Madison, Wis., and Milwaukee area markets.
Currently, eight stores, including the one in New
Berlin, feature expanded/upgraded foodservice seating areas, and 18 boast
the full Willow Creek coffee bar. The company has three design prototypes
for its retail outlets. In addition to the Prairie-style New Berlin
neighborhood store, there is a model designed for more commercial settings
and a third, very contemporary-looking prototype design.
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