Mega! Consumers Cooperative, a Midwestern convenience retailer, has closed all of its remaining c-stores less than two years after declaring bankruptcy, after a financially challenging year.

The co-op was working through restructuring after declaring bankruptcy in 2023 and closing several stores. In May, Mega! ended its franchise agreement with Holiday and rebranded to BP stations.

Mega’s CEO Mike Buck said those restructuring efforts were at the same time as significant cash flow pressures caused by reduced fuel margins, resulting in insolvency.

The situation is understandable. After all, inflation, pilfering and other fiscal concerns have put pressure on the convenience retail industry for the past few years, causing several other c-store operators to go out of business recently, including Mountain Express, Gas Hub and Choice Market.

But is this situation unavoidable?

In many cases, the answer is NO. If the management pays sufficient attention to the early warning signs while doing store performance analysis, and does not rely exclusively on limited data provided by the stores, there’s a possibility of taking appropriate measures early in the game and save the underperforming locations, either by management overhaul, or by adjustment of store offering to better reflect the customers’ needs. Retail performance management and store performance management don’t always require expensive software. One of Ticon’s key goals is to provide business owners with actionable insights for successful performance management in retail.

If you want to keep your revenue stream, and even increase it, consider product offerings that your target audience is seeking, and provide the appropriate retail site selection at your locations.

And the key to this is something we call KYC – Know Your Customer. At Ticon, we provide accurate, precise and reliable demographic analysis reports about the population anywhere in the country, with 1-mile granularity. This data, fortified by our second-to-none historical traffic data analysis, will lead you to making grounded, insightful decisions at every step of the way – from retail retail site location analysis and site selection, selecting the most promising site, to choosing the right store format, to excelling in the in-store product offering, to operating the store with maximum efficiency.

Visit us today to get on the fast track to success!