Retailing family revamps Coventry c-store

The Nisa partners have introduced a raft of new services to their Millennium View store to appeal to the transitional demographic that make up a large proportion of the store’s customers, which and have seen immediate results in sales and footfall, with an increase of 20 to 25% across food-to-go since the changes.

The store, which is located across the road from the bus station in the heart of the city, was launched in February 2019 and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

A serve-over food counter originally installed on the shop floor has been replaced by a bank of machines including f’real, Tango Ice Blast, Rollover, fwip, PG Tips, a second Costa Coffee, as well as self-serve hot food.

A further chiller was added to the store at the end of last year to enable additional chilled food-to-go sales and the mini overhaul has also seen a re-lay of the general flow of the store with the licensed section opened up to better show off the offer and new signage has been erected to the exterior of the shop to better advertise the 24-hour opening hours.

Ricky Dougall said: “Customers didn’t want to wait for their food. We had to change that whole idea to fit in better with the transitional customers we mostly get in the store. The bus drivers especially were demanding something faster and more efficient from the food-to-go.”

He added: “It’s working much better for the shoppers now and our food-to-go area (FTG) is much more viable for us because it’s less expensive to run and we don’t need to staff the area.

“We have seen an increase in spend in FTG since the alterations and adding in the new machines has definitely added incremental sales as well with a 30% increase year-on-year across the store.”