Jared Scheeler:
Absolutely. As a little bit of recap, everybody in the industry is facing the same issues with labor that I am like not enough people interested in working. Labor rates are skyrocketing and my objective in bringing the team together was to look at ways to reinvent how we’ve always looked at labor. And like you said, everything was on the table. There were no bad ideas. We spent a good part of two days talking about this topic and this topic alone. We’ve had a few takeaways from it and I think they really worked out for us in positive ways. And then there’s some other things that we talked about that we’re working on as more of long term solutions.
We’re a seasonal industry in a sense, our summer business is certainly higher than winter, especially here in North Dakota. So we see a nice boost in the summer and it’s hard to adapt to that increase in business. We enacted some gig workers, in this case all younger workers who are covering specialty areas within our stores, and in most cases it’s the cooler vault. We’re pushing 1,200 individual beverages per day in some stores, that’s a lot to restock and it’s hard to absorb that with the existing labor that we schedule on a typical basis. What we did is we found a group of high school students, a large group of friends, and we challenged them to keep the cooler stocked. There’s a group of about eight and at one of our stores they fill a cooler shift once per day during the week. So we have eight workers filling five shifts only. We’re flexible with them, they’re flexible with us. We don’t care when they do it just as long as that cooler gets taken care of sometime during the day. We’ve done it for bakery too and that’s worked well for us.

Chris Blasinsky:
Is there any friendly competition among them? As a teenager, that’s what I would do.

Jared Scheeler:
They challenge each other. I did the cooler better than you, or sometimes they’ll go work the car wash, I made more tips in the car wash than you. I hear that banter all the time, but they’re having fun with it. What’s the point of work if we’re not going to enjoy it?

Jeff Lenard:
And where did that idea start from?

Jared Scheeler:
That that came back from talking to our team about how we can accomplish the things that we need to accomplish. We had an existing high school team member who works quite a few hours for us, he’s wise beyond his years, and he’s the one who reached out to his friends because his friends wanted to work. They wanted to earn some money and take advantage of the high labor rates that everybody’s paying right now. But with all the activities with sports and such that they were in the summer, it was hard for them to be able to do that. We granted them the flexibility to be able to make a few bucks, but also work when they want and when they can.

Chris Blasinsky:
Jared, I want to go back a second for the folks who may not know The Hub or familiar with the area that you’re in. Dickinson, North Dakota is relatively small. It’s a good tight knit community. We visited you several years ago for Ideas 2 Go and got the lay in the land. So in talking about these high school kids, they’re your customers.

Jared Scheeler:
Absolutely. Dickinson is a town of about 25,000 people, the rest of my stores are in towns of 2,500 or less, even down to 500 in one of the towns that we do business in. We’re a big part of the community, we always have been, so this is a natural fit for us to be able to reach out to these high school students and make them part of our team.

Jeff Lenard:
We talked about how you get ideas from staff. You also get ideas and share ideas when people come to Dickinson. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the folks who have visited?

Jared Scheeler:
One of the beautiful things about this industry is that we’re also willing to share what we know, share what we’ve learned, share our best practices, share things that haven’t worked. That comes into effect from big companies to small companies. I think right now in this age of consolidation, small retailers really need to stick together and have each other’s back. And when I became the chairman of NACS this past October, I made an objective to help as many small retailers as I can, to take their game to the next level. And that’s manifested itself in some visits that I’ve had.
It’s been a tremendous honor to host retailers from around the country right here in Dickinson to learn from each other. Kind of the dirty little secret is that they come thinking they’re learning from me and most of the time I take away more than I might have given them. There’s so many great retailers in this industry, I’ve had quite a few over the past this past calendar year. Clay and Mia Lambert came out from the Twin Cities and after the NACS Show, a gentleman who I had never met before was looking to build a store in the Dallas area. He wanted to jump on the new wave of what convenience ought to be. And then this past month, Chris Bambury from Sonoma, California, flew out to take a look at the operations. It’s been a tremendous honor to be able to host fellow retailers.

Chris Blasinsky:
So on the flip side of that, who did you get to visit in the last year?

Jared Scheeler:
I’m seemly always on the road for one reason or another, whether it’s travels through NACS or personal travels through my daughter’s basketball. I spent quite a bit of time in Twin Cities this summer, spent some time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and got a behind the scenes look at a Casey’s operation through a connection I have through NACS. And I also spent a lot of time visiting my old company that I used to work for, Bobby and Steve’s Auto World just built a new store in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jeff Lenard:
And I would imagine that when you hit the road with the family, they know you’re going to be making some stops along the way. Do you look at other formats?

Jared Scheeler:
I get so many ideas from other businesses in other channels that are innovative and a lot of it’s in foodservice because you see different types of cuisine or different site types of equipment, or different ways of going about business. That’s where I take so many mental notes. When I make road trips, I scheduled stops at various places that I want to see or various stores within our channel that I want to stop at. Whether it’s a high volume store in a busy area or a truck stop that has a food court containing four different QSRs, I want to see how they do it, how many people they have working, how the flow of business goes. I’m always a student of the industry, of retail and foodservice. I think a lot of times, especially here in North Dakota, you get caught up in the same old, same old. Take the opportunity to go to areas that are maybe more developed or more advanced or have more options. There’s so much to learn out there. I really enjoy that aspect of it.

Chris Blasinsky:
I was on the road a little bit this weekend and went through Haymarket in Virginia, and stopped at a Sheetz store that had three self checkout counters. One of the ideas that we’ve picked up on in the past year or two is self-checkout in convenience stores. There’s more proliferation within our industry in the last few years. Is that something that you’re looking at or do you already do it?

Jared Scheeler:
It is absolutely something that I’m looking at. If you would’ve asked me a year ago if I wanted to do self-checkout, I would’ve given you reason after reason after reason why I didn’t want to do it. In hindsight, none of it really makes sense. None of those ideas in my head really made sense because when I go to a grocery store or Walmart, I don’t care how many manned check lanes are open. I’m going to self check 100 times out of 100. I don’t care how big my order is and that’s just because I want to be in control. I think I’m faster. Why would that not carry over into our industry? So it’s something that I have been closed to in the past. At this year’s NACS Show, that’s doing to be one of my biggest things that I’ll be looking at is the best ways to implement self-checkout.

Chris Blasinsky:
For me, I’m kind of the opposite. When it’s a big grocery shop I get in the line so someone else can do it, but when it’s the small to medium where I can handle two or three bags, I’d rather do it.

Jared Scheeler:
That’s every single transaction in our industry – a relatively small transaction. I have to imagine that there’s an appetite for it out there.

Chris Blasinsky:
This is your year chairman and every year at the NACS Show, we turn the gavel over to someone else. You’ve had a pretty amazing year as the first chairman in a while who got to do the live events and didn’t have to be virtual and was able to get out and see things in the industry and travel. Coming to the end of the tenure, as they say, what are some of the things that you’ve seen and done that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do had it not been for the NACS chairmanship?

Jared Scheeler:
I do not take for granted how blessed I am that I’ve been able to get out and about, and see people have visitors here attend events as chairman, because we went a long stretch where a lot of that stuff just didn’t happen. The fact that we are moving back towards normalcy has just been great. And like I said, I feel extremely blessed by it, but looking back at the chairmanship, as I said earlier, my biggest takeaway was I was hoping to inspire more small retailers across this country by what I do, what I know, what I’ve learned, and hopefully, having the ability to share that. I’ve built friendships out of it and I’ve learned so many things that I didn’t know through these friendships. Having the ability to help and being in a position to help, I probably wouldn’t have had that opportunity if I weren’t being the NACS Chairman. It opens the doors to so many things, that’s my biggest takeaway from the year.

Jeff Lenard:
You have a lot of hats that you wear, and now you have a new one: coach. Anything that you’ve learned from your new role in coaching basketball?

Jared Scheeler:
A few months ago, I accepted a position as a head coach of high school girls basketball team. I have been coaching basketball for the past eight years, all at lower levels, so I’ve never been fully in charge of an entire program. There are so many parallels between coaching and running a business. It has reopened my eyes into the simplicity of how we ought to be dealing with our people within our stores from a leadership standpoint. What I’ve really discovered is that as a coach, you’re attempting to make a positive experience for everybody who’s in the program. And you’re attempting to meld all the pieces of a team into maximum performance. It’s such a simple concept, but I think in many ways I’ve lost sight of that within my businesses – making the most positive experience as possible for every individual on the team and trying to get the most out of what skills and strengths that they bring to the team. That’s been the wake up callof being in a coaching position and putting all those pieces together for maximum performance on the team. I found myself a little bit upset with myself that I kind of lost that over the years, but coaching has fired me back up.

Outro:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

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