Convenience store customer experience
Every store is also telling a story. The only question is who decides what it says.
Most customers grab what they came for and leave. A better experience slows them down, brings them back, and grows the basket. I help operators find what’s holding their stores back, and fix it.
The problem
Customers can find what they came for in even the worst store. But when the entrance is crowded, vendor displays have taken over, or the place feels tired, they stop shopping and start retrieving. They grab it, pay, and leave.
They never see the coffee bar. They never notice the new food program. They never pick up the item they didn’t know they wanted. A store that feels clear, cared for, and comfortable changes that, and earns more from the traffic it already has.
The idea
The work is closing the gap between what you meant your store to say and what it actually tells customers.
3:33
The average convenience store trip, from leaving the car to getting back in, according to NACS. A store says something in every one of those seconds.
The essays
Full essays coming soon.
Things I’ve come to believe
Reality is observable. Customers tell you where the friction is with their footsteps, their headlights, and what they reach for.
Hierarchy is design. When everything in a store is equally important, nothing is.
That means the person in front of you, not the generation or the average shopper someone assigned them to.
A store can run twelve businesses, and the customer should only ever have to feel one.
A prototype should repeat what customers trust, not every answer that worked on one piece of ground.
The real test is an ordinary Tuesday six months after opening, when nobody is coming to take a picture.
About
I came into convenience retail with an architecture degree and more confidence than I’d earned. Paragon Solutions, a convenience retail design firm in Fort Worth, is where a mentor took me under his wing and my real education began.
Since then I’ve spent more than sixteen years designing convenience stores across hundreds of projects: ground-up stores and remodels for single-store owners, small and regional chains, national prototype programs, and remodel rollouts for major chains.
Along the way I learned that the building is only half of it. What customers see, feel, and do inside it decides whether they come back. JEM is where I help operators get that half right.
JEM stands for Jason, Erin, and McDonald. The four dots on the seal are the family behind it.
Core values
A short newsletter on what makes stores work. Get new essays by email when they publish.
Walk in from the parking lot and look at what a customer sees first. If you’re working through a store, a remodel, or a prototype and want a second set of eyes, I’d like to hear about it.