John Roscoe (far left, at a NACS meeting in Dallas, Texas) is one of the retailers who founded NACS on August 14, 1961. He played an instrumental role in many of the innovations related to the early growth of the industry, including popularizing self-serve gasoline. He lives in Prescott, Arizona, with his wife Marilynn and wrote this after his daily eight-mile bike ride.

What are you most proud of from your time in the convenience retailing industry?

I’m proud that my small store experience forced me to learn and understand the principles of successful retailing. When I started our business in Denver in 1957, I copied a concept that was successful in Texas. We thought we had a business plan we could accomplish and it would lead us to riches. It wasn’t that simple.

We learned that we needed to work hard and try out new things or go broke. You learn when things are intense. We developed new programs and strategies when we found out that what we were doing wouldn’t pay the way. We were innovative because we had to be. We made a concept that was profitable in warm-weather states (where operators would open each day by rolling up bay doors) into a retail offer that could work anywhere.

Chance got us into the gasoline business in 1964, and gasoline changed the business. It took the industry 10 to 15 years to learn what I learned in one day—and to embrace it. In fact, when I presented the concept of self-service gasoline to the industry at the 1964 NACS Annual Meeting, it was not of great interest. I was in a panel discussion along with someone who operated a meat market in a session called “New Concepts of Merchandising for Profit.” After our presentations, all of the questions from the floor were directed to the meat market operator. Gasoline sparked no one’s interest.

However, gasoline changed our business. You could add two pumps to a store and increase margin dollars by about 50%. The total cost was about $10,000 and the sale of gasoline increased store traffic. It took the same real estate and the same personnel. Convenience stores were in the other guy’s business without absorbing the other guy’s costs. Convenience stores became the low-cost provider of gasoline.

Sixty-two years ago, I was invited to attend a meeting in Kansas City with 12 other drive-in store operators to create a national association to represent their interests. The group was set to name the association with the term “bantam stores” or “drive-in market stores.” I held out until we adopted the name “convenience stores.”

Today, I’m not sure I did the industry a favor. We’d all be better off with another name. I think the industry should concentrate on selling things at the lowest price possible and giving convenience away. Volume generally begets profits, like with gasoline.

It doesn’t have to be done in one move. The easy things can be done first. Stores can easily become the place people buy beer and other beverages in volume, instead of just on a convenience basis. Price and promotions are key. Stores can become the basic supplier of things that people use every day. They can become different kinds of stores. Let efficiency of operation become your philosophy for profit.