Springtime is for C-Stores

Spring season is synonymous with new beginnings, which makes it a great opportunity for c-stores.

Throughout the northern hemisphere, spring has sprung. It made the leap on March 20, a.k.a, the Vernal (Spring) Equinox. Two-thirds of the country is starting to warm up, with clearer days around the corner for the rest.

It’s inevitable, really: people all over the world recognize spring as a time for new beginnings. New Year’s Eve and its resolutions get the hype, but the Vernal Equinox is recognized by many as the true start of the year. It’s a far older tradition that Auld Lang Syne, too, practiced at least as far back as the Babylonians, in 700 B.C.E or so.

The almost-as-old Persian/Zoroastrian spring start of the year is called Nowruz, which is still celebrated in Iran and some parts of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central and South Asia. The early Roman calendar was influenced by traditions like it at first, but the spring start to the year lasted only a short while, before the Empire tried their own thing.

The celebration of spring isn’t just ancient, it spreads across plenty of cultures, in many unique ways. There’s the Songkran Water Festival in Thailand, nicknamed the “World’s Largest Water Fight.” And India’s Holi, the “festival of love” that brings communities together for giant street parties. If you’ve got two weeks, the Chilam Joshi, of Pakistan’s Kalash people, offers food, dance, mulberry wine, and if you’re up to it, a trek into the Valley of Kadash, nestled amidst the Hindukush mountains.

Closer to home, William Shakespeare weighed in on spring, most famously with Sonnet 98. And then there’s our uniquely American take on that venerable symbol of spring bounty, the Easter Bunny. Brought to our shores by German immigrants and turbocharged into a universally loved icon by the media[1], it dovetails nicely with the c-store retailer’s efforts to maximize the commercial potential of the season. Which can be done many ways.

For example, with more consumers out and about as the weather begins to improve, SSCS customer, Onvo, promotes its locations as a clean, well-lighted place to enjoy the spring sunshine. Other c-stores, like TXB, peg the season as an excellent time to roll out new spring menus, or like Casey’s, roll out springtime coffee creations.

Japanese c-stores, no strangers to effective marketing, tie any number of spring promotions into the concurrent blooming of cherry blossom trees across the country. It isn’t without precedent for a c-store to bring out a new spring line of clothing, either. And if you’re looking for a little cash to help you celebrate the season, there’s always SSCS customer Circle K’s contest, “The Big Circle K Giveaway” running through most of spring.

While the themes of new beginnings, renewal, and growth are identified with springtime, they also apply to a successful c-store, which must continually refresh and reinvent itself to keep up with developments in their market. C-store software like SSCS’s not only makes fast adaptation to change possible, it provides detailed insights about your store, simply not possible without it. Looking for springtime-like rejuvenation for your business? Please give us a call at (800) 972-7277 and we can chat about it.

[1] Starting with newspaper coverage somewhere around the first decade of the 20th Century.