Schoolteacher’s Dream (Eagles Landing Travel Plazas—Part 1)

Eagles Landing stake out the wide open spaces of the Western U.S. as destination hubs for commercial and recreational travelers.

Eagles Landing Travel Plazas is an SSCS multi-site customer doing business across six states—Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Iowa, and Kansas. The organization dominates in the mostly wide open spaces of the Western half of the United States, an area spreading across literally thousands of miles.

Interestingly, enough, it’s a success story that began in 1987 as the dream of a schoolteacher. Not that Mark Yardley didn’t love instructing high schoolers in a classroom, but as a businessman at heart, he found himself drawn to fuel retailing.

“Mark liked teaching, but he really liked the idea of running a store,” says Scott Stuart, Eagles’ Landing’s franchise operator, himself a veteran of over 35 years of food, merchandise and fuel retailing. “I think he saw the growth potential in it; the promise in it.”

That first store was in a little town called Beaver, Utah, which is located right on U.S. Interstate 15, the main thoroughfare between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. The location was a huge part of the site’s potential. It had a steady flow of customers that would never truly be exhausted. Freight and long-haul truck drivers were part of the mix, and so were cars full of families visiting the natural attractions and parks scattered throughout the market— Zion, Bryce Canyon, Lake Powell, and more.

As Mark worked to build up his new purchase, it became apparent that the Travel Center (Plaza) model was the right fit: a more modern take on the truck stop that was family friendly and open to incorporating additional profit centers, like quick serve and fast casual restaurants.

As Eagles Landing built and acquired stores in the decades that followed, they looked for sites that, like their inaugural operation, were right off main thoroughfares and interstate highways (today that includes I-70 and I-80, in addition to I-15). These locations tended to be a considerable distance from major commercial centers, with plenty of land available to shape into self-contained “destination” hubs for commercial and recreational travelers.

These big footprints allowed Eagles’ Landing stores to include, depending upon the location, such amenities as truck parking, rest areas, showers, EV charging stations, and tire service. About a third of the sites include restaurants like Wendy’s, Taco John’s, Chester’s Chicken, and regional offerings like Beaver Taco, again depending on the location.

Overall, It’s a great success story, but not one without significant challenges. At the top of the list was gaining control over item pricing across the entire enterprise, even as Eagles Landing had added seven stores since 2017.

Part of the issue is the far-flung nature of the enterprise. If you don’t have a central clearing house to review and approve the new items and cost changes occurring at every store—in an up-to-date fashion, no less—the price book can get out of alignment with your sites before you know it. And even though the Travel Plaza model has been replicated similarly across Eagles Landing stores, their inventory is far from identical.

“About a third of our merchandise varies among sites,” explains Stuart. “The center of the store, mostly traditional grocery sourced from Core-Mark, is relatively the same, but we provide a lot of autonomy to the individual store to select what they think will work in their markets, and what smaller, local vendors are going to provide it. The cooler contents tend to be different, for one thing. And we’ve only started to scratch the surface in terms of deli offerings. There will likely be more variety between stores there, too.”

The difficulty of managing inventory was maximized by Eagles’ Landing’s previous POS system; it was simply getting too old and limited operationally to meet the demands of a growing store with an increasing variety of merchandise rolling over from site to site with increasing frequency. The registers couldn’t keep up and were cumbersome to use.

So Eagles Landing began to shop for a more modern POS and back office solution since, in this day and age, a good POS system can only reach its potential with the use of a powerful but flexible back office like SSCS’ Computerized Daily Book, it wasn’t long before the Eagles Landing team got in contact with SSCS. However, it was one of our other products, Central Price Book. that made the profound impact on the success of the store as a result of the changeover.

We’ll talk about that in Part 2, coming next week.