The Roots of SSCS

SSCS was born out of the industry it serves. That’s an advantage for our customers.

One thing that’s cool about SSCS is that we were born out of the retail petroleum industry. You’ll find us in the place we started 35 years ago, on the Central Coast of California. (For a historical overview of SSCS, click here.)

Stable roots contribute to a strong foundation for SSCS that, over the years, our customers have come to associate with stability and trust. It’s part of our identity; we take a lot of pride in it.

In fact, our company’s roots in industry go back even further: to the 1940’s. The father of our company’s founder owned a gas station in downtown Pacific Grove, a charming little town near SSCS that we covered in this blog post. The site looked like this in the 1960’s:

If you visit that location today, you’ll find the Lighthouse Movie Theater standing on it (the original gas station eventually moved to a brand new building a half dozen blocks down the street where it still does business today). As a point of reference that’s the same building across the street, colorfully refurbished:

Believe it or not, this intersection was once home to four (!) gas stations, one on each corner, a glimpse of the industry before it began to consolidate in earnest. One of these has been re-purposed as a sandwich shop and boutique:

SSCS’s longevity and roots set us apart. Three generations of immersion in the industry has fostered our inside-out familiarity with it, unique among technology solutions companies. This experience positions us to best understand the needs of our customers so we can address them expediently.

In addition, our long association with retail petroleum fosters the kind of insight that helps us anticipate where the market is going—the same kind of acumen our founder possessed when he, in the late 1970’s concluded that progressive, multi-site operations like his own would have to computerize to compete and thrive. He learned how to code, hired a small team of programmers to help him and over time we grew. And grew. Close to four decades later, we’re helping more petroleum retailers across North America than ever improve their profitability and performance.

This is a true American success story, one we’re delighted to participate in. That it started in charming Pacific Grove—known as “America’s Last Hometown”—seems all the more fitting.