Ampol was recognised with two major retail achievements at the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores (AACS) Awards held at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne last night.
The store won the 2021 AACS Corporate Store of the Year and the 2021 overall Store of the Year.
Ampol’s recently promoted general manager, and recently appointed board member of AACS, Skye Jackson, told C&I in an exclusive interview about why this store is so special.
“We are really honoured to have been recognised by AACS. It is a prestigious award within our industry.
“The team are so humbled and excited to receive this award and it has taken many months of work from multiple people to deliver this and we are so happy.
“This is all about taking your corner store to the next level and providing customer solutions. For example – you don’t know what you are having for dinner tonight and you are on your way home and you need to fill up your car – so you fill up with fuel and at the same time you can pull together the ingredients you need for spaghetti bolognaise for this evening.
“You don’t need to feel bad about getting take away for the kids – you can make a nice easy meal and put something on the plate that is healthy for the family.
“Listening to the Peter Jowett presentations from the young graduates, some of the ideas they have put forward are things we have executed with this concept – for example, delivering on a value focused top up shopper mission.
“The store was opened in November 2019, pre-Covid, and the results have exceeded our expectations and well beyond our business plan objectives we had in place for the store.
“The thing that has been pleasantly surprising has been the growth has not just been from the incremental categories that we have added such as produce, and protein and other incremental categories, it has been from our core business of confectionery, snacks, beverages that are significantly up on previous years.
“We thought there would be a bit of a cannibalisation factor of people buying into other products, we expected to retain and see some slight growth in some of those core categories, but the good news is that the basket is much bigger.”
Written by James Wells