Dive Brief:

• QuikTrip will close its fuel-less convenience store in Atlanta’s Midtown neighborhood on May 3, a company spokesperson confirmed on Friday.
• The location, which opened in June 2016, was the company’s first non-fuel convenience store. QuikTrip is shuttering the location after confirming it hadn’t been meeting company expectations around performance as well as customer and employee safety, the spokesperson said.
• A couple years ago, QuikTrip seemed to be all-in on expanding its non-fuel c-store concept. But that appears to have stalled, as QuikTrip’s spokesperson confirmed the company only has one other such store.

Dive Insight:

When QuikTrip piloted its fuel-less c-store concept in 2016, the company said at the time that these types of locations were part of its long-term strategy to reach non-traditional market segments. These locations emphasized food and merchandise over fuel and featured the chain’s QT Kitchens concept, which offers prepared foods including breakfast scrambles, barbecue brisket and chicken and pulled pork sandwiches.

In late 2022, the company debuted a non-fuel c-store in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, that also featured Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. This is QuikTrip’s only non-fuel site that’s still operating today, the company’s spokesperson said.

At that time, QuikTrip still said it intended to roll out more fuel-less stores moving forward. However, when asked on Friday if QuikTrip plans to roll out more non-fuel convenience stores in the future, the company’s spokesperson did not offer a clear answer, only noting that QuikTrip will continue targeting big cities around the country in its expansion plans.

“QuikTrip is always working on new store developments and will use this pilot concept as a learning experience to help build our brand as we expand in metropolitan areas nationwide,” the spokesperson said.

Fuel-less convenience stores became more common over the years as retailers sought ways to meet consumer needs outside of fuel amid growing expectations for quality food and the rise of electric vehicles. 

Besides QuikTrip, c-store chains like Choice Market and Kum & Go had several of these types of stores. While Choice Market is still growing, Kum & Go has closed all of its non-fuel stores — the last of which shuttered earlier this year — due to a lack of consistency across all its sites.

QuikTrip also isn’t the only major c-store chain in recent years to shutter some stores because of safety concerns. In late 2022, Wawa closed nearly a dozen stores in Philadelphia due to crime issues, while RaceTrac shut down a store in Atlanta earlier this year after a man was killed outside of it.

Founded in 1958, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based QuikTrip operates around 1,000 convenience stores across 17 states and employs more than 28,000 people.