QuikTrip continues Chicago expansion

Dive Brief:

QuikTrip opened its second remote travel center near Chicago on July 20. The store is located in Lansing, Illinois, a suburb about 20 miles south of downtown Chicago, according to an emailed company announcement.
The travel center features a larger parking lot than a standard QuikTrip, with 20 gas fueling positions and eight diesel bays for trucks. It also offers an expanded foodservice offering, featuring the retailer’s made-to-order QT Kitchens operation.
This comes three months after QuikTrip opened its first Chicago-area location, and nearly a year after disclosing plans to enter the Windy City. Including traditional locations, this is QuikTrip’s eighth location in Illinois.

Dive Insight:

Although QuikTrip’s newest Chicago-area travel center faces only smaller-format c-stores in the area, it’s just down the street from a Walmart Supercenter, which promises to generate competition between the two retailers in the neighborhood.

“The Travel Center allows us to not only create meaningful connections with our new local customers in Lansing, but also serve travelers in this busy part of the country,” said Aisha Jefferson-Smith, QuikTrip’s corporate communications manager.

While QuikTrip has been in the travel center business since the 1990s, the convenience retailer has been particularly focused on its “remote” truck stop concept since debuting the format in 2020.

The difference between QuikTrip’s regular travel centers and its remote format is that the latter are only built in new markets, specifically targeting areas near one of QuikTrip’s food distribution centers, Jefferson-Smith, said in a previous interview.

To date, QuikTrip has 97 travel centers overall, according to its website.

Other traditional convenience retailers like Casey’s General Stores, RaceTrac and Wawa have also begun dipping their toes into travel centers, with several experts noting high margins and EV charging as major reasons for doing so.

Founded in 1958, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based QuikTrip operates more than 1,000 convenience stores in 17 states.