Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: September 22nd, 2019, 7:01 pm This was previously a USA Gas station and originally a Shell before that. There is no walk in convenience store. There is a cashier booth which sells a limited supply of bottled drinks and snacks. Perhaps, they could add a convenience store, but they would need to get rid of the single row of parking spaces to make room. I did not see any soda fountain. This gas station has limited space and no room to expand. There are apartments literally feet away on the sides. I do not know how people can stand the gas fumes right outside their windows.
USA had a lot of stations like that. Given that Speedway's strength is a consistent and fairly well thought out c-store strategy and loyalty program, I am not really sure what they bring to the table for this type of location. Unless there is a high demand for tobacco sales that can take place from that cashier booth. That was the old USA strategy before they got bought out; cheap gas and cheap tobacco. I was always amazed how much tobacco USA sold from its booths or drive through pay windows. Many of these stations in CA that are being converted to Speedway started out as unbranded/discount type stations, either as Beacon/Ultramar or as USA. It was under Tesoro they got branded, and some of these sites I think only loosely met branding standards for the brands anyway. So converting them back to discount/unbranded operations is not a completely untested idea.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by Alpha8472 »

The Mobil gas station in San Leandro, California has just been remodeled. The canopy is now silver. The pumps are white with red. This was a former Flyers gas. I believe that this location will become a Speedway any day now. However, the Mobil logo on the gas price sign still has not been changed. The convenience store at this location is huge and there are 2 large gas canopies. Perhaps this will become a very visible Speedway location. It is at a busy intersection near the freeway ramps.

I am interested to see how Speedway runs a store. Mobil already had remodeled this once rundown location into one of the nicest Mobil stations that I have ever seen. It had gas canopies with bright blue neon lights. It was spectacular to see at night. Now it looks kind of plain after the remodel since there is no more neon. Flyers was a very low cost gas station. Mobil was somewhat on the low side still, but where does Speedway stand on price?
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by TW-Upstate NY »

Shortly after Speedway took over all the Hess stations around here, they stated they would have the lowest priced gas in the market and they've pretty much kept to that. They may only beat the competition in the immediate area by one cent a gallon but they have done what they said they were going to do at least where I live.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by Alpha8472 »

Another Mobile gas station near me has been transformed into a Speedway Express. The station received a complete exterior remodel with new gas pumps. The gas canopy has been changed to silver gray. This location has a convenience store and it still was branded as Speedway Express. I thought Speedway Express meant that it was a station without a convenience store. What is the difference between Speedway Express and a regular Speedway? The gas prices have gone up. Or perhaps, it is just the regular gas prices going up. The price of gas is slightly lower than other gas stations nearby, but not the lowest in the region. Costco is still much lower.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by storewanderer »

Alpha8472 wrote: October 5th, 2019, 10:07 pm Another Mobile gas station near me has been transformed into a Speedway Express. The station received a complete exterior remodel with new gas pumps. The gas canopy has been changed to silver gray. This location has a convenience store and it still was branded as Speedway Express. I thought Speedway Express meant that it was a station without a convenience store. What is the difference between Speedway Express and a regular Speedway? The gas prices have gone up. Or perhaps, it is just the regular gas prices going up. The price of gas is slightly lower than other gas stations nearby, but not the lowest in the region. Costco is still much lower.
I've never seen a Speedway Express so not sure what that is.

Gas has been going up a lot here in Nevada. Like up 30-40 cents in the past two weeks.

I went to two of these recently rebranded Speedway sites today. No sign of Mobil left. The stores are not there yet. They installed Speedway cash registers but I didn't see a kiosk for the Speedy Rewards program. Maybe I missed it at one, but the other definitely did not have one. Still on the weird generic coffee/soda program from before using the 20+ year old equipment with few flavors, no Speeedway branded cups, etc. I guess that part is coming later. It seems like it should be there now. They redecorated the inside of one of the stores (just the walls) but the other store still looked like about 1988 inside, at best.

Both stores had the aisles completely remerchandised and Speedway product added in. The shelves were fully stocked. One store was having a major "clearance" sale with a ton of old inventory in crates all over the store. I guess this one was still a dealer site run by Anabi Oil until late last week and they came in and took it over.

So, they are offering a .10/gallon fuel discount with Speedy Rewards card, which they are handing out in the store. One of the stores, the employees were not offering the card nor asking anyone for the card. The other store, they were offering the card to anyone who would take it and mentioning the .10/gallon fuel discount this week. Gas price (posted price, before the rewards card) at both was .10 above the nearby cash/debit Arco, and .14-.34 below the nearby 76 and Chevron stations.

I see they have re-done the pumps and now process via the gas pump chip cards. They added tap as well on the pumps but it says "coming soon." If you remove your card too soon, you get treated to a video about "changes to our pumps" and "enhanced credit card security" while the pump cycles through a reset which seems to take a while. Or at least that was the video I got. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Never thought I'd see Speedway in California, it sure seems out of place.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by jamcool »

In New Mexico, all of the Giant locations have been converted to Speedway. Arizona is probably is next, the question is do company owned AM-PMs get converted to Speedway? Most of Giant’s locations are in Tucson, Yuma, and Northern Arizona, with a few AM-PMs scattered in those areas. Most of the AM-PMs are in Phoenix most are company owned. Does Speedway convert, buy, or build in Phoenix, or ignore the market totally
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by storewanderer »

jamcool wrote: October 6th, 2019, 5:46 pm In New Mexico, all of the Giant locations have been converted to Speedway. Arizona is probably is next, the question is do company owned AM-PMs get converted to Speedway? Most of Giant’s locations are in Tucson, Yuma, and Northern Arizona, with a few AM-PMs scattered in those areas. Most of the AM-PMs are in Phoenix most are company owned. Does Speedway convert, buy, or build in Phoenix, or ignore the market totally
I think they're doing Arizona right now. Not sure why they skipped SoCal and went to NorCal first. I didn't know the Arcos in Phoenix were company operated, when did that happen? They were previously under multiple franchisees, the few that have managed to stay in business alongside Quik Trip and Circle K. BP had sold all of that along with the associated real estate off, before selling the Arco brand to Tesoro.

What they have stated is everything company operated will be Speedway. The gray area is what isn't company operated, what happens to it. Because they have a lot of company owned/multi site operator operated sites running Shell, Mobil, USA branding and so far they have been taking a lot of those sites back from the multi site operators, operating them as company sites again, and those seem to be the ones converting to Speedway.

The Marathon website still references the Tesoro and USA brands (then a 404 error when you click for more information) so maybe they are going to keep supporting those brands for a while. Zero reference to the old Giant, Howdys, and whatever other junk that company ran brands.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by arizonaguy »

A lot of the ARCOs in Phoenix appear to be independents from what I've seen.

Many of them no longer are AMPM and have generic branding for the convenience stores.

I haven't seen any evidence of any of them converting to Speedway.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by storewanderer »

arizonaguy wrote: October 7th, 2019, 5:08 pm A lot of the ARCOs in Phoenix appear to be independents from what I've seen.

Many of them no longer are AMPM and have generic branding for the convenience stores.

I haven't seen any evidence of any of them converting to Speedway.
That is what has happened up here in Reno too. In the past couple years, most of the Arcos dumped off AM PM and went to unbranded convenience stores.

Since the AM PM agreement was with BP and the Arco agreement was with Tesoro it probably made sense to not be paying two separate franchise fees. AM PM has been a weak c-store concept for years, though some of the new build ones in CA are quite nice, we did not have any like that up here. All were either conversions of other brands or built by Arco in the 80's or early 90's. More recently I have been seeing more promotions out of AM PM as I think BP is trying to grow the brand again. Tough when stations in the Tesoro territory keep dropping AM PM. And tough when the Northern California territory continues with the "no credit card" policy.
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Re: Marathon to acquire Andeavor (Tesoro)

Post by Brian Lutz »

Although there are a lot less AMPM stores than there used to be around here, the ones that are still around seem to be remodeling, and I've even seen one or two new builds within the past couple of years. I think it's a stronger brand in the Pacific Northwest than it might be elsewhere. If an AMPM store here removes the AMPM branding, there's usually a good chance it will be changing gas brands as well.
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