Retail Watchers

QuikTrip is expanding out West for the first time since they entered Arizona, planning to build stores in Denver (they were waiting for Colorado to drop 3.2 beer). When QT goes in to a new market, they build like crazy, which is usually bad news for the local operators (like Circle K in PHX). Other than 7/11 and Loaf N Jug, I don't think Denver has any megasized convenience store operators.

Loaf N Jug only has a few stores around Denver. Most are outside Denver. Most of the Denver Loaf N Jugs were in King Soopers parking lots (they bought out existing gas stations, mostly Conoco/66 operations) so those went over to Kroger rather than to EG Group in the sale of the c-stores and are now King Soopers fuel centers.

Denver's most common c-store chains are 7-Eleven and Circle K. There are also quite a few Bradley (Stinker from Boise) sites and they have spent some money on upgrades the past few years as those sites were really dire before, so this is pretty bad news for them, but a lot of those are smaller sites. Also common is United Oil with quite a few locations (debranded Circle Ks), some of those were pretty nice sites built as corporate Conoco Break Places in the late 90's but United is not a great operator and the sites are low volume for their size as it is now (it will only get worse). Other than that there are a number of other smaller multi-site operators around Denver and as it is the market there feels pretty saturated. 7-Eleven has actually built a number of new stores in Denver in recent years (those new stores are largely indistinguishable from a 7-Eleven of the 1970's inside, but they do have more gas pumps). This will absolutely slaughter them.

I expect to see a lot of gas stations/c-stores in Denver redeveloped for other uses once Quik Trip does its thing there.