Small stores add big-store technology

By Kyle Gearhart
Wausau (Wis.) Daily Herald

Andy Long is looking forward to the day when he can tell you how many candy bars, sodas and bags of chips he's sold in the past week, day or even hour.

The first bits of a new inventory computer system are in place at the Wilderness Crossing independent convenience store that he manages in Wittenberg, Wis. The many hours Long spent entering sales totals into a spreadsheet and estimating profits are coming to an end.

Now Long can run reports on any of the thousands of items sold in his store. He'll know which candy, sodas, chips, gasoline and cigarettes are selling best. That will help him order the right items, keep his shelves stocked and know each day how much money the store has made or inventory it has lost.

"We were having problems," he said. "Our physical counts wouldn't match up. With the (new system) the cost of goods will be specific."

The technology Long is using is something that larger convenience store chains have been moving toward for some time, but so far has been out of the price range of smaller stores with less volume.

He's using a system called Series2k (www.series2k.com) that can track thousands of items, their cost and sale price, and create reports on items or general categories for about $5,000.

With the Series2k system, convenience stores get a computer, monitor, scanner and software that connects to most registers to keep track of their inventory.

In an association survey done earlier this year, 50 percent of small independent stores — chains of one to 10 stores — said they still manually entered items in an accounting ledger or spreadsheet.