One of the first questions Maplefields considers when buying equipment surrounds the total cost of ownership. The lower the total cost of ownership, the faster it is to make back your investment. For Maplefields’ IT Director, Skip Potter, that’s the key to his purchasing decisions.

“Having a different dispenser outside and a different POS provider inside is just not effective,” says Maplefields’ IT Director, Skip Potter. “It’s not cost effective to do that. Working with everybody on one team, one platform, has been very beneficial to us. So, we eradicated eight sites immediately. Everything from forecourt, to inside – the [non-Gilbarco equipment] had to go.”

The best convenience stores don’t just serve snacks and gas, they serve an experience and Maplefields is no different.

“I have people who come in three times a day,” says Store Manager Kelly St. Francis. “They’ll come in for breakfast and coffee in the morning, then come back for lunch and dinner.”

“Where the rest of the industry has not gone, we’re going,” says IT Director, Skip Potter.

Maplefields’ General Manager, Otto Hansen agrees, “EV charging will be part of our landscape for years to come.”

“I loved the sleek look of them. They’re liquid cooled. They worked really well with very little maintenance,” Skip says.

When you walk into a Maplefields in Northern New England, you won’t find your typical convenience store.

Cashiers? They don’t have them. Impatient customers? Not really. A line? What’s a line?

While some c-store operations are scrambling to beat the April 2021 outdoor EMV deadline, the folks at Maplefields in Northern New England are sleeping at night just fine.

Every single one of Maplefields’ stores is now EMV-compliant, months ahead of the compliance cutoff date.

“There is constant turnover in this business and we’re no different than anybody else. But we also have the ability to retain people,” says Maplefields’ IT Director, Skip Potter.

When you start talking to the leaders of the company, it’s easy to see why. Many of them started off as cashiers and store managers just like the associates they oversee today.

oodservice has become a mainstay for convenience stores trying to entice gas guzzling customers to come inside the store for a bite to eat. Every single top c-store brand has a successful foodservice program driving non-fuel sales.

“When we decided to get into the foodservice program, we decided we were either going to make it – or break it,” says Maplefields IT Director, Skip Potter.

When IT Director, Skip Potter, drew up his “cashierless” c-store concept for Maplefields convenience stores, he took every opportunity to reduce “friction” for his customers – including friction from the forecourt.

“We wanted a system that could integrate with the forecourt and give customers another level of freedom to dictate their shopping experience,” says Skip./p>

The convenience store industry is in a constant state of invention and reinvention.

“A convenience store used to be just a gas station,” says Maplefields’ Special Projects Manager, Brian LaBrie. “It used to be something that had a garage attached to it. It’s beyond that now.”

Maplefields knows c-stores are the forefront of electrification, providing frictionless integration that doesn’t require drivers to change their behavior. That’s why many of their locations feature a bank of Tritium RT-50 DC Fast Chargers from Gilbarco’s growing e-Mobility platform. Simple and quick to install, with high interfacing capabilities, the RT-50 allows seamless integration of the latest EV technology into your site, in the least disruptive manner.