Agree, you certainly tend to get better customer service from mom-and-pop. They UNLIKE the chains sincerely appreciate your business.

Anybody remember Sam's on the corner of First and Ruby?

Grieker,
Sam's made the best cheeseburger hoaggie - called the "Tummy Stuffer" and he had those little personal pitchers of beer. Spent many late night's in that place to satisfy my tummy stuffer fix...I must have eaten 60 or 70 of those things over the years...

Why small gas stations are disappearing: Because when the local newspaper writes a story about them, they fail to mention where any small gas stations are so that we could support them if we chose. While they gave us the location of many closed stations and some coming chains, they closest they came to telling us the location of Brunnerville Garage is "Lititz area". I guess you have to pay for advertising. Wouldn't a free plug in a story about why your business is failing help you out? Wouldn't it help the reporter to be able to reach contacts in the future if they thought that talking to the paper might actually have a benefit, instead of being the side story to plugs for major competitors?

They aren't surviving on gas sales but I can tell you that they make a killing out of American's laziness. We Americans like "one stop shops" that's why the Wal-Mart type of establishments are prospering during this economic crisis.

This is the thing that's propped up the convenience store business and killing them at the same time.
According to Rutters' during the training brain washing.... I mean training videos, we were advised against stealing a $1.00 bottle of soda because they only made $0.01 cents per bottle, so in order to make up the $1.00 we stole, they have to sell 100 legit bottles.
I know this is bull!profanity! and I think you all do too. Nobody runs a 1% profit margin and survives.
But what they also do is sell tiny bottles of tide for twice the price of a quart bottle of tide at the local grocery store. And they do it with mustard, and ketchup and many other items which expire before they ever sell. Yes, there is an expiration date on ketchup. Spell it catsup and it's still got an expiration date.
So they promote huge amounts of waste that cut into their profit margins while selling primarily single serving single purchase items like candy bars at ridiculous prices to make up for it. As well as coffee and soda, the highest profit margins of nearly any food-service establishment.

They need to do some serious re-organization to survive. The only reason Sheetz and Turkey Hill are surviving is not because of gas, in fact, there are many TH stores that sell $0 of gasoline every month. Not profit, total sales. They have no gas to sell. But I digress, the only reason the huge chains survive is because they're huge. In order to keep going, they keep adding, be it quick-service made to order sandwiches or even restaurants. These too will collapse eventually without some massive changes to how things are done.

Might I suggest cutting the bull!profanity!? What am I talking about? Rutters made us not only buy any coffee we drank, but account for the amount we threw out every day too!

Exxon doesn't own it.
It was a franchise. Exxon sells only wholesale gasoline and petroleum products. People who run stores pay Exxon a fee to post that sign out front and agree to sell only Exxon products. That's where the Exxon involvement ends.
McDonald's Burger King, Subway all work the same way.

Turkey Hill and Sheetz are not franchises. Turkey Hill is owned by Kroger if I'm not mistaken. The dairy that produces the famous gigantic cows to be parked and driven along parade routes is also part of Kroger. That's why the logo changed a few years ago. Rutters is owned by CHR corp - I think CHR used to stand for Chris H. Rutter, but no longer. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know who owns Sheetz or WaWa.