You’re on a road trip, you gas up, you venture inside for a pick-me-up... and you’re either dazzled or depressed. The convenience store game ranges from “quite nice, and I’ll happily snack up” to “Oh dear God, how will I get the bacteria off the bottom of my shoes?” There’s a hierarchy to convenience stores, and if you know what you’re looking for, you can drift down the road another mile for a more fortuitous landing. That’s where the inaugural American Customer Satisfaction Index Convenience Store Study 2024 comes in.
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This study ranks all the gas station store brands by looking at metrics like what kind of cooked food is available, how fast service is, whether you can preorder by app, what kind of merchandise is sold, where the store is located, what its hours are, and whether rewards programs reward repeat visits. It’s based on 5,710 surveys of customers chosen at random and contacted via email between March and September 2024.
Some say convenience stores may even give McDonald’s a run for its money. “The top-performing convenience store brands are now on par with fast food chains in terms of food quality and variety, offering customers a wide range of fresh, gourmet options,” says Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI. For the particular metric of cooked food quality, Wawa, Buc-ee’s, Casey’s General Stores, Kwik Trip and Sheetz meet or exceed fast food chains.
The number one convenience store in the U.S., according to this study? It’s Wawa. If you haven’t heard of this store, it’s found on the East Coast, centered in the Northeast and the South. The second place store is QuikTrip, whose stores are found in the midwest (not to be confused with the store that sounds the same but is spelled differently, Kwik Trip, which is the No. 2 midwestern store and is #7 nationally). And in third place is Buc-ee’s, which is a southern chain. Westerners, your Circle K and 7-Eleven don’t make the top 10; they’re at No. 11 and No. 13, respectively.
Here’s the list of the top 15 convenience stores in the U.S.:
1. Wawa
2. QuikTrip
3. Buc-ee’s
4. Murphy USA
5. Casey’s General Store
6. Sheetz
7. Kwik Trip
8. BP
9. Cumberland Farms
10. Speedway
11. Circle K
12. Racetrac
13. 7-Eleven
14. All others
15. Shell