Why do some convenience-store hires depart after a month while some never leave?
CSP spoke with four employees who fall into the latter category: Those who turned an hourly position into a career.
Here is the first story in the series, featuring Jake Vogel from Kwik Trip. Look out soon for others on leaders from SunStop, TravelCenters of America and S&S Petroleum.
Click here for more on the state of labor and hiring at convenience stores today.
In June, Jake Vogel (pictured below), Kwik Trip’s vice president of category management, celebrated 25 years at the La Crosse, Wisconsin-based convenience-store chain, which has 868 locations.
In 1999, while in high school, he started at a Spencer, Wisconsin, Kwik Trip, unloading trucks in the evening three times per week as well as working the cash register.
“Today we’ve got 40 to 50 staff members at a given store, but back then, we didn't even have food yet,” he says. “It was very much the Cokes-and-smokes mantra, VHS movies, film [for still cameras].”
After high school, Vogel continued working at Kwik Trip while enrolled at a junior college.
“My aspiration when I was in school was to go work on the stock exchange,” he says. “I had a fascination with business, and I loved math.”
- Kwik Trip is No. 11 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.
The summer after his first year of college, there was turnover in leadership, and Vogel, age 19 at the time, was recruited to be the new certified assistant store leader, which he described as a “roaming” employee who supports store leaders.
“My name had been thrown around mostly because I was super flexible,” Vogel says. “I just needed as many hours as I could get to pay for college.”
After talking with both of his parents, he accepted the offer and jumped from being a part-time student coordinator to part of the leadership team in a district.
“A lot of conversation went into that, and to this day I still think about it because I never finished school, which does bug me,” he says. “I saw an opportunity to get in on our retail side knowing I had tons of opportunities here at a pretty young age to run a store.”
In 2007, after managing several stores, he went to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to work in the support center in the merchandising department. In 2014, Vogel moved to category management.
Vogel, named to his current position in January, says back in the days of unloading trucks, he never envisioned himself being at Kwik Trip for as long as he has.
“I’ve been here most of my life,” he says. “I saw a funny video on Tik Tok last night … where this kid in kindergarten said his aspiration was to work at a convenience store, and people were laughing at him.”
Vogel says there’s a stigma to working in retail, but it can be very rewarding.
“There are more opportunities than just running a register or changing garbage or cleaning a bathroom—even though those are very, very important pieces of our business,” he says.
“There’s satisfaction and knowing you’re taking care of people every single day. But if that’s not for you, there's still awesome opportunities in this space … There are IT people, HR people, accounting people. There’s procurement and category management, people who run price books. Just because running a register isn’t your shtick doesn’t mean that there aren’t awesome opportunities in our space for you to grow.”
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