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07 25th, 2009| 
Over the past summer you worked for your uncle’s convenience store in your hometown. As you prepared to return to school, your uncle asked for a report with your impression of the c-store business.
After thinking about it for a couple of days, you were apprehensive to report to your uncle what you really thought of the business. Did you really want to tell him that as you saw it, c-stores have seven big revenue-generating product categories: prepared food, beer, cigarettes, packaged beverages, fountain drinks, and lottery tickets. However, cigarettes are now too politically incorrect and unhealthy to continue to grow in sales and may even start to decline over the next couple of years. Also, gasoline, which accounts for nearly half of his sales, is under pressure from the likes of Wal-Mart and Costco, which are using fuel as a traffic generator. In addition, the other categories are now seeing low-to-no growth.
You realize that if you tell him this bad news, you need to tell him what to do: sell out or change the business model. What would you tell him to do?