Convenience Store Sales Are Shaky. Brewers Shouldn’t Panic (Yet)

Way back in the post-vaccine, pre-election sweet spot of October 2023, when Bidenomics were really cooking, I wrote a column about the brightest spot in craft brewing’s otherwise fairly dim outlook: the convenience store.

Back then, the segment was down in virtually every other channel, but up in the nation’s gas stations and corner stores, thanks to the convergence of several trends. The American drinking public was shifting toward higher alcohol-by-volume, more full-flavored stuff in larger single-serve packages. Weary of high-stress, big-basket grocery runs in the teeth of the pandemic, shoppers had become delighted all over again by the small thrill of the impulse purchase, which c-stores (colorful, quick, full of treats) were optimized to deliver. Draft sales were down and spirits-based canned cocktails were coming for beer’s share, but the American Kwik-E-Mart was a haven from those woes for brewers who’d cracked its code.

All of those things still hold true, to varying extents. Yet overall convenience store sales were down 4.3 percent by volume for the 52 weeks through Feb. 23, according to market research firm Circana. Refrigerated goods (not beer, but like, string cheese and Lunchables and so forth) were down 7 percent; chocolate candy, 6 percent. The Wall Street Journal framed its mid-March report on Circana’s scan data as a reflection of the restraint skittish customers are showing in the face of President Trump’s incoherent, destructive trade war. As in, with a recession looming, shoppers are paring back on nonessential, indulgent, and “splurge” purchases, declines in which disproportionately register in the c-store channel.

“Gas prices have been elevated and so people are just having a bit less extra discretionary change in their pocket,” the president of consumer-packaged-goods giant J.M. Smucker, told the paper. (This isn’t entirely true: Gas prices are up around 38 percent from five years ago, but down around 36 percent from their mid-pandemic high in 2022, per data from the still-functioning-for-now U.S. Energy Information Administration.) J.M. Smucker acquired Hostess Brands for $5.6 billion in 2023; that division of its business declined 7 percent last quarter. The National Association of Tobacco Outlets warns carton purchases are down and single-pack sales are up at its members’ 66,000 retail locations, many of which are convenience stores. Hershey’s is rolling out a “gold-standard planogram” to 40 percent of its c-store footprint in a Willy Wonka-ass bid to stop its bleeding in the channel. And so on, and so forth.

Conspicuously absent from the WSJ’s list of junk food and vices was beer, so I decided to take a look myself. After all, while you might consider beer essential, it hardly ranks compared to, say, those eggs Trump take. (As one Canadian brewer told CNN as he braced for tariff trouble earlier this week: “People need to eat; they don’t need to drink beer.” I’ve heard similar from concerned stateside operators.) And the c-store channel has always been crucial to beer’s off-premise success — especially craft beer in recent years, as outlined above.

The upshot, for now, is that beer is more or less tracking the broader channel dips. In the 52 weeks through Feb. 23, the category’s top 100 brands were down 1.4 percent by dollars and 3.9 percent by volume compared to the same period in 2024. As has become common in the past few years, the craft segment performed slightly worse than the category: It’s down 2.8 percent and 4.7 percent in dollars and volume, respectively. These are not red-alert numbers. But they’re not good, and like everything else, they will likely get worse in the wake of Trump’s market-torching depression commencement address in the Rose Garden earlier this week.

If there’s good news, it’s that the c-store code that craft brewers — chief among them New Belgium Brewing, with its bodega-beating Voodoo Ranger brand family — has begun to work in other off-premise channels, too. To put it another way, more stores are mimicking what has made convenience stores successful in the first place.

“Grocery stores have shifted a lot of their front-facing, single-serve, quick-shop options to look like convenience stores,” says Bryan Roth, the director of insights for the market intelligence platform Sightlines. “We know broadly that people have integrated convenience-store shopping behaviors into their everyday life. They’re making more trips to shop for the same number of items, and more stores are creating environments [that] feel like a convenience store. There is a world in which we’re talking about people just going to a different location to do the same thing.” A decline in c-store beer purchases would certainly be bad for c-stores, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that another channel isn’t picking up that volume.

This should offer some comfort to all the craft brewers that have developed c-store strategies in the Voodoo Ranger mold. As Roth’s Sightlines colleague Kate Bernot noted recently, single cans — very much including the mighty 19.2-ounce stovepipe — are nearing the same volume as 4-packs in Brewers Association-defined craft beer. “It’s not just a convenience play, either,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “Everything is a c-store now. Shopping trip frequency is up and item count is down, meaning customers are looking to meet in-the-moment needs at affordable prices rather than stocking up.”

Of course, that behavior shift happened once, and there’s no reason it couldn’t happen again. If Trump’s economic fiasco sends cash-strapped shoppers back to supermarkets seeking lower unit costs on big, infrequent pantry-stocking staples, all the rejiggered endcap coldboxes in the country won’t be able to keep beer sales from collapsing. But because nobody knows how this ludicrous, corrupt, self-destructive protectionism will play out next week, much less six months from now, let’s assume for the sake of this column that we’re headed into a Great Recession-style malaise — economically painful and socially destabilizing, but not beans-under-the-bridge bad for most of the cohort of drinker that enjoys high-ABV tallboys of double IPA. (Based on the way things are going: fingers crossed, man.)

In that milieu, Roth argues, c-store beer sales may actually benefit. “Everybody is taking price, even chain grocery, so price gaps [between supermarket and c-store] are smaller than they were even a few years ago,” he says, pushing back on my hypothesis that customers’ trained to expect lower prices at the supermarket would actually give up the convenience of… well, convenience. “The idea of a ‘treat yourself’ impulse buy in a world that increasingly feels unstable is an experience that has long been served by convenience stores,” he says. If you’ve got a Champagne taste and a beer budget, you buy beer.

Things are changing too fast, and in ways entirely too dumb, to forecast with certainty how this will play out for beer’s c-store bastion just yet. But we could all use some optimism right about now, and the optimistic take is that the channel’s emphasis on smaller package sizes and novelty sharpens the old industry saw that holds that beer is recession-proof. We’re about to find out if it will — and if it is.

Hop-ocalypse Now

Unions are quite popular with the American public these days, but they remain a) institutionally weak, and b) as unpopular as ever with the right-wing industrialists and politicians of this country’s ruling class. With the Trump administration deliberately hobbling the National Labor Relations Board and ripping up the union contracts of hundreds of thousands of federal workers more or less on impulse, it feels like open season on organized labor. Whether that green light from Washington, D.C. informed Anheuser-Busch InBev’s abrupt announcement to close Wicked Weed’s plant in Portsmouth, N.H., last week — where workers voted in November 2024 to join the Teamsters — is impossible to say. Ditto, whether the firm is investing $1 million in its Asheville, N.C., facilities because it makes good business sense, or because the Tar Heel State has the lowest union density in the United States. But it doesn’t exactly help the vibe, regardless.

Ups…

Stone Distributing finally has a new owner, with Hand Family Companies’ acquiring the Southern California wholesaler, as well as Classic Beverage, in a terms-undisclosed deal… It’s a Rocky State tie-up as Dry Dock Brewing and Left Hand Brewing announce merger plans… And, another, as Colorado craft conglomerate Wilding Brands announces plans to acquire Great Divide Brewing Co. … Pabst Brewing Co. will take a run at Miller Lite et al. with Pabst Light, sure why not…

…and downs

The Beer Purchasers’ Index (the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s vibe-o-meter) had imports contracting for the first time since April 2020… Bump Williams reported “a general FEAR” suppressing Mexican import sales among overindexed Hispanic shoppers… I simply think $111,150 is an unreasonable amount of money to spend on a 75-year-old beer can, in this (or any) economy…

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