8 Ways Legion WFM Solves the Unique Challenges Convenience Stores Face

Convenience stores operate in a demanding and fast-paced environment, facing unique challenges when managing their workforce. With 24/7 operations, high employee turnover, and the need to comply with complex labor regulations—such as age-restricted sales—these stores must balance efficient staffing with cost control and employee safety. Effective workforce management is essential to ensuring operational success while keeping labor costs in check and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.

Legion Workforce Management Software gives convenience stores an intelligent, automated, employee-centric solution to their unique and complex challenges. Here’s a sample of how Legion WFM is helping leading convenience stores today:

1. Ensuring Compliance

Convenience stores must comply with various labor regulations, including rules around age-restricted sales and scheduling for minors. Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to manage compliance across all jurisdictions. Predictive scheduling and labor laws are automatically applied to the schedule, so managers are instantly warned if their actions or edits introduce risk or violate rules.

Time and attendance tracking automatically incorporates compliance rules, ensuring employees scheduled to work meet all regulatory requirements while computing premium pay. For example, minors are prohibited from being scheduled for shifts where they could handle age-restricted products, reducing the risk of fines and ensuring adherence to local labor laws.

2. Labor Optimization for 24/7 Operations

Operating a 24/7 business requires careful scheduling to avoid overstaffing during low-traffic hours or understaffing during busy periods. Legion’s auto-generated, highly accurate demand forecasts provide optimal labor plans, budgets, and schedules across all touchpoints, freeing managers to spend more time with employees and customers—resulting in happier employees and increased revenue.

Legion WFM synthesizes historical and current information about how customers buy. Weather and local events are automatically syndicated and pre-integrated, so you don’t have to run complex calculations, pay high data fees, or use manual processes. External and customer event data are automatically used to train the ML models for the greatest accuracy.

Legion Labor Optimization empowers managers with staffing guidance and labor insights. It instantly predicts the number of employees and skills needed in 15-minute, 30-minute, and daily increments. This is particularly valuable for convenience stores, where demand can fluctuate throughout the day. By dynamically adjusting shifts based on real-time data, Legion helps optimize labor usage and control labor costs without sacrificing customer service. For example, one national petro-convenience store chain reduced schedule creation time by 66% and can easily share employees across locations to optimize labor usage.

3. Improving Safety and Security

Safety is a top concern for convenience stores. Employees working night shifts are more vulnerable to safety risks such as robbery or assault, especially if they work alone.

Legion WFM allows managers to create schedules that ensure no employee is scheduled alone during high-risk hours (late night or early morning) and can automatically recommend staff pairs during these shifts. Managers can be alerted if there are any solo shifts scheduled. This not only enhances the safety of the store but also boosts employee morale by reducing the risks associated with working alone during night hours.

4. Minimizing Overtime and Maximizing Productivity

Uncontrolled overtime can erode profit margins. Legion WFM optimizes labor costs by preventing unnecessary overtime using real-time scheduling tools that predict staffing needs and alert managers to potential overtime risks. The system can automatically adjust schedules or recommend part-time employees to cover additional shifts, helping to avoid costly overtime and ensuring the store operates within budget.

5. Accurate Forecasting for Special Events

Convenience stores often experience spikes in customer traffic during local events, but forecasting demand during these periods can be difficult. Think about the local Little League tournament or a parade, for example. A trip to the convenience store is often part of the day.

Legion WFM incorporates external factors such as nearby events, weather conditions, and historical data to provide more accurate labor forecasting. This ensures stores are adequately staffed during peak times while avoiding overstaffing during quieter periods, helping to optimize labor costs and increase profitability.

6. Ensuring Proper Stocking

Effective labor management is crucial for ensuring proper inventory stocking. With Legion Automated Scheduling and Labor Optimization, managers can ensure staff are allocated specifically for restocking during off-peak hours, ensuring shelves are full during busy periods. This improves product availability without compromising customer service and sales.

7. Saving Time on Schedule Creation

Manual scheduling can be tedious and prone to errors. Legion WFM enables intelligent automation to create optimal schedules that match business needs with employee preferences and skills 96% of the time. With Legion Automated Scheduling, managers can instantly create optimized schedules based on labor rules, budget constraints, compliance rules, and employee skills, performance, and preferences.

With Legion Automated Scheduling, managers can ensure the most critical shifts, including peak hours, are filled first. Legion’s AI-powered recommendation engine considers multiple sources of information, such as skills, availability, and past behavior, to send shift offers to employees automatically. Managers can receive a notification that the employee has accepted the offer, and the employee is automatically added to the schedule.

Managers can also increase their labor pool by automatically scheduling employees with matching skills and preferences from nearby locations. With Legion Automated Scheduling, managers can reduce scheduling creation and maintenance time by 50% to focus on driving revenue and retaining employees.

8. Boosting Employee Retention

Employee turnover is a significant challenge in the convenience store industry, where jobs are often viewed as temporary or transitional. Legion WFM addresses this issue by giving employees more control over their schedules through self-service shift swapping and earned wage access (EWA). These features help improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover by giving employees more flexibility and financial security, ultimately leading to a more stable and engaged workforce. Another Legion convenience store customer has been able to change the culture of frontline employees worldwide. As the IT Director said, “Legion provided a workforce management solution that takes them out of an analog world and into a digital world. Plus, it gives managers and employees the flexibility they need.”

Conclusion

Convenience stores face various challenges, from compliance with labor laws to managing 24/7 staffing needs and minimizing labor costs. Legion WFM provides a comprehensive solution with advanced AI-driven scheduling, real-time forecasting, earned wage access, and labor optimization.

By addressing key pain points such as employee retention, safety, compliance, and cost control, Legion WFM empowers convenience store managers to run their operations more efficiently, increase profitability, and create a better work environment for their employees.