The Growth of Convenience Stores in 2026: Industry Trends Independent Retailers Can’t Ignore

Walk into ten convenience stores today and maybe two of them still look like they did in 2019. The coffee station’s bigger. There’s a self-checkout kiosk by the door. Cigarettes have moved to a smaller shelf behind the counter, and there’s a cooler of protein shakes where the extra soda used to sit. What happened? And does “growth” even still describe what’s going on in this industry, or is that the wrong word now?

It’s still the right word. The growth of convenience stores continues into 2026, just not in a straight line anymore. Store count ticked down slightly this year. Sales kept climbing anyway. That combination — fewer stores, more revenue per store — tells you something about where this industry is headed, and it matters most for the independent operator trying to read the signals correctly.

The Growth of Convenience Stores in 2026, by the Numbers

Start with the headline figure behind the growth of convenience stores this year. There were 151,975 convenience stores operating in the United States as of the most recent NACS count — a slight dip of 280 stores, or about 0.2%, from the year before. That’s not collapse. It’s a rounding error against a base of more than 150,000 locations, and it followed a similar small decline the year prior.

What’s the number that matters more? Total industry sales, which reached $817.5 billion. In-store sales — the food, drinks, and merchandise inside the store, not the gas pumped outside — hit $341.2 billion, up 1.7% over the year before. That marks the 23rd consecutive year of inside-sales growth for the channel, according to NACS. Twenty-three years running. Not many retail categories can say that.

A Snapshot: 2018 vs. Today

The table below lines up where the industry stood when this article was first written against where it stands now. The shift is bigger than a few percentage points suggest.

A convenience store POS system built for the way these stores operate today looks nothing like the register setups from 2018 — and neither does the customer walking in the door.

Independent Operators Still Own Most of the Market

Here’s a question worth asking directly: did the big chains finally win? Not even close. Companies running 10 or fewer stores still control 63% of the U.S. convenience store count. Large operators with 500-plus locations — think 7-Eleven, Circle K — hold 22.2%. The rest sits with regional chains in between.

That 63% figure hasn’t moved much in years, and thats worth sitting with for a second. Consolidation headlines make it sound like independents are an endangered species. The store count says otherwise. What’s changed is how independents compete, not whether they can.

Two tools are doing a lot of that work right now. The first is purchasing power. Joining a wholesale buying group or retail cooperative lets a single-store operator negotiate supplier pricing closer to what a regional chain gets, without giving up ownership. The second is simply starting smarter: anyone starting a convenience store today has more playbooks, more financing options, and more affordable POS technology available than an operator did even five years ago.

• Independent operators can match chain pricing power through cooperative buying.
• Modern POS financing has lowered the up-front cost of opening a store.
• Local knowledge — knowing your block, your regulars, your neighborhood’s schedule — remains something a regional chain can’t replicate from a spreadsheet.

Ecommerce and Mobile Payments Are Resetting Checkout Expectations

“Fast checkout” used to just mean a short line. That’s not what customers mean anymore. Mobile wallets, contactless cards, and app-based ordering have reset the baseline, and a convenience store that can’t keep up loses the exact customer it’s supposed to win — the one in a hurry.

Mobile Wallets and Contactless Cards

Tap-to-pay is not a novelty anymore; its close to the default. A customer pulling out a physical card and typing a PIN increasingly reads as the slow option, not the normal one. A POS that can’t accept contactless and mobile wallet payments without a bolted-on second device is already behind, and that gap shows up fastest during a morning coffee rush when every extra second in line costs a sale.

Self-Checkout for High-Traffic Stores

Self-checkout kiosks, long a grocery-store fixture, have spread into convenience formats too. Do they make sense for a small bodega with one register? Probably not. For a higher-volume store near a transit stop or a highway exit, though, a kiosk or two frees the one clerk on duty to handle the deli line, the lotto counter, and age-verified sales instead of ringing up every bag of chips by hand.

Ecommerce and App Ordering

Ecommerce and app ordering — through a platform like NRS’s BOSS Local shopping app or a store’s own site — lets a customer place an order before they ever walk through the door, with the sale flowing straight into the POS. That matters more than it sounds like it should. A customer who can order ahead and just grab their bag off a shelf skips the line entirely, and the store still captures the sale, the loyalty points, and the data.

Do any of these tools replace the counter clerk? No, and that’s kind of the point. They free that person up for the parts of the job a kiosk can’t do.

Why Store Count Dipped Even as Fuel-Selling Locations Hit an Eight-Year High

So if the industry is healthy, why did the total store count fall at all? Two things are happening at once, and they’re not contradictory. Overall store count slipped by 280 locations. Meanwhile, the number of stores selling fuel rose by 768 locations to 122,620 — the highest number in eight years, representing 80.7% of all convenience stores.

What does that mean in practice? Non-fuel convenience formats — small urban stores, some dollar-store-adjacent formats — are thinning out slightly, while fuel-anchored locations keep expanding. Texas added the most stores of any state; New York lost the most. A store like this depends on getting fuel and register data to line up, which is exactly the kind of reconciliation problem that modern pump-to-register integration was built to solve.

For an independent weighing whether to add a fuel island or double down on a walk-up format, this data point answers the question. Fuel-anchored stores are where the growth of convenience stores is concentrating right now, not the strip-mall corner store without pumps.

The Slow Decline of Tobacco Is Reshaping the Category Mix

Cigarettes used to be the backbone of a convenience store’s revenue. Not anymore, and the shift has been dramatic. Cigarettes made up 30.9% of in-store sales in 2015. That share had fallen to 18.8% by 2024 — a drop of roughly 12 percentage points in under a decade, driven by higher state excise taxes, lower smoking rates, and tighter regulation.

Is smoking disappearing, or just shifting? A bit of both. The adult cigarette smoking rate in the United States fell to 9.1% in 2025, down from 9.9% in 2024 — the second straight year under 10%, per CDC survey data. Compare that against a 42.4% adult smoking rate back in 1965 and the long-run trend is unmistakable.

Other tobacco products picked up some of the slack. Modern oral nicotine and other tobacco products grew from 4.2% to 7.6% of in-store sales over the same decade, and they carry a much better margin — about 29.5%, versus 13.76% for cigarettes. Cigarettes still generate more raw gross profit dollars per store per month, but that gap keeps narrowing every year.

“Higher state excise tax rates, lower smoking rates and other pressures continue” to pull cigarette sales down — a trend NACS has tracked consistently for a decade.

What should an independent retailer take from this? The register space that cigarettes used to dominate needs a new job. Vape and modern oral nicotine can fill part of it. The rest belongs to the categories in the next two sections.

Health-Conscious Shoppers Are Rewriting the Snack Aisle

Ask a convenience store shopper today what they’re looking for, and “healthier” comes up more than it used to. A 2025 Acosta Group study found 61% of convenience shoppers actively seek out better-for-you items at least some of the time. Only 30% said they had no interest at all in healthier options.

Protein is the clearest example. Convenience stores posted 12.4% growth in products carrying protein claims — compared to just 3% in grocery, according to CSP Daily News. About 18% of consumers say they specifically want more meat- and protein-oriented snack options on the shelf.

Who’s driving this? Millennials and Gen Z shoppers are willing to pay a premium for healthier choices, and women — historically underrepresented among convenience store shoppers — are increasingly the target for a well-merchandised wellness section. Soda sales have gone flat, mostly because diet soda has lost ground, while ready-to-drink teas and functional beverages pick up momentum.

A store that groups its healthier items together, labels them clearly, and treats wellness as a real category instead of an afterthought captures a shopper who might otherwise drive past to a grocery store. That’s real revenue sitting on the table, and it’s ignored surprisingly often.

Foodservice Has Become the Store’s Real Profit Engine

If tobacco used to be the anchor category, foodservice is what’s replaced it. Foodservice made up 28.5% of in-store sales in 2025 — up from just 11.9% two decades ago — and it now contributes 38.9% of in-store gross profit dollars, according to NACS. That’s a category doing more than double its “fair share” of profit relative to its share of sales.

Prepared food — pizza, chicken, sandwiches, wraps, salads — accounts for 73.9% of foodservice revenue on its own. And shoppers have come around on quality. In the Acosta study, 51% of convenience shoppers now buy hot food at least once a week, up from 45% just two years earlier, and 52% said they believe convenience store hot food is equal to or better than fast food.

1. Build out a compact hot-food or grab-and-go program, even a small one — the margin dwarfs almost every other category in the store.
2. Track which prepared items sell by daypart, not just by week, so waste doesn’t eat the margin gain.
3. Pair foodservice with loyalty incentives to turn a one-time lunch buyer into a regular.

Foodservice takes more labor and more food-safety discipline than stocking a shelf of chips. It’s also, by a wide margin, where the profit is.

Building Customer Loyalty in a Crowded Market

Does loyalty still work the way it used to? The data says it works better. A 2025 Acosta Group study of convenience shoppers found 63% visit their preferred store at least weekly, and 72% describe their trips as planned, targeted stops for something specific — up 6 points from 2023. A shopper with a reason to come back, and a program that gives them a reason, is worth more than a one-time impulse buyer.

Not every store needs the same loyalty structure. A busy urban bodega might do best with a simple digital punch card; a fuel-anchored store with a bigger basket size might need a tiered points program tied to fuel discounts. Eight loyalty program structures worth evaluating range from paper punch cards up through fully POS-integrated points systems — and the right pick depends on store size, traffic pattern, and what the operator can realistically manage day to day.

A built-in loyalty program tied directly to the POS removes a lot of that friction. Enrollment happens at the register instead of through a separate app download, and rewards track automatically instead of relying on a clerk to remember to stamp a card. Given that only 24% of convenience shoppers currently use a retailer’s app, according to Acosta, there’s real room to grow enrollment simply by making the sign-up easier.

Tailoring Product Selection to Local Demand

What sells in a store two blocks from a college campus is not what sells in a store off a highway exit. That sounds obvious, but a surprising number of independent operators still stock based on habit rather than data. Which items are moving? Which ones sit on the shelf until they’re marked down or thrown out?

Inventory tracking tied to the POS answers that question in real time instead of at the end of a slow quarterly count. An operator can see, item by item, what’s turning fast enough to reorder and what’s dead weight taking up cooler space that a protein shake or a hot food item could use instead.

• Pull a top-and-bottom sellers report monthly, not just annually.
• Compare category mix against the neighborhood — a store near a gym stocks differently than one near an elementary school.
• Reassess shelf space every time a category shift shows up in the data, like the tobacco decline covered above.

None of this requires guessing. The data already sits inside a modern POS system. It just has to get looked at.

Competing Against the Chains With Modern Technology

Big chains have scale. Independents have speed and flexibility, and a modern point-of-sale system is what turns that flexibility into an actual advantage instead of just a nice idea. A chain takes months to test a new loyalty structure across a thousand stores. An independent can try one next week.

What does “modern technology” mean for a single-location or small-chain operator in 2026? It means a POS that handles inventory, loyalty, and reporting in one system instead of three disconnected tools. It means accepting every payment type a customer might use — card, contactless, mobile wallet — without a second device bolted to the counter. And it means competing on service and speed rather than trying to out-discount a company with a thousand times the buying power.

None of the trends covered in this article — tobacco’s decline, foodservice’s rise, health-conscious demand, loyalty expectations — show up on a shelf by themselves. They show up in the data a POS system collects every single day. The stores capturing this growth are the ones reading it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the convenience store industry still growing in 2026?

Yes, by revenue. In-store sales reached $341.2 billion in 2025, the 23rd straight year of growth for that category, and total industry sales hit $817.5 billion. Total store count dipped slightly (down 0.2%), but that reflects consolidation in non-fuel formats more than any drop in consumer demand.

How many convenience stores are there in the United States?

There were 151,975 convenience stores operating in the U.S. as of the most recent NACS count, a slight decrease of 280 stores from the prior year. About 80.7% of them sell fuel.

Are independent convenience stores being pushed out by big chains?

Not based on the store count. Operators running 10 or fewer stores still make up 63% of the market. Large chains with 500-plus locations hold 22.2%. Independents remain the majority by count even as a handful of large operators expand.

Why are cigarette sales declining in convenience stores?

A mix of higher state excise taxes, declining smoking rates, and tighter regulation. Cigarettes fell from 30.9% of in-store sales in 2015 to 18.8% in 2024. The adult smoking rate hit 9.1% in 2025, the second straight year under 10%, per CDC data.

What’s replacing tobacco as a top convenience store category?

Foodservice, primarily. It made up 28.5% of in-store sales in 2025 and drove 38.9% of in-store gross profit. Other tobacco products and modern oral nicotine have also grown, from 4.2% to 7.6% of in-store sales over the past decade.

Do convenience store customers want healthier options?

A growing share do. A 2025 shopper survey found 61% of convenience store customers actively look for better-for-you items at least some of the time. Protein-labeled products in convenience stores grew 12.4% recently, well ahead of grocery’s 3% growth in the same category.

What should an independent convenience store focus on to keep growing?

Four things tend to matter most: a loyalty program that fits the store’s size and traffic, a foodservice or grab-and-go program if space allows, inventory tracking that gets reviewed regularly, and payment technology that covers mobile wallets and contactless cards without friction at the register.

Does a small convenience store need self-checkout or mobile payment options to compete?

Full self-checkout isn’t mandatory for every store, but contactless and mobile wallet acceptance essentially is at this point — customers expect it. Self-checkout makes the most sense for higher-traffic stores where freeing up a clerk during rush periods has a real payoff.