C-store CEO pay rose for all top three earners on 2025 list; Louisiana store adds a drive-thru tunnel
The three highest-paid public c-store CEOs on C-Store Dive's 2025 list all took home more than they did the prior fiscal year, and the reasons behind each raise were not the same. It is worth a look this week for anyone who runs stores and watches how the people at the top get paid.
The pay list
C-Store Dive's ranking of the highest-earning public convenience-store CEOs put three names at the top, and each one saw compensation climb from the previous fiscal year. The publication was clear that the path to a bigger check differed by executive, so this is not one board-wide bump applied across the group. Without the line-item breakdown you cannot say which lever mattered most for each name.
For a jobber or a single-site operator, the read is simple. The public chains are paying up to keep the people at the top, in a year when pump margins carried more of the earnings weight than fuel volume and foodservice and inside sales grew.
Watch whether the raises hold if fuel margins soften and inside sales have to do the heavy lifting on their own. Pay packages built on a good margin year look different when the margin year turns average.
Pablito's Pit Stop
A convenience store in Abbeville, Louisiana, off Highway 167, now runs cars straight through a tunnel in the middle of the building. Pablito's Pit Stop looks like an oil-change or car-wash bay from the road. A bell rings when a car pulls up, an employee takes the order, and the customer pays without leaving the seat.
Co-owner Melissa Verret frames the whole thing around service. "If customers come with an empty ice chest, we fill it up for them and they are ready to go," she said. The idea came from her son Cody, who drove through a convenience store in Texas on a deer-hunting trip and liked the format enough to bring it home.
It is one store, and a drive-thru tunnel is not cheap to build or staff. Still, it is a real answer to a question a lot of operators are asking about how to move packaged goods and cold drinks to customers who do not want to park and walk inside.
What to watch
Whether the CEO raises survive a flatter margin year. And whether the drive-thru format shows up at a second Louisiana site, which would move it from novelty toward a model worth copying.