Australian Convenience Store News & C-Store Exhibitions

he Swap n Go complete package approach caters for all size cylinders, so you never have to turn a customer away again.

The scene is a service station in Australia: An attendant is filling B-B-Q cylinders. At the same time, he's trying to serve customers. Gas is going everywhere. The attendant is running from the counter to the gas filling station. Customers waiting in line are frustrated. The customer waiting for his cylinder to be filled is embarrassed.

Before the advent of the cylinder swap system, this was a common scenario at service stations around the country.

For George Schickert, such a scenario served as the impetus to devise his very successful Swap 'n Go cylinder swap system. However, educating customers in a self service format was an issue he did not resolve until a visit to the USA. There, companies were painting their cylinders. He realised that to encourage customers to swap, he had to do something to make his swap cylinders in the cage look better than those that were brought in by the customers.

"From the start, the concept was to give the customer a new-looking cylinder each time," explained Mr Schickert. "The problem was that we only had the distance between the petrol bowser and console to tell our story. So, the cage became a very important merchandising unit. It was then that we realised we were in the packaging business - not the gas business."

He commenced with only 9kg cylinders but feedback from customers showed that there was a demand for the 4kg cylinder. The 4kg cylinder now represents a large proportion of cylinder transactions, according to Mr Schickert. "As the Swap 'n Go concept caught on, many of our customers withdrew the decant filling off their sites for occupational health and safety reasons and because staff did not have the time to fill. As a result, there was still a gap in the market - albeit small - for a Swap cylinder to cover the vertical 'companion valve' cylinder.

"Another problem was that this type of cylinder comes in a number of sizes. Our service station customers didn't want to turn away any of their customers so an answer had to be found." The answer came in the form of the 'Camper' cylinder. This was a 4kg cylinder for which customers could swap any companion valve cylinder, regardless of size. So, if they had a 1kg, 2kg, 3kg or 4kg companion valve cylinder that satisfied the normal cylinder checklist, they could swap it for a 'Camper' cylinder.

Mr Schickert believed the package was now complete. However, listening to feed-back from the market-place, it seemed some operators were having problems: Their staff were not always checking for 'out of date' cylinders and this was having an impact on their margins. To resolve this problem, Swap 'n Go eliminated the wholesale charge for 'out of test' cylinders. "This ensured their margins and made the transaction of swapping a cylinder even simpler," Mr Schicker said.