Flash Foods, Calfee Take Technology Steps for the Future

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Waycross, Ga.-based Flash Foods Inc., operator of 160 convenience stores in Georgia and North Florida, will beta test Loyalink, Pinnacle Corp.'s new Web-based loyalty program, which will be at the upcoming NACStech show in Dallas, May 17-19.

"We know that convenience retailers want more than just simple point accumulation in a loyalty program," said Pinnacle executive vice president Jeff Whittle. "Loyalink doesn't just capture information, it provides powerful tools to construct, execute and measure virtually any loyalty strategy a retailer could embrace."

Using Loyalink, a home-office based marketing group can build customized loyalty programs and deploy them easily across stores or groups of stores. Loyalink tracks and distributes promotions, calculates and triggers loyalty rewards in real-time, and allows customers to participate in programs deployed across the entire retail enterprise rather than a single store. Loyalink also manages the collection of transaction data from Pinnacle's Palm POS to deliver loyalty rewards right at the point of sale, and to provide the business analytics required to measure and improve promotion construction.

In other technology news, Dalton, Ga.-based Calfee Co., operator of 134 Favorite Markets stores, is currently using NAXML standards to transfer in-store safe deposit totals to the back-office PC after each shift. This new integration allows Calfee to eliminate manual envelope drops, save time in creating deposits, carry money from shift to shift, and cut the guesswork out of shift cash totals and over/short amounts.

"One of our goals with this program is to eliminate envelope drops," said Art Whetstone, Calfee's vice president and MIS director. "The integration between AT Systems and PDI is allowing us to save time in completing this daily, store-level task by eliminating much of the manual labor. The interface is a critical step in our program to control cash losses. At the same time, we believe increased use of the bill-reader safe will significantly reduce the time we spend handling cash."

Calfee is in the first phase of the interface roll-out. The company has 47 stores with the Autovend safe, 25 of which have been interfaced.
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