Premier Business Partners:

Rich Tank Lines

North Grosvenordale, Conn.-based Xtra Mart Convenience Stores is more than an East Coast gas station and store chain. It is the retail component of Providence, R.I.-based Warren Equities Inc., which continually makes Forbes’ annual list of America’s Top 500 privately owned companies and was founded by prominent philanthropist Warren Alpert.

Warren Equities also serves as the holding company for Warex Terminals Corp., Drake Petroleum Co. and Auburn Merchandise Distributors, with total revenue in excess of $1.5 billion per year.
Xtra Mart has locations in Connecticut, Massachusets, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia, and is a rapidly growing sector of its parent company.

“Xtra Mart continues to be a driving force in the convenience store industry, adding services like car washes and hot food items to its menu of offerings for visitors,” the company says. “Each year we expand our list of stores in 10 states, from Maine to Virginia. Yet, despite our rapid growth, Xtra Mart stays true to its promise of convenience and service for all of its customers, today and into the future.”

Xtra Deals
Xtra Mart achieves this, in part, by making a range of services available. Each Xtra Mart location includes a Joe’s Deli, which serves hot breakfast sandwiches, deli sandwiches, pizza, hot dogs and rotisserie chicken. Some locations offer car washes and monthly product promotions. These promotions include a raffle of $100 of gas every month for those who sign up for the Xtra Mart e-mail club, or discounts on snack food. “We keep thousands of items in stock every day to provide our customers with an unparalleled selection at the best prices around,” the company says.

Xtra Mart also makes purchasing gas more convenient for businesses with the Xtra Mart fuel card, a charge card that tracks cars’ fuel-efficiency and offers online account management.

“With our system, each vehicle is assigned a card and each driver is assigned a unique identification number; one can’t be used without the other,” Xtra Mart explains. “Drivers enter the current odometer reading of the vehicle at the time of [the] purchase along with the identification number. With all that information captured electronically, we bring you the ultimate control in fleet fueling.”

The company says that customers will save money by cutting down on administrative expenses, like sorting through cash receipts and credit card slips. A setup fee of $40 per account and $2 per card, per month is required. “Our single card can replace your current fuel credit cards, offer greater flexibility and give you the tools to create policies to restrict unauthorized purchases,” the company adds.

Other features of the card include:

• Monthly comprehensive reports to help check purchases and vehicle efficiency
• Secure fueling through driver identification numbers
• Time-savings, through month-to-date and year-to-date accounting
• Performance tracking, with cost-per-mile and miles-per-gallon calculated
• Online account access, where account information can be updated with real-time access.    

Streamlined Systems
Xtra Mart’s appliance repair and inventory maintenance are managed in Connecticut. Computerized sensor systems in each store supervise equipment such as freezers, lights and store alarms. The sensors transmit the information to the repair headquarters to notify pre-established repair contractors. The company recently enlisted software development company Sprintout to streamline its repair and ordering system.

“We created a Web-based database of store locations, store systems, repair orders and vendors,” Sprintout says. “We determined what information was crucial for each work order and designed a database to store and access that information quickly and flexibly.

“Then we developed a system using an extranet and wireless communications, including a custom application to work on [a] Palm Pilot and similar wireless devices. Using Palm VII computers that provide a wireless connection to the Internet, repair vendors and Xtra Mart field managers now access and respond to current repair orders from anywhere on the road via e-mail.

“The wireless communications application we developed and host has automated the entire repair process and cemented communications between XtraMart and all its repair vendors. The database of repair vendors is always current, so that if any store equipment fails, repair personnel can be dispatched quickly to the right location, to keep the stores operating smoothly all the time.”

The Great Philanthropist
The late Warren Alpert founded Warren Equities in 1950, with “as he tells it, ‘$1,000 and a used car,’” the company says. He went on to build one of the most successful corporations in America and to become one of the wealthiest – and most philanthropic – men in the United States. “I wanted to be rich so I could give my money away,” he told the Boston Globe in 1988.

Alpert, who the Boston Globe says “grew up poor in Chelsea [Mass.] and always answered his own phone at work,” was born in 1920. “The youngest of five children, Mr. Alpert was 13 when he started helping his father sell sheets and pillowcases from the back of an aging Buick,” the Globe reported in 2007. “His parents were immigrants from Lithuania and the family lived on the second floor of a three-decker on Orange Street in Chelsea. Mr. Alpert graduated from Chelsea High School and Boston University.”

In 1998, Alpert told the Globe he “started with nothing and worked seven days a week and commuted to [Boston University] every day.”

Alpert served in the military intelligence during World War II, and was awarded the Purple Heart in 1945 for an injury suffered on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion. Alpert subsequently completed the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program and in 1947, received his master’s degree in business administration from Harvard.

“MBA in hand, Mr. Alpert worked for Standard Oil of California before returning to the East in 1950 to start buying gas stations,” the Globe says. “He expanded into other areas as the decades passed. When a venture didn’t work, he dropped it quickly and moved on.”

Alpert donated millions to medical causes, including more than $20 million to Harvard in 1993, resulting in the school naming a building after him. He donated $1 million in 1998 to Harvard’s Tosteson Medical Education Center.

The following year Alpert donated $15 million to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, N.Y., to name the Warren Alpert Pavilion, and in January 2007, he gave $100 million to Brown University medical school, which was renamed the Warren Alpert Medical School.

The Warren Alpert Foundation, which is funded solely by the Warren Alpert estate, gives a $150,000 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize to a scientist or researcher each year who has made breakthroughs in curing major illnesses. Other donations the Warren Alpert Foundation and Warren Equities have made include:

• Fellowship in the name of Bernard Fields at the Harvard Medical School
• Major funding at the Chelsea, Mass., Jewish Nursing Home
• The Victor Cohn Prize of Science Journalism
• A $100,000 donation to the University of Maryland Foundation
• Two scholarships at the Diocese of Providence schools
• A scholarship at Community Prep School in South Providence, R.I.
• A scholarship at the Alperin Schechter Day School in Providence, R.I.

“I want to feel that the world is better off for my having lived,” Alpert told the Globe in 1993. “Now if you are in a position to cause something to happen that you think is important, it’s kind of wonderful.”