Two weeks after Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. announced its purchase of the On the Run franchise from ExxonMobil, the company insists it does not intend to force On the Run franchisees to rebrand their sites to Circle K—at least not yet. “We don’t have any plans on a short-term basis to force people to move from On the Run to [Couche-Tard brand] Circle K,” Couche-Tard’s vice president and CFO Raymond Pare told CSP Daily News this week.
Could that change in the near future? Maybe, Pare said.
“That’s a question we’re working on. We’ve already started discussion,” he said. “The first step is to work with the franchisees in order to determine what will be the next step. This is not a decision that will be made in [the Couche-Tard] office [alone]; it is a decision that we will make together. And it will be what makes sense and what will create more value for the franchisees and us overall.”
