Typical new Murphy USA Store
There is no way a convenience store retailer can do $4200 per square foot selling candy bars, soft drinks and beer, snacks and miscellaneous items in a store with that kind of square footage.
However, look at this:
But the vast majority of their stores are like this one.
What's that second store's retail square footage? My guess is maybe 60 square feet at 5' x 12'. If it sells $1000 in snacks a 24 hour day, it's doing really good. I'm being generous at $1000, but that works out to $6,083 per square foot. I guess they could be doing it! Working backward from the number they give, Those tiny stores are actually doing a little over $750 per day so when averaged with the bigger stores much lower $/Sq.Ft returns they get the $4200. It's an honest figure, once I analyzed what is going on.
Grocery stores sell far more than that and cannot even approach $400. Something was very, very fishy until I saw those itty-bitty stores.
That Dollar number for Apple stores is low, too. I've seen other statistics that put it around $6K per square foot, double Tiffany's number. . . and Apple's flagship store in New York at $8K.