RICHMOND, Va. – Last week’s fourth annual Mid-Atlantic C-Store Expo — organized by the Virginia Asian American Store Owners Association and held at the Richmond Raceway Complex — was host to 105 vendors and nearly 3,000 representatives of the region’s convenience stores. Not bad growth from the inaugural event in 2011, which drew just 71 vendors and 300 merchants in 2011.

The growth of the event underscores the benefits the organization offers its members, Sanjay Patel, a member of the group’s executive committee, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch following the event.

Patel operates more than 30 convenience stores and is president of Chesapeake, Virginia-based LAP Groups, a family of retail, hospitality, industrial and service companies. He said many of the store owners and operators at the expo are single-store merchants.

“All of us benefit from membership in the larger organization,” Patel said in the Times-Dispatch piece. “It gives us buying power so we can compete with the big national chains and it gives the vendors the opportunity to negotiate with the organization rather than trying to deal individually with thousands of independent store owners,” he added.

Michael Davis, vice president of member services for NACS, said the stores “are part of America’s Main Street,” with customers making convenience store purchases 160 million times a day across the country. About 95,000 of some 151,000 convenience stores nationwide are single-store operations.

“Vendors can’t have a sales force big enough to cover all those stores. This expo brings the store owners of a whole region together,” Davis explained.

Patel said his group has negotiated three new deals for its members this year. For example, he said, Amerigas has agreed to offer the organization’s members a discounted wholesale price on its propane tanks. The organization also is in talks with additional vendors for more price cuts, he said.