Invest in Clerk

Every gas station in America runs the same losing math: $10K–$35K a month in cashier payroll, plus roughly $24K a year walking out the door as shrink — for a store that still can't reliably stay open overnight. Clerk removes the labor from that equation entirely. We rip out the open aisles and refrigerated cases and replace them with a modular, glass-enclosed dispensing wall: a hopper travels the length of it, picks the item a customer selects, and drops it into a box only after it's paid for. Snacks, hot coffee, fresh food, even age-restricted goods like alcohol and lottery — sold without anyone behind the counter, 24 hours a day.

The install pays for itself in more ways than one. Owners can go cash, SBA-financed, or lease-to-own at $1,500 down and $475/month per module — a lower bar than hiring a single overnight cashier. Once it's running, we make money five different ways off the same box: the SaaS platform, on-screen advertising ($20K–$40K/year per location), SKU-level sales data licensed to CPG brands ($10K–$25K/year), and a marketing/delivery subscription add-on. Blended, a single location generates $180K–$215K in year-one revenue and settles into $60K–$95K a year in high-margin recurring revenue after that.

Before Clerk, I spent years running automated retail at real scale — vending, unattended checkout, sourcing hardware overseas — and I'm putting that same manufacturing and operating playbook to work here, just on a bigger box with a bigger problem to solve. Six store owners have already signed on for our first deployments, before a single unit has shipped.

This $1M funds our first 5–10 installs and 12–18 months of runway to prove the model. From there, the plan is simple: every gas station and c-store in the country is a candidate for this retrofit, and we intend to be the one they call.