“It was just a little corner dairy when I started,” Stevens says.
“Olly Olsson was the owner, Mum worked here as well. When I turned 15, Mum left and they offered me her fulltime job – I left school and came here.”
Then, 17-and-a-half years ago, Olsson sold up. He’d been at Night ’n Day’s annual conference and returned home to Winton, informing Stevens that he was offering her the business first.
“I couldn’t stop crying. He was like, ‘Right, go and talk to your parents about it’. I went and got advice from Mum and Dad, and they were like, ‘That’s a no-brainer’.”
In 2017, Excell bought into the business – she is now a 40% shareholder in the franchise.
Together, the pair make a formidable team – the store has now won five store-of-the-year awards, including their most recent just last week.
They say they complement each other well – Stevens with her knowledge and history; Excell, who trained at one point to be a teacher but never made it to the classroom, with her administrative skills. They both have a natural rapport with their staff.
“Before Dad passed away, he was the referee,” Excell laughs, when asked if there have ever been any sisterly squabbles. “He used to come in and sort us out.”
Mum still keeps an eye on the shop as well. “She’s very proud,” Stevens says.
Rising from a corner dairy
Family connections and community links run deep at Night ’n Day. Among many examples, there’s father-and-son combination Alan and Hamish Garrick, who own four Night ’n Day stores in Queenstown and Arrowtown, and husband-and-wife Sukhwinder Singh and Manjit Kaur, who own the Mt Maunganui and Rotorua stores.
At the top of the business is general manager Matt Lane, who was born in 1990, the same year that his parents, Andrew and Denise – the original Night ’n Day founders – turned their fledgling group of stores into a franchise chain.
The Lane family has owned Night ’n Day’s original Regent Rd store in Dunedin since 1984, buying an ageing grocer’s shop with a decaying floor and transforming it, eventually, into a 24-hour student mecca, selling all manner of hangover-curtailing staples (a hot steak pie and Coca Cola, anyone?).
The Regent Rd store remains world-famous in Dunedin, but 35 years on from its launch as a franchise business, Night ’n Day has expanded well beyond its Otago roots, now operating 54 stores across New Zealand. It is the country’s third-biggest retail convenience chain.
At the same time, the company is pushing for a more level playing field to take on the supermarket duopoly of Foodstuffs – which runs New World, Pak’nSave and Four Square – and Woolworths NZ (previously Progressive), the owner of Woolworths and Fresh Choice/Super Value.
Last month, Night ’n Day rolled back the price of butter to August 2024 prices. Rather than a 500g block of yellow gold selling for around $11, Night ‘n Day sold 20,000 blocks – they were limited to one per customer – for $6.50 each.
An effective marketing campaign and publicity stunt, it certainly forced home a point about the hefty price of butter, with the duopoly in the spotlight, and broader consumer speculation of a major new competitor.
“I think too much focus is on a third player,” Matt Lane told Karen O’Leary of the Paddy Gower Has Issues TV show.
“How can we change the market to be a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth? Let’s not limit ourselves. Are the small centres going to end up with Costco’s? Absolutely not.
“Is Timaru, is Greymouth? They’re not going to end up with a Costco, so why should [those towns] be disadvantaged purely because we’re trying to get an international player that competes in the major cities to try and compress prices?”
Breaking the duopoly
Lane tells the Herald that the duopoly situation has been a long-term problem since the early 2000s and, therefore, needs long-term solutions.
He’s a big fan of the Government effectively carpet-bombing the problem with solutions, rather than a piecemeal approach.
“I feel – and it’s easy for me to say this – that there needs to be an overcorrection and then wind it back if necessary, rather than just trying to take one step, then one step, and then one step, and saying, ‘Is it actually working?’”
The Government, the Commerce Commission and “the whole of New Zealand know it’s an issue”, Lane says.
“We seem to be content just to say, ‘We’ll try and tweak wholesale, or create a wholesale supplier. We’ll try and tweak some of the competition rules or the land covenants’.
“Let’s try to fix everything. If we find that something is a bit harsh, you can still dial it back again to find that parity, but we’re a long way away from creating competition.”
Night ’n Day was once a member of the Foodstuffs co-operative, giving it access to wholesale prices of dry grocery items.
That came to a halt in 2011 – Foodstuffs has previously cited breaches of its membership agreement; the decision also coincided with Night ’n Day partnering up with Gull to open 21 new stores in the North Island.
The grocery challenges have meant some Night ’n Day stores lost the ability to hold liquor licences. Because grocery wholesale prices jumped and therefore the retail price lifted, they weren’t selling enough relevant products to be deemed a grocery retailer (and therefore able to also sell booze).
Despite these hurdles, Night ‘n Day is a big business success story, largely because of its agility and a necessary pivot away from a focus on groceries – they’re still there, but currently more expensive because of the wholesale issues – to a more purposeful, competitive offering within three distinct pillars: coffee, milk bar and fresh food-to-go/deli foods.
“That’s because everyone can access different prices and you can create a differentiation of the product,” Lane says. “That’s where we see a massive amount of growth and that allowed us to sustain our operations because we lost all the profitability and sales of grocery.”
While serving barista coffee and hot food might seem common sense, New Zealand has a reputation for leading these retail trends internationally.
Lane recalls being at a US retail conference when an expert speaker’s suggestion of barista coffee – rather than the instant, filter variety – was met with gasps and concern in the American audience. New Zealand had been selling it for years.
Night ’n Day has also been turbocharged in recent years with delivery service in the form of Uber Eats, Door Dash and Deliver Easy.
“It’s the next step of convenience,” Lane says. “Historically, we’re a convenience store because you can get in and out very quickly based on the format size.”
Now, convenience arrives at your front door. “People are living a lot more here and now. They’re living for the moment. They value their time a lot more.”
Night ’n Day eyes new locations
While Night ’n Day has a network of 54 stores dotted from Southland to Whangārei and is always looking to grow, Lane says there is no magical number.
“It’s the quality over quantity for us. We look at every opportunity as it comes across. We certainly don’t sit there … being complacent with what we’ve got.
“We do want to grow, but we want to make sure that it works, first of all, for the brand, franchisees and the site itself.”
Lane reveals the company is looking at several potential new sites, including one at Jack’s Point, in Queenstown, as well as exploring some further options in Dunedin.
There is also a “clear gap” in Hamilton. “It just feels like that’s a logical city we’re not part of, when you look at our geographical spread.”
An indication of a franchise value is revealed on Night ’n Day’s own website. Right now, two franchises are listed for sale – Cromwell, for $680,000 plus stock at valuation (an estimated $160,000), and Dee St in Invercargill, for $450,000 plus stock at valuation (estimated at $125,000).
According to the website, the Cromwell store has a weekly turnover of $62,700 and Dee St has a weekly turnover of $51,000. The average gross profit for each site is 34%.
Lane talks of Night ’n Day having more agility than similar-sized retail convenience brands.
“We can’t compete on [a marketing] budget with the BPs and the Zs in terms of doing things that way. We’ve just got to do it by creating a point of difference and we do that through our supplier base, speed to market, the ability to have an idea in the morning and execute it in the afternoon.”
The origins of Night ’n Day
Like Bridget Stevens in Winton, Matt Lane first experienced life in the shop as a young teenager, stacking shelves. That later became a university job behind the counter, alongside a number of his mates.
After graduating from Otago University and working for four years at Deloitte, he came back into the business in 2016, working in business development and then finance before becoming general manager in 2019.
Lane’s mother, Denise Lane, says she and her husband, Andrew, owned two standalone dairies in Dunedin initially. They sold those in 1984 to buy the Regent Rd store in the heart of the student district.
It was a good-performing store and long-established on a busy street.
The site also became the family home for the Lanes and their young children, with their residence attached. Staff had to use the family toilet. “Our hallway wasn’t a normal hallway – it was all filled with shelves and stock because our house was also our storage room.”
Opposite them was a BP station, and the Lanes started hearing whispers that it would start trading 24 hours a day.
They acted quickly and got in first. They knew they needed to retain their regular customers – a 24-hour rival threatened to draw them away.
While Night ’n Day went 24 hours, the BP never did. It’s no longer there.
“It was the first standalone 24-hour convenience store in New Zealand,” Andrew Lane says. “There was nothing like it. It started off slow, but it actually picked up and we thought, ‘we’re on a winner here’.”
Confident that the model could work elsewhere, the couple then sought out and bought the best dairies in Invercargill and Christchurch.
In 1990, the couple were at a National Association of Retail Grocers of New Zealand (Nargon) conference where they met representatives from the Night Owl convenience chain from Australia.
“At that stage, we had five stores and they had 10 or 11, and they explained to us about franchising, which we’d never heard of as a business system back then. We’d probably heard of the McDonald’s way of doing things, but didn’t really know too much about it,” Andrew Lane says.
“They explained what they had gone through – they said you should really look at it, it’ll move you away from the day-to-day hassles of operating a convenience store, and you’ll be able to help other people replicate what you’ve done.
“We did some investigation into franchising and we thought, well, yeah, this system works and it works well. And we said, if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to come up with a brand.”
With the help and expertise of a Dunedin graphics designer, they came up with the Night ’n Day concept and worked over the following months to develop systems, including operations manuals.
The other dairies were rebranded. Andrew Lane was worried about that, but he says there was no pushback. “There was none at all; it was all in our head!”
Denise Lane puts a myth to bed that the blue-and-gold colours were a nod to their Otago heritage. Not at all, she says – they represent night and day.
The duopoly disruptors?
Matt Lane says there is no one “silver bullet” to compete against the supermarkets.
“We need the foundations to be able to compete, whether it’s ourselves, whether it’s The Warehouse, whether it’s a new player coming in. More competition in this space helps us, even if we’re not the leader in it.
“Do we want to grow? Yes, absolutely. The only way I can see it happening, though, is through the existing set-ups.
“It’s very hard for any player to sit there and go, I’m going to open opposite a Pak’nSave and compete. It’s just not going to happen. There’s not the brand presence. There’s not the pockets to be able to do so.
“We’ve grown organically over time. We’ve utilised the conversion of some Four Square stores to be able to do that.
“To start creating competition, I think one of the most important things is removing the restraints of trade on the duopoly stores. If someone is currently operating a Four Square and they want to convert or go independent, there should be no barriers for them to do so.”
Lane points out there’s not a lack of brands in New Zealand, it’s a commonality of ownership.
“If you had Pak’nSave, Fresh Choice, New World, Woolworths and Four Square all competing against each other, it would actually be quite a competitive marketplace and they’d all try and take each other’s market share.
“Whereas what we’ve got is quite a complacent duopoly where everyone just plays in their own space … ”
Lane also points out that for every day that the status quo remains, the duopoly grows stronger.
“They’re opening new stores, they’re creating a better footprint, they’re cementing brand awareness.
“Competitors are getting more and more nervous. It’s one thing to come out and go, we’re going to fix the supermarket industry – that happened in 2021. We’re now in 2025.
“My discussion to MBIE [the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment] was there’s been nothing given to me that has improved my business and my ability to compete that wasn’t available to me in 2021. So we’re four years deep and I don’t have one tangible thing I can point to say, ‘This is helping me grow and succeed’.
“But then you go, ‘Who is going to take the risk and why would they take the risk in the New Zealand market?’ Bit different in the States or Australia, given the population size and density.
“But there needs to be a genuine motivation or genuine support to actually be able to encourage people to do that.”
After first interviewing Lane in early August, I went back to him this week for an update. “No public announcement has benefited us to increasing competition, however what is encouraging is the key components that will improve competition are still being worked though and considered.
“It is a wait-and-see, but there is still a lot of resource being allocated to increasing competition and I’m hopeful something will eventuate.”
A Ferris wheel that hasn’t stopped
For all their success, Andrew and Denise Lane remain remarkably grounded – they are thrilled to see new generations of families in their franchise stores coming through the business.
“I don’t know if I see it as a major success story,” Andrew Lane says. “I probably see it more as something that we just wanted to achieve and just kept on achieving it to grow.”
He says when the business entered its franchising structure in 1990, it was with the intention of mentoring and “helping other people enjoy a business that we both thoroughly enjoyed, and to grow like that”.
Denise Lane adds: “It was a case of long, hard hours. I guess we never thought it was going to get to where we are now.
“It was like a Ferris wheel – when you got on the ride, you couldn’t get off it until it stopped. It has not stopped yet.”
Disclaimer: Night ’n Day recently sponsored the NZ Herald’s Great NZ Road Trip project. This article is an independent editorial story.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor.
