Sinclair loyalty game drives 42% more store visits, 9.7% more fuel sales over eight-month test
Sinclair Oil ran mobile game rewards inside its DINOPAY app for eight months and pulled 42% more site visits and a 9.7% lift in fuel purchases. The numbers come from Sinclair and its partner Mistplay, covering a campaign that ran November 2025 through June 2026. Take the figures as the vendors report them, because both have a reason to like them.
The setup is straightforward. Mistplay's LoyaltyPlay tool put game-linked offers into DINOPAY, and customers earned fuel discounts by playing popular mobile games promoted inside the app. Customers play, earn a reward, and redeem it at the pump. Sinclair called the visit and purchase gains significant.
Why an operator should care
Loyalty is where c-store margin gets defended when pump spreads are thin. A 42% jump in visit frequency could pay for a program many times over, but that depends on what each redemption costs, which Sinclair and Mistplay did not disclose. Every extra trip inside is a chance to sell a coffee or a roller-grill item, and those items carry far better margins than fuel. The point of fuel traffic is to pull people inside, where the store makes its money.
The catch is that a discount-funded visit costs something. A 9.7% fuel-volume lift bought with cents-off rewards can dilute the very margin you were trying to protect, so the question any jobber or single-store operator should ask is what the redemption cost ran against the incremental basket. Sinclair and Mistplay did not release that math. Eight months is also short, and novelty fades once the game stops feeling new.
Still, the direction is worth noting for anyone weighing a loyalty refresh. Gamified rewards tied to an existing pay app pulled measurable traffic for one branded chain. Whether it holds past the launch bump is the open part.
Refinery waivers
The White House is pushing for more refinery waivers to ease pump prices, per a Yahoo report. The detail is thin, but the mechanism is familiar: small-refinery exemptions from Renewable Fuel Standard blending obligations cut compliance costs, and the administration is framing that as pump relief.
For fuel retailers, more waivers could soften wholesale costs at the margin if refiners pass any savings down, which they do not always do. The bigger crosswind is RIN prices. Every exemption granted reshuffles who carries the blending burden, and that ripples into what blenders and jobbers pay. Watch how EPA scopes the waivers before betting on any pass-through to street price.
What to watch
Whether Sinclair or Mistplay publishes redemption cost against incremental basket, which is what tells you if the loyalty lift actually paid. On the policy side, how many small-refinery exemptions EPA grants and what RIN prices do in response. Both take weeks to read, not days.