A Wawa in Ridley, Pennsylvania
It’s around 10 a.m. in Ridley, Pennsylvania, at the local Wawa. The morning coffee rush has just ended at the convenience store, leaving only a handful of customers lingering during the calm before the storm of lunchtime hoagies.
“Are you interviewing people about Wawa?” a customer named Ferrenc Rozsa approaches me. “You know, I wrote a song about Wawa.” He quickly retreats to his car and then back into the store with a country tune blasting through the speakers of his iPhone.
Coffee in the morning, hoagies in the afternoon
In the evening I fill up my tank
They got everything and more
I love my Wawa, I love my Wawa
I love my Wawa, it’s my favorite store.
Rozsa imagines Blake Shelton on lead vocals.
To an outsider, Wawa appears like a normal, run of the mill convenience chain — except to residents in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Florida. To them, Wawa is a community hub that deserves praise, fan mail and even country songs.
I ask Rozsa what inspired him to write and produce an entire song commemorating Wawa. “I come here every day. Even if I don’t need anything, I come in because I miss the feeling. The Wawa people all know you, they say hello, know you by name sometimes — it’s almost like a family.”
Ferrenc Rozsa
Family.
It's a word I hear often during my days at Wawa store openings, touring the chain's Pennsylvania headquarters and while chatting with customers in retail locations. It’s ingrained in just about every element of the company culture. At a store opening in Hackensack, New Jersey, "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge & Jade plays from the speakers as neighbors cheer firefighters during a hoagie making contest. A goose mascot snacks on lettuce during the ribbon cutting ceremony.
The grand opening of a Wawa in Hackensack.
On a separate occasion, a Thanksgiving food drive supports employees and customers in need. Whether it’s helping out store associates or donating thousands of dollars to charity, many Wawa stores take pride in their communities. It might seem unusual for a store that sells gas and Sizzlis.
It’s all in the goose blood, as they would tell you.
The Wawa Thanksgiving drive in action.
Wawa’s family roots date back to 1803 with the Wood family’s booming iron foundry business in New Jersey.
By the 1880s, the Wood family spent summers vacationing around the Philadelphia area. Keen to Delaware County in particular, George Wood rented and later bought a Victorian home with a vibrant red roof in a town called Wawa, an Ojibwe Native American word that translates as “Canada goose." Surrounded by farmland, the family took an interest in the dairy market, and by the early 1900s developed a new business that promised safe and sanitary milk during a time it was scarce.
Milk bottles from when Wawa was originally a milk delivery company.
Later, Wawa became a go-to milk delivery company, but the service unraveled during the late 1950s and early '60s. Women were beginning to enter the workforce and the general need for convenience reached an all-time high. To respond to the change of times, Wawa opened its first food market on April 16, 1964 in Folsom, Pennsylvania.
The rest is, well, history.
Milk being packaged at Wawa's facility.
The Victorian home and surrounding land that George Wood purchased all those years ago is precisely where the headquarters still stand today — fittingly named “Red Roof.” The original home is still intact and hosts a small tour through Wawa’s relics and personal history, while former bedrooms operate as offices and conference rooms.
The original home owned by the Wood's family, now used as offices as well as to showcase the history of Wawa.
The current state of Wawa’s headquarters, which is in the process of renovation, isn’t unlike a Silicon Valley tech giant, except without the obvious frills. You certainly won’t find celebrity chefs or employees on scooters, but you will find an impressive innovation lab, test kitchens, employees huddled around laptops proudly wearing Wawa shirts, and a cafeteria that shares a vague resemblance to a Wawa retail location.
Wawa's new headquarters
The Wawa test kitchen
A hoagie being made in the test kitchen
Smoothing testing
Coffee cupping tests
The Innovation and Design Center is where Wawa tests different things in a replica of their stores.
A coffee test counter in the Innovation and Design Center
A space to test layout and display inside stores.
And to match its cult-like following, Wawa needs equally devoted employees. For instance, Wawa’s current CEO Chris Gheysens has been with the company 18 years and is still a rookie by Wawa standards.
Chris Gheysens, CEO of Wawa
It’s not out of the norm for Wawa employees to stay with company 30 to 40 years. At HQ they've pasted photos in their cubicles, work memories throughout the years, alongside kitschy memorabilia.
“I don’t know why [staff] are so nice. They certainly aren’t getting paid enough. I couldn’t do it,” one customer in Aston, Pennsylvania, tells me, though 41% of the company is owned by employees through Wawa's employee stock ownership program.
Wawa memorabilia on an employee's desk
One of the employees at Wawa's headquarters
Offices are filled with Wawa signage
The topic of expansion is always on the agenda at Wawa. Gheysens is first to admit the company has a perfectionist attitude that lends itself to a slower, calculated growth.
No, you won’t be seeing Wawa expanding nationwide anytime soon.
“You think of a Wegmans, you think of an In-N-Out Burger, they are very slow growth, very deliberate — and i think there’s an element of that cult status that’s attached to that in some regard," Gheysens. "Just as you get bigger, the focus has to turn more toward efficiency, away from the tailored approach to business and more to to the process approach of business. I just wonder how much that can possibly erode the cult relationship you have.”
Wawa's new flagship store in the middle of Philadelphia.
This past September the company launched its new flagship store, located on Broad and Walnut Streets in the heart of Center City, Philadelphia. It offers everything you’d expect to see at Wawa from a product and tech perspective: touch screen ordering, surcharge-free ATMs, milkshakes, soft drinks. With reclaimed wood, a brighter color palette and first-ever seating offered, this new location represents a shift in design aesthetic you’ll see in future locations.
The tech-strewn interior of the Philly Wawa.
If you live in North Jersey or South Florida, expect to see more Wawas coming in the near future.
When it came to expanding, Florida in particular was an unpredictable gamble and a completely new market in 2012. Corporate wondered, would customers take to the Wawa brand?
Maxi, who works at the Philly Wawa
Wawa attempted to translate the northeast's culture and loyal following seamlessly down south. They even nixed the idea of automatic doors (because it’s known that at Wawa everyone holds the door for you). Or so they thought.
On launch day they forgot one missing element: Wawa Iced Tea.
Not only was there a line out the door, but the company faced an absolute uproar: Wawa was launching in Florida without one of its most beloved products. Floridians knew exactly what they wanted.
Decisiveness is a trait that holds true to many Wawa enthusiasts. In the midst of major expansions, Wawa has been either renovating or completely shutting down older stores that did not have fuel potential or were not held to the same standards as the newer locations. Considering Wawa becomes a ritual of sorts for many people, when one closes, it’s personal. Take Wawa store #532 in Crownsville, Maryland, which was set to close Dec. 10, 2015. Customers took to Change.org to rally support in hopes of keeping the store open. Despite being a town few have heard of, it has garnered over 2,000 signatures.
Another petition asks the chain to return Ciabatta Melts: “Allow the world to enjoy the wonderful creation known as the Ciabatta Melt sandwich once again. Reintroduce these sandwiches, so that I and many others throughout the east coast can be happy again.”
Poetic (and occasionally pissed) Yelp reviews are not to be disregarded either. “Wawa has seen me at my worst, and my best. At 4am and 4pm. Sober and horribly drunk. Wawa will never judge me,” writes Craig M. of London.
Perhaps the greatest love letter of all comes from Ellie Kemper, star of Netflix’sThe Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the American version of The Office. In a hilarious 2011 essay for Princeton Alumni magazine, titled “An Ode to Wawa,” Kemper details her undeniable love for the chain:
How do I put into words one of the most enduring relationships I have in this world? I’m not sure I know. How do I come to terms with the fact that whenever I come back to Princeton, it is the Wa that I am happiest to see?
“I think it’s just kind of like the all American Store. It’s like, Apple pie and Wawa, you know?” - Paula Turnbach
Annually Wawa brews more than 195 million cups of coffee, sells 80 million built-to-order hoagies and serves 600 million customers. In 2015 the company ranked No. 34 on Forbes’ list of America’s largest private companies, bringing in $9.7 billion in revenue each year. In 2016 Wawa plans to open 47 new locations.
For a company that's not nationwide, it has topped Market Force Information's study on America's favorite convenience stores for 2015. So, really, what is it about Wawa?
Wawa’s competition (Starbucks, McDonald’s, 711 and Sheetz, among others) offer similar convenience and product, and with the exception of Sheetz, are readily available on every street corner. “I think it’s just kind of like the All American Store. It’s like, apple pie and Wawa, you know?” explains customer Paula Turnbach.
Wawa has managed to grow into a large retail chain while still maintaining some dynamics of a local, mom-and-pop shop.
An employee at the Aston, PA Wawa
For a chain of more than 645 convenience stores that are all fundamentally the same, Wawa manages to mean different things to different people.
It can be the town center where you see your neighbors even when you don’t necessarily want to. Its parking lot can be the unofficial club on the weekends, where teenagers drink Natty Ice. It can feel like your high school reunion when you return home for the holidays. During Thanksgiving it’s not uncommon for customers to bring store associates plates from their own families' feasts. Scott Gaddis and Cindy Richardson, known as “the Wawa Couple” among locals, tied the knot in an Abingdon, Maryland, store. Mother Isabella Marks Mosca's Facebook post went viral after a Wawa store associate gave her son with autism a visor. “Thank you for caring and for the chance to make us always feel at home,” she writes.
“No, I don’t love Wawa,” customer Andy Omiridis tells me. “I enjoy the ambiance or whatever you call it. It’s not that important — it’s just a place for me to go." But he's in the stores all day long. "I hit every Wawa in Pennsylvania and Delaware. I probably do it three times a day. Four times, maybe.”
When I question why he so frequently visits a place he feels indifferent about, Omiridis pauses and scratches his head. “I guess I do love Wawa? Some days I need a cup of coffee [and] I’m only looking for a Wawa. Isn’t that crazy?”
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