Why wawa name

Wawa brews more than million cups of coffee each year. That signature coffee, introduced in the s, is proprietary, and available only in Wawa stores. In , five West Chester women completed a two-year quest to visit every Wawa then in existence. In , HBO premiered Mare of Easttown , a limited series crime-drama that takes place in Pennsylvania and, yes, where the characters—including Winslet's—are seen indulging in and even talking about their Wawa coffee from time to time.

Fans of the convenience store chain turned the store into its own character, and even Winslet had a few things to say about the storied convenience store. Wawa had some major love for Winslet, too. To celebrate the opening of a new store in Delaware County, where the series was shot, Wawa declared June 10, " Mare of Easttown Day" at its stores. And created a limited-time Mare of Easttown Spicy Cheesesteak to go with it.

Half of the town of Wawa, Pennsylvania, is in Middletown, and half of it is in Chester Heights, the official location of the company's headquarters. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article, "Estimates of those who do live in Wawa range from about five families Bruce Clark, Middletown's then-manager.

BY Erin McCarthy. Wawa was founded more than years ago—as an iron factory. I did. When I first moved to New Jersey from upstate New York — the land of Stewart's and Nice N Easy — I saw the convenience stores and wondered how they came up with that rather funny-sounding moniker. Then I saw the goose on the store's logo.

Feeling pretty smart, I thought back to my French classes, where we learned that the French word for goose is oie , pronounced: "wa. That must be it, I told myself: There's a goose on the logo, and the name is a reference to geese. Two geese. Mystery solved. It wasn't until a few months later, when I decided to actually check my facts, that I found out I had been wrong all along.

The answer is pretty simple: Wawa is named after Wawa, Pa. But the story behind the words doesn't end there. Here's where it gets interesting: The town in Pennsylvania was so named because that's what the local Native American tribe called a certain bird.

That bird? My Midwestern parents moved to Pennsylvania's Delaware County, home to Wawa's headquarters and many of its stores, when I was 6. Initially, we were confused by this "Wah-wah" that generated religious-level local fervor. The name is taken from an Ojibwe word for the Canadian goose. Hence the goose logo and mascots. Soon enough, we became acolytes, won over by last-minute groceries and better-than-average coffee; my brothers, both now living far from Wawa outposts, still swear by its hoagies and breakfast sandwiches.

But Wawa transcends local celebrity. And, like any all-night restaurant, the chain is always there to make fresh sandwiches for the closing-time crowd. It's not just the sandwiches that win notice. In , Harvard Business Review singled out Wawa's rigorous employee training and the resulting strong customer service culture. That training was developed through a proprietary program with Philadelphia's St. Joseph's University; the company now handles training on its own. Joseph's who worked on that program.

Like Wegmans or In-N-Out, Wawa is usually described as a cult brand , a regional player--a Mid-Atlantic specialist confined to a narrow niche. That niche, though, is huge. Wawa also says it's profitable, though it won't discuss specifics or how much revenue comes from gas sales.

As Wawa edges upmarket, executives and fans cite a key advantage: its workers, their role in that company culture--and their financial stake, since Wawa is now 41 percent employee-owned. See below. Wawa asks employees to "fulfill lives, every day," and promote six core values --one of which is "embrace change. All seek to compete with the "quick-service restaurants" that make up one of the fastest-growing and most-competitive segments of the restaurant industry.

High-end chefs are spinning off fast-casual concepts; startups focused on salad and burgers and poke all vie to be the next Shake Shack; fast-food behemoths like McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are upgrading ingredients; grocery stores with prepared-food sections are becoming " grocerants. Yet while it tries to level up, Wawa's business still relies on volume and speed. The company makes "very few partial pennies per customer," Gheysens says, "but for a lot of customers" million of them annually.

Bring people in for a cup of coffee or a tank of gas or to get cash at the store's fee-free ATMs, and they'll likely buy something else: a bag of chips, a Tastykake, a highly customized hoagie--or, since the prices are so low, all of the above.

Wawa's ability to sell so much so quickly relies on technology, tightly controlled supply-chain operations, and a "cluster" expansion strategy that establishes most new stores near other Wawas. The company introduced touchscreen ordering in , getting a decade-long jump on the iPad menus that many fast-casual restaurants now use reducing labor costs and making customized orders--and upselling--much easier.

Its distribution partner, McLane, runs what Wawa calls the supplier's only dedicated warehouse in the U. Last year, Gheysens oversaw the launch of an oil barge and tug to bring 7. A one-time Deloitte analyst who became CEO in , Gheysens took over in the midst of the company's push into Florida.

He's continued that blitz while shifting his gaze to big cities: downtown Philadelphia, which the chain once neglected in favor of the suburbs and highways around them; D. But Wawa has always been quietly reinventing itself. Constantly," adds Rich, who left a role at Coca-Cola and spent two years pulling shifts in hour Wawa stores before his dad let him into headquarters.

Dick Wood remains bluntly unsentimental about family and business. He and his brother George--also on the board--"decided a long time ago that what was important to the family was: 'What's the value of a share of stock, and what's my dividend?

For the first years or so, that was a Wood. Wawa was nominally founded in , when Grahame Wood opened his first market in a rural suburb. But it really dates back to , when Grahame's grandfather George Wood opened the Wawa dairy farm, which would eventually supply that store.

And to , when George's uncle David C. Wood opened the first of the New Jersey iron foundries that would eventually provide the capital to buy the dairy.

And to , when the first Richard Wood came from England to colonial Philadelphia at the same time as fellow Quaker William Penn and started building a dynasty. It went on to encompass textile companies, children's hospitals, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Philadelphia Bank, and a dry goods business that, in the late s, outsourced some debt-collection work in Illinois to a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.

The Woods also intersected with other local, politically-connected dynasties; the du Ponts, of chemical fame, and the McNeils, of Tylenol fortune, both have supporting roles in the Wawa story. He returned with a plan to open three stores that would sell Wawa's milk and other perishables.

She credits the company's management culture to "Uncle Grady's" paratrooper service during World War II: "There's this sense of building a team, where I'm relying on you for my life," she says. In , Grahame hired his cousin's son, Richard D. Wood Jr. Which was perfect training.