Lady Business: Who gets to go to Wawa?

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-ninth issue, published May 24, 2018.

The Room Where It Happens

There’s an underlying question I keep coming back to in this newsletter, and it’s one that’s had a banner few weeks in the headlines: Who gets allowed into certain rooms, and how comfortable do they feel there?

“Comfortable” can mean a wide range of things from “respected” to “not arrested,” of course. And it’s a question that intersects race and class and sexuality as well as gender: Starbucks bathrooms. Arrested Development cast interviews. The fashion industry. Time Inc.’s top journalism jobs for most of last century. The Fortune 500 list.

It’s a question that came up as I reported this big labor of love in June’s issue of Inc.: A profile of 54-year-old convenience store Wawa, which started a few miles away from where I grew up, and which now is one of the biggest such chains in the country:
 

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. The company claims $10 billion in annual revenue. (Wawa also says it's profitable, though it won't discuss specifics or how much revenue comes from gas sales.) Top dog in the $550 billion U.S. convenience store industry is 7-Eleven, which took in $29 billion in U.S. revenue in 2017. But Wawa is now eyeing new competitors: quick-service and fast-casual chains like Dunkin' Donuts or even Chipotle, which sells nearly $4.5 billion in burrito bowls and guacamole annually.

I found a ton of fascinating detail about the company’s success: Abraham Lincoln once worked for Wawa’s founding family! Wawa’s Washington store is the semi-official breakfast caterer for Face the Nation! The company reportedly dropped $80 million on buying its own oil barge! I could have written twice as much about it (and did, in the earlier drafts), especially about Wawa’s complicated and sometimes fraught family history. Eg: The guy originally slated to take over Wawa as CEO in 2005 was also the son of former Delaware governor Pete du Pont, a onetime Republican presidential candidate.

One point that got cut from the article was raised by a couple of experts: “Convenience stores have traditionally attracted blue-collar men,” former NPD Group restaurant analyst Bonnie Riggs told me, but Wawa and its closest competitors “are attracting not only women but Millennials and Gen-Z” customers from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
 
More bluntly: Traditionally, “women didn’t feel comfortable in that environment,” said Richard J. George, a professor emeritus of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University. “Wawa was one of the leaders of making their stores comfortable for people in all environments.”
 
Which makes sense if you think about it—the stereotypical convenience store is highway-and-gas-station-adjacent, full of crappy food and cigarettes, populated by shady characters and long-haul truckers. It’s not a place where a lot of people feel comfortable. But—and this is part of the culture and the cult following that my article gets at, and what I heard from so many fans of Wawa—that was never my experience at my local Wawa growing up. It never felt like a sketchy place to hang out, or a dangerous place to be a teenage girl at any hour.

Admittedly, I was a white girl in a pretty white suburb, a place where I felt comfortable most places; I doubt the town was generally as welcoming to people of color. But during my recent reporting visits to Wawas, in the Philadelphia area and the Washington area and in Florida, the customers I observed seemed pretty diverse, racially and gender-wise.
 
My friend Felicia, an actor who used to live in downtown Philadelphia, praised the chain this way: “I also loved that I could roll into my South Philly Wawa at any time of day or night, in pajamas or crazy teased hair and massive amounts of make-up left over from a show, and nobody even really blinked. A couple times I went in there around midnight after doing back-up singing for Johnny Showcase, in crazy clothes and way over made up--and no one cared or gave me any crap.”
 
That’s the sort of thing that’s often hard to quantify in a business profile of a company. Revenues and profits and employee numbers are clear cut. Statistics on corporate diversity and inclusion program – how many employees, and managers, and board members, aren’t white men? – can be quantified.

But who feels welcome and comfortable in the spaces you operate? That’s a far more subjective and individual measure -- and one at which all sorts of institutions are massively failing these days.

Lady Bits

--A hilarious/horrifying 1977 People headline I turned up in my Wawa research, profiling the founding family daughter who married the Delaware governor: “Who's That Pretty Law Student I Saw You Out With? Gov. Du Pont Has the Answer.”
 
--Speaking of people feeling comfortable in traditionally unwelcoming spaces, I admired a lot of the small statements Meghan Markle (and her mother!) made during her wedding this weekend. Like wearing a wedding gown and a reception dress both designed by women, as was her unconventional wedding cake.
 
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