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frequent visits. Adding gas retailing would certainly be con-
sistent with Wawa’s mission to “make customers’ lives easier.”
But things did not go at all as planned. Wawa failed to rec-
ognize how different gas retailing was from retailing high-qual-
ity prepared foods. More important, Wawa encountered a more
fundamental mismatch with its core service-oriented culture. In
1984, Wawa shuttered 34 integrated gasoline–convenience store
locations, despite the fact that the venture had enhanced rev-
enues at the pilot locations.
Ten years later, in 1994, then-CEO and fourth-generation
owner Richard “Dick” Wood was again seeking significant
organic growth and looked anew at gasoline retailing. Fortu-
nately for Wawa, most gasoline retailers had not been very good
convenience store retailers. Still, companies have long memories
for failure. After a decade, gasoline was still considered anath-
ema to “being Wawa.” There were numerous reasons why gas
retailing, with its operational complexities, might not be com-
patible with Wawa’s high-touch, superior customer experience.
Wood started by leveraging outside expertise. He had
served for some time on the board of QuikTrip, a convenience
store chain with a strong presence in the southern United
States, and he had a strong relationship with QuikTrip’s CEO,
Chester Cadieux. QuikTrip had successfully combined supe-
rior gasoline retailing with convenience store offerings.
Cadieux, in turn, provided Wood with QuikTrip’s detailed
business plans, financials, and the process details necessary to
run an integrated gasoline and convenience offering. Wood
appointed Jim Bluebello to lead the program, with a small team
in a stand-alone unit. Creating the separate unit contained costs
in case of failure and protected the gas team from institutional
resistance from the core business. But Bluebello still required
support from the rest of Wawa to succeed—the capabilities in
convenience retailing, operating processes, and service excel-