I shop at Wawa, our local convenience store, much more often than any person should shop at a convenience store. Today, for example, I stopped at Wawa three times. Yes, that’s pretty obsessive.
There are a few observations I have made about Wawa in my high-frequency visits, some of which I have probably shared before, but I would like to record again because it’s on my mind at the moment, having just returned from a trip to the store.
First stop: Coffee people. Are you a coffee person? I don’t mean the kind of person that simply enjoys coffee. And I don’t mean the kind of person that says, “I simply can’t get motivated in the morning if I don’t have my coffee.” The people I’m talking about are the OCD folks who would scream “must have coffee” in the morning if they didn’t require coffee to unzombify themselves. Even then, the act of getting and consuming the coffee is no longer what arouses them from this stupor so deep they forget to put on actual shoes with their suit-pants and instead wear their battered old pink bunny slippers with the missing button eyes.
No, the coffee itself isn’t enough. Whatever rejuvination they gain from drinking coffee in the morning happens after I encounter them at Wawa. Dang it.
Sometimes I just want to smack these people around. You can tell which ones they are before they even enter the building. I’m not sure how. Maybe I’ve encouraged a sixth sense in myself for detecting (and failing to avoid) coffee people.
There are essentially two variants of coffee offender at Wawa. The first kind is the Totally Oblivious coffee person. Mr. or Mrs. Totally Oblivious is just that - completely unaware of anything happening around them while on their mission to obtain coffee. They don’t see you. They see only the coffee machine. Donut delivery guy be damned! It’s not that they’re actively agressive, because that would imply an un-zombie-like behavior, it’s that they are completely befuddled and sometimes helplessly frustrated when they are separated from their coffee.
If you were to put up a partition near the coffee island and their coffee was behind it, they would have no idea what to do next. I imagine that 30 or so of them would buzz around the partition with empty coffee cups, waiting for the partition to move so that they could follow their usual path to the coffee.
The other kind of coffee person is the Icer. You do not need ice in your coffee. The coffee is supposed to be hot, you idiot. If the coffee is too hot, wait until it cools down. Do not pour just enough coffee into your cup for the ice to also fit, and then go to the soda fountain and fight with the ice dispenser for five minutes trying to get just the right amount of ice to go in your cup, spilling coffee all over the place. You do not need ice. You do not need ice.
It’s nearly freakin’ summer — why are you drinking hot coffee anyway?? You addict!
And finally on the coffee people issue - the next one of you that pays for a 12oz coffee with a credit card when there are four people in line behind you is going to die.
This week has also been trainee week at my corner Wawa, which doens’t help. I followed these two girls - sweat pants, flip flops, and tight tank tops all in matching Porky Pig pink and Sweat Will Be Visible Through This grey - into the Wawa as they were discussing how to break a $20 bill and pay for gas, which didn’t seem all that complex. I’m not sure why, but with all four registers open they proceeded directly to a far counter register where a guy (who I know is new, but that’s mostly irrelevant) was running the checkout.
This black guy at the register has hair that must be a foot long, and it’s all coming off his head straight out. It’s not a fro, but some kind of weird Don King-but-groomed look that has his managers wondering if a hair net is even neccessary when preparing food. So these girls are standing in line two back, the fro-ish dude has a single finger on the register’s touch screen but is standing way back from the register like it’s shooting out sparks or something, and he’s asking a girl in a Wawa uniform (who is kneeling on the floor between the register counters) something about iced tea while the customer at the front of the line holding six boxes of Salem 100’s looks on with horror.
I’m just painting a picture for you here. Wawa has got to be one of the most interesting places to work. Maybe it would get tired after a while, but I imagine that you see all kinds of people doing all manner of weird things in a very short time.
During my third visit to Wawa today, the short bus made an emergency stop for snackies for everyone on board. There was a brief moment of tension as a regular school kid who happened to also be there, maybe 6th grade, said something derogatory about the largest short bus rider I had every seen. Apparently, Wawa has undercover security because that altercation could have gotten out of hand quickly.
For the love of all that’s holy, train your employees to open the change rolls! I waited for 2 minutes while the clerk fought with the blasted coin wrapper. She thought she’d get fancy with the quarter roll and cracked it on the counter, spewing quarters all over the place. Thank goodness she hadn’t done that with the dime roll.
Wawa has recently added a few new things to their menu. They’ve got this whole “toasted” line of sandwiches, which I suppose they’re doing to compete with Subway and Quiznos. There are several problems with this whole toaster idea, though. First, the toaster makes everything take twice as long. This is not because of the toasting wait, which really isn’t that bad. But the employees wander around and do nothing while the toaster is going, and don’t focus on other orders. Sometimes they even wander away from the toaster to talk, forget it’s on, and then come back to it only after it’s been sitting there cooked for a while.
Second, their ordering system is a little broken because a single sandwich has to be entered into their touch-screen ordering system twice; once for plain, once for toasted. If they forget to remove both sandwiches when they run out of something, like the yummy roasted pork sandwich, then you can order something they don’t have. This causes all kinds of havok because by the time you learn that they don’t have what you want, you’ve already paid for what they don’t have.
Third, the toasting doesn’t really taste that good.
They’ve got this new cheesesteak sandwich that I tried today. Being from the Philly area, it’s hard to get a “fast food” cheesesteak that tastes any good. This one was surprisingly not that bad. I think I would prefer my meat to be a little hotter, though.
What I don’t like about their sandwiches is their tendency to put the tomatos on top. Apparently, every customer enjoys having their tomatos fall off their sandwiches. Would it be so much trouble to tuck the tomato slice down inside with the meat? You can put the lettuce on top, I don’t care if some of that falls off. Repositioning the tomato is a pain in the butt, though. And apparently, as I learned from overhearing far too much training this week, choosing the location for the tomato is completely the perview of the person making the sandwich, unlike things like the location of the cheese and the amout of meat. So if it’s within your power, do something!
Finally… Soda. Has anyone else noticed a strange uptake in weirdo sodas lately? For instance, at Wegmans I got a coupon on a bag of corn chips for a free 4-pack (4?) of Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. Uh, ok… Diet. Cherry. Vanilla. Let’s just mix all of these other sodas together and call it Dr. Pepper, shall we? There was no way this soda was going to last the market, said I, picking up the conveniently positioned 4-pack from the top of a stack. Oddly enough, it tastes pretty darn good, especially with salsa.
Well, what do I know? It’s a staple in the Wawa inventory now. And Coke is even distributing a similar flavor - Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke. Weird.
What’s even more weird is today’s discovery: Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper. The wonders never cease. If they could just put the flavor syrup pumps back on the soda fountain, I could get a 32oz cup of the exact mixture I want for $1.05, instead of spending $1.40 for 20oz of the premixed formula. Oh, well.
This post sounds oh-so-much more interesting when I’m reading it aloud.
