As Wawa continues its rapid expansion into new states, another one of the company's earliest stores will be closing next month in South Jersey.
Wawa confirmed an Oct. 8 closing date for its Cherry Hill store on westbound Route 70, near Chelten Avenue, after a run of 51 years. The store is part of a dying breed of older, smaller Wawas that opened beginning in the mid-1960s and helped establish the company as a convenience staple in the region. The store that's closing first opened its doors in 1973.
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"While this was a very difficult decision to make, we have determined that this store cannot deliver the experience customers deserve or continue to meet performance expectations," a Wawa spokesperson said in a statement to the Courier-Post.
Wawa closed another one of its oldest stores in South Jersey in November, shutting down a shop that had opened in Mount Laurel's Ramblewood section in 1972. In Philadelphia, a Wawa that operated for 45 years in Port Richmond closed in July.
The company has said its newer operations and products can't be adapted to work in many of its older store designs. And while Wawa often remodels and replaces its older stores in communities that lose them, a proposed Super Wawa with a gas station on the other side of Route 70 was scrapped because of objections from Cherry Hill residents. The company's emphasis on buildings stores with gas stations has led to more scrutiny from communities concerned about traffic and the presence of fuel lines near homes.
Wawa's original store in Folsom, Delaware County, opened in 1964 and was closed in 2016. The company held a celebration to open a larger store several blocks away. Before the store's closure, a former customer living in Houston wrote an open letter to Wawa in hopes of saving the original store.
"Some of you may think that it is weird to include a local grocery store as an important part of your family, but the truth is ... it's more than just a local grocery store," Jacqui Vivanco Hertlein wrote in her letter to the company at the time.
Wawa now has more than 1,060 locations in the United States, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic region and Florida, and is now in the process of expanding into Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. The company was ranked 20th last year on Forbes' list of the largest private companies in the country.