Wawa stakes its claim in Sheetz territory with its first Central Pa. store

Wawa fans lined up before dawn Thursday near Harrisburg International Airport to witness the chain firmly stake its claim into what was once squarely Sheetz territory. The Delaware County-based company opened its first Central Pennsylvania store — within eyeshot of a Sheetz.

The only thing separating these two beloved Pennsylvania convenience store chains, which are just 0.3 miles apart on West Harrisburg Pike in Middletown, is a CVS in between. Within the boundaries of the CVS demilitarized zone there are no hoagies or MTOs, no gas pumps or touch screens.

In several grand opening missed opportunities, Wawa did not bring a truckload of sand from the Jersey Shore to draw a line in, Sheetz did not sneak a hose of its Boom Boom sauce onto Wawa’s property, and nobody anywhere played “Dueling Banjos.”

Wawa started the party by giving away hand-clapper noisemakers and free Wawa T-shirts, and by pumping music in the parking lot. Hundreds of fans — many who came wearing their best Wawa-run clothes like pajama pants, Crocs, and Eagles shirts — began lining up at 4:30 a.m. By the time the store opened at 8 a.m., the line wrapped around the building.

The first person in line was Amanda Shull, 39, of Camp Hill, who went to college in Philly, where she fell in love with Wawa. She’s been waiting “years” for a store to come to the area and didn’t cheat with Sheetz when it was a Wawa desert.

“I think Sheetz is going to go out of business now,” she said, looking at the one just down the road. “Bye, bye, Sheetz! Nice knowing you.”

When the doors opened, fans screamed, danced, and skipped their way into the store. Shouts of “Go Birds!” were heard and the Penn State Harrisburg men’s basketball team, whom Wawa invited to the event, started a few “We are Penn State” chants.

Chris Haynes, 23, a recent graduate who was on the team and an Upper Darby native, said he’s been “a Wawa fan living in a Sheetz world.” He’d drive 30 to 40 minutes to the nearest Wawa, in Lancaster, and said now that there’s a Wawa in the area, Dauphin County has “earned my residence a little longer.”

“A lot of people from Penn State Harrisburg are from the Philly area, so I think it’s going to be easier to recruit players now,” he said.

Also at the opening, with his video camera, was Matthew Fridg of Latrobe, who has revived the documentary he began in 2018 and put on hold during the pandemic: Sheetz Vs. Wawa: The Movie, the tagline of which is: “The most colossal conflict the screen has ever known.”

“When we saw the news break about the Middletown Wawa, I said, ‘This is it, we’ve got to be there,’” Fridg said. “It’s great for us. The story has only gotten better. Sometimes a story just needs time, like wine, to develop.”

Over at the nearby Sheetz, which was relatively quieter, Ashley Wise, 40, of Middletown, waited for an MTO with her daughter, Mallory, 8, who was playing with a noisemaker from Wawa.

Wise said they attended the Wawa opening but the lines for food and gas were too long, so they went to Sheetz. With both nearby now, Wise said, she’ll go to Wawa for hoagies and Sheetz for everything else, because “they’re everywhere here.”

“Wawa was a novelty when we’d travel, but now it can be a part of our lives,” she said.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time Wawa and Sheetz stores are close together. The chains have locations near each other in Maryland and Virginia (in Charlottesville, Va., they’re right across the street from each other), and in Pennsylvania, they coexist in the Lehigh Valley in towns like Bethlehem, where several locations are less than a mile apart.

But this new Dauphin County store — the chain’s 1,070th location across eight states and Washington, D.C. — marks Wawa’s burgeoning expansion into Central Pennsylvania, historically a Sheetz stronghold. Prior to this week, Wawa didn’t have a store in the state west of Lancaster County, but by the end of 2025 it hopes to have 12, with plans for 40 stores across Central Pennsylvania in the next five to seven years. (The long-rumored gentleman’s agreement about unspoken boundaries between Delco-based Wawa and Blair County-based Sheetz was just the stuff of Pennsylvania lore.)

Sheetz did not return repeated requests for comment, but according to CSP Daily News, which covers the convenience store industry, the chain announced plans for 30 more stores in Western Pennsylvania in 2022.

Right now, the closest Sheetz to Philly is more than 45 miles away in Morgantown, Berks County. Sheetz, which currently has 700 stores in six states, proposed a store for Phoenixville this year, which would make it the closest Sheetz has ever got to Wawa’s home turf in Southeastern Pennsylvania. But that store has been met with community opposition, as has a proposed Wawa at the same intersection.

Jeff Lenard, a spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores, said there are several reasons that convenience stores expand — their customers want it, an area is ripe for growth, and they have more qualified people to run stores than they have stores.

“Sheetz and Wawa are a different type of ‘rivalry,’ but there’s enough room for them in the same industry, in the same state, and sometimes in the same town,” Lenard said. “When they are apparently directly in competition with each other, what they are saying is this is an area that feels vibrant, and can support both of us.”

Wawa president Brian Schaller said when the Middletown site was chosen three years ago, Wawa saw a strong customer base in the county’s nearly 300,000 people.

“There’s also a million-plus travelers that come to that airport every year, so there is activity here and we feel we can compete with the food offer,” he said.

While Wawa and Sheetz fans have fought long and loudly for the honor of their preferred convenience store (so loudly, in fact, they’ve drowned out the few but proud Turkey Hill and Rutter’s fans), the companies say they have nothing but respect for each other. They’ve even worked together on volunteer projects for food banks and the Special Olympics.

“I think the Sheetz story with Wawa is actually a great one of competition that I think we both believe makes us better,” Schaller said. “We’re fighting for the good of the industry competing, so I think there’s more love than there is rivalry.”

Once again, it was left to the people of Eastern and Western Pennsylvania to fan the flames of this absurd rivalry. It’s not enough we have to goad each other on the Eagles and Steelers, the Flyers and Penguins, we had to take on this mantle, too.

“If you take into account the broader Pennsylvania, there’s always slights between the one side of the state and the other,” Lenard said.

Fridg, the documentarian, said he’s found Pennsylvanians have fun disagreeing on something so silly.

“There’s so much division in our country. This is the one divide that’s OK because if I’m at Wawa or you’re at a Sheetz, I’m still holding the door open for you,” he said.

Fans are so devoted they have tattoos of the chains, line up for openings, stop by for wedding photos, and buy all the silly merch, like Sheetz scrunchies and Wawa hoagie wrapper baby blankets.

The fervent fandom has even spread into politics. In 2020, noted Sheetz freak Sen. John Fetterman (then the state’s lieutenant governor) and U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, an ardent Wawa fan, penned op-eds for The Inquirer debating the merits of each chain. In 2021, they participated in a Wawa vs. Sheetz debate on Zoom hosted by City & State Pennsylvania.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the democratic vice presidential nominee, accidentally waded into the debate when he addressed the Pennsylvania delegation at the Democratic National Convention last month and mentioned he’d stopped at Sheetz, which elicited boos from the Philly-area delegates.

Some politicians try to be cautiously diplomatic, aware of the size and power of the Wawa and Sheetz voting blocs. This week, when celebrating the debut of canned cocktails at state convenience stores and supermarkets, instead of going to Sheetz or Wawa for a photo op, Gov. Josh Shapiro went to Rutter’s (a York-based chain).

In the 2016 election, former President Donald J. Trump stopped by a Wawa, and this year, Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Sheetz and used a Wawa reference in campaign billboards.

“That speaks that they’ve done enough research to know Pennsylvanians care about their convenience stores and they’re doing everything they can to see how that might play with the race,” Lenard said.

Back at the Wawa opening, retired educator Sheila Evans, 64, of Middletown, stood in the store with a cappuccino in hand, marveling at the crowd. She said she hopes people show up to vote in November the way they showed up for Wawa on Thursday.

“If people who believe in something turn out to vote, like they turned out for this, we’ll be in good shape,” she said.