Wawa is closing two Center City locations. Here’s what former workers told me.

After working at more than half a dozen Wawa stores over the course of 18 years, John Deary says one memory stands out vividly: the fights.

“A lot of fights,” said Deary, who’s 35 and put away his nametag with the flying goose for good recently in order to pursue a career in comedy. “I’ve witnessed two guys fight and one bash the other’s head into the donation box at the cash register, breaking it and spilling blood and change everywhere. I witnessed two mothers, with their young children, get into a fight — during which one of the women pulled out Mace and carelessly Maced everyone in her vicinity, including my manager and her own young child.”

He knows other employees who have seen far worse: armed robbery, stabbings, shootings.

Last week, Wawa announced that it would close two Center City stores — at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market — because of “continued safety and security challenges.” These closures come after a group of young people ransacked a Wawa in the Northeast, which, in the words of Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong, was “a scene from the apocalypse.”

I reached out to a handful of former Wawa employees, who described a work environment at some locations where unruly customers were routine, theft was a near-constant threat, and gun violence — particularly at locations in the city — has increased over time. And despite all of that, they almost universally praised the flexible hours and noted the company’s emphasis on worker safety. Many said they still miss aspects of the job.

In a decade of full-time work at Wawa, Deary saw the company take steps to make employees feel safe by hiring security guards and cutting late-night hours at higher-risk stores. When he worked at the Wawa at Aramingo Avenue in Port Richmond, there was a police detail assigned to the store on weekend overnights.

“Aside from tons of theft and the late-night fights, I’ve been fortunate in not having anything too serious ever happen during my shifts, but I’ve worked at stores and had coworkers who were witness to much more serious stuff,” Deary said. “It can be a scary environment.”

Deary’s career at Wawa included stints working at stores in Bucks County, Port Richmond, Queen Village, South Philly, and Center City. There’s a marked difference between Wawas in the suburbs — where the company is expanding, sometimes to the chagrin of local communities — and those closer to Center City.

Disturbances tend to be more frequent — and more intense — at stores in the city, but Deary is not sure if adding more officers downtown would be practical.

One potential solution for store thefts and violence, he said, could be reverting to the purchase pick-up system that some locations used at the height of the pandemic.

“I‘m not sure if many stores did this, or still do this, but early in the pandemic, some slower stores kept their doors locked and only filled delivery and mobile orders,” he noted. “I also know Wawa has been testing drive-thru and walk-up window options. Maybe Center City stores could rely on order pick-ups or a delivery window during late-night hours.”

Alexandra Risko, 23, worked at a Wawa in Old Bridge, N.J., from 2017 to 2020. The only experiences she had with crime were the occasional unruly customer. “Once a guy threatened to punch me in the face, another threatened to get me fired,” she said. “In these instances the staff around me made me feel so safe and secure that I did not have to worry.”

Ashley Bonser, 36, worked at another New Jersey location — down the Shore in Lavallette — from 2009 to 2016. After Hurricane Sandy, Bonser was reassigned to an overnight shift. “If the local police didn’t come in of their own accord for free coffee, it probably would have been a lot worse,” she told me. “I thankfully never had any experiences with crime, but I’m sure that had to do with the constant police presence. On weekends in the summer, they were paid to be there.”

The two former employees I interviewed who worked at Wawa in the 1990s both said there’s a marked difference in violence, especially gun violence, between then and now. Five hundred people were killed by gun violence in 1990 in Philadelphia at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic; that record wasn’t surpassed again until 2021.

Chad Saylor, 47, worked at two Wawa stores in the mid-to-late ’90s — one in the Far Northeast and the other in West Chester. He fondly recalled what he said was a “Cheers-like vibe.”

“Wawa back in the ’90s wasn’t just a place you ran in and then ran out,” Saylor said. “You had coffee and talked for hours with a revolving cast of neighborhood regulars. The customers were very much an extension of the store.”

Those customers, he said, “would gather by the coffee area and shoot the breeze, walk around outside, say hello to folks in the parking lot, come back in, and talk for another couple hours. It was basically like a bar scene without the booze.”

Unlike Mayor Jim Kenney, who brushed aside the Wawa closures in Center City by saying, “I don’t think it’s a bad omen at all,” the former Wawa employees I spoke to had a more nuanced view.

Joe Crescente, 44, who worked at a Wawa in New Hope in 1997, said that the chain’s closure of two Center City stores is a “bad idea. Wawa is Philadelphia.”

I grew up in New England — a land without Wawas — but after only a few short months of working with my Philadelphia colleagues, I quickly realized how much a part of the city this brand is. The company is a symbol of the city. Abandoning two central locations feels like an admission of defeat.

But Crescente was also quick to note that the chain’s move was a symptom of a larger problem. “Anything that’s getting pinned on Wawa is not a Wawa problem alone,” he said. “It’s a citywide problem.”