1,254 words
Last Saturday night at about 8:15 in a mostly white neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia, about 100 marauding youths — every last one of them black — brought psychedelic shockwaves of vibrancy to a Wawa convenience store. They looted items, knocked down display cases, and jumped up and down on cars outside with hormonal teen-primate fury. At least one of the looters, apparently a female of the species, was filmed twerking on a counter inside the store.
Although a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer said it “was like a scene from the apocalypse,” there was nothing exceptional about the incident. It was only the latest iteration of black America’s ongoing collective assault on our nation’s fast-food establishments. Things like this seem to be happening daily across the country. As far as Negro-driven ransackings of public eateries go, the incident was quite ordinary. There weren’t even any reported injuries.
It’s the place they ransacked that’s unique.
Wawa (pronounced “wah-wah”) is the greater Philadelphia area’s version of a 7-11. The difference is that whereas 7-11s are painfully generic (the chain started in Dallas, but there’s nothing distinctively Texan about 7-11s), everything about Wawa stores bears the unmistakable imprint of their crass and grimy birthplace. Wawa is the only convenience-store chain in America where you can not only pump gas, take a leak, and buy the most potent gas-station coffee on the planet, you can also get cheesesteaks made fresh to order alongside large soft pretzels and Tastycakes and Zitner’s coconut Easter eggs and Herr’s potato chips and an array of Philadelphia-style hoagies, even a heretical vegetarian hoagie. During the Thanksgiving season, you can get their most popular sandwich, The Gobbler, which is hot turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, and stuffing all wrapped in a hoagie bun baked in the store from Philly’s finest Italian-style dough.
It’s this insistence on honoring local culture and cuisine while expanding beyond the Philadelphia area that has inspired a fierce loyalty among Wawa’s patrons.
As this Wawa booster phrases it, “Wawa’s like a corner deli that had like been a part of a community, and you turned it into a chain.”
According to 28-year-old Philadelphian Clayton Dyer — who has the Wawa logo’s goose tattooed on his freaking arm, as do many other Wawa acolytes, including Johnny Knoxville of Jackass infamy:
Calling Wawa just a convenience store would be like calling Fenway Park just a sports venue. They’re so much more than that. . . . I came to realize that, for me, Wawa is home, and that’s what inspired my tattoo — a reminder that I can have a taste of home any time I stop into a Wawa, which I do frequently.
In an essay called “The Touchscreen Sacrament of the Wawa Hoagie,” Meghan McCarron writes of how the brand walks a tightrope between expanding nationally and losing its regional identity:
The cult of Wawa extends far beyond what’s usual for a regional chain. But for me, what makes it truly great is how it represents the best of what Philadelphia has to offer. . . . And as it stretches further and further from home, it does not forget itself: Wawa calls a hoagie a hoagie, even in Florida. . . . If there were Wawas across Southern California, the chain would lose its sense of home. Wawa’s power comes from being both massive and specific, a regional behemoth.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
It’s not hyperbolic to refer to Wawa’s fans as a “cult.” In 2014 Business Insider declared, “Wawa is one of the only convenience stores on the planet with a cult following.” Wawa holds such a mystical gravitas in the area that when Pope Francis visited Philadelphia in 2015, Mayor Michael Nutter offered him the Wawa hoagie of his choice.
The name “Wawa” was derived from an Ojibwe word for a breed of goose that was found in the Delaware Valley over a century ago. “Our original Dairy farm was built on land located in a rural section of Pennsylvania called Wawa,” states Wawa’s official website. “That’s why we use the goose on Wawa’s corporate logo.” To me, it’d make more sense to use a cow, especially a cute little calf, rather than a goose as a dairy farm’s logo, but maybe that’s why I’m a writer rather than a dairy farmer.
The Wawa chain, which over the years added hot coffee and hot food to all of its locations and placed gas pumps outside most of them, now boasts nearly a thousand stores. Most are in the Delaware Valley, but the franchise has even spread down into Florida, 90% of whose population at any given time seems to consist of people who were born in the Northeast and got sick of the winters there. At last count, over a quarter of all Wawa stores are located in central Florida. The company is now planning to expand into Tennessee and Alabama. I’m not sure my brain is ready to process a Wawa in Alabama, although I’d like to hear someone with a speech impediment sing a song about it.
As a permanent exile from the area that is generally known as the Delaware Valley but who also holds an eternal fondness for the area in my heart, this looting of the Wawa in Northeast Philly upset me more than the Notre-Dame fire of 2019.
I have nothing but warm, positive memories of Wawa. Every day in the lunchroom of my Catholic grade school in Springfield, Pennsylvania, we were served one of those gigantic soft Philly pretzels and a half-pint of Wawa milk in little white cartons with orange lettering and a crude rendering of the Wawa goose. We also made a field trip to the unincorporated community of Wawa, Pennsylvania to visit the dairy farm that made the milk we drank every day for lunch. The farm was maybe seven miles maximum from the house where I grew up.
The first-ever Wawa Food Market opened in 1964 in Folsom, Pennsylvania, only three miles from my house when I was only three years old. Wawa was my ’hood, homie. In mi barrio. Wawa is the set I claim. It’s in my bones — from all that free Wawa milk I guzzled in grade school, it’s probably literally in my bones.
Wawa was always reliable. Wawa would always be there. The coffee would always be hot. There would always be Tastykakes and pre-wrapped hoagies and soft pretzels. Life in and around Philly could often be bleak and miserable, but Wawa always made life a little easier.
And now a hundred damned dirty juveniles went bonkers and shattered Wawa’s innocence in a part of town that used to be known as the “Great White Northeast.”
“For those who don’t know Philly,” wrote someone on Twitter, “WaWa [sic] is almost a sacred institution. Ransacking a WaWa [sic] is truly a taboo. This is like the sacking of Rome. Only if the Romans were doing it to themselves.”
Well, it depends on how you distinguish a Roman from a barbarian.
This one stings me. It punches me straight in the solar plexus of my soul’s nostalgia center. I suppose this is how a religious person feels when someone has desecrated a church. And even though I doubt that, up to the hundredth monkey, any of them could even spell the word “symbolism,” the looters knew deep down in their DNA what their little act of resistance symbolized. Coming from a so-called “civilization” that has never invented anything as magnificent or profound as a Wawa Food Market, they wanted to spoil our milk and drop a turd in our cheesesteaks. They wanted to make things inconvenient at our convenience store.
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20 comments
Recall the many times Michelle Obama referred to black neighborhoods as “food deserts.” The implication is that whitey was just stingy with sustenance. The truth is that any business, but especially food business, in the most vibrant neighborhoods will be robbed blind daily and eventually run out of business.
While most of NY and NJ chose south Florida to relocate, almost all of PA has chosen Jacksonville and north Florida. When we got our first WaWa a couple years ago it was a big deal. We now have at least 10. The employees there are top notch and the places are as neat as a pin. I am very sorry for what those animals did. They belong not only in a food desert, but the actual jungles from which they came.
In one of the twitter comments on this incident a black was literally complaining that WaWa doesn’t open stores in black neighborhoods. You can imagine the responses.
Those rascally “teens.” Actually some of them aren’t teens yet.
Their parents are probably home saying, to quote Chris Rock, “Ah takes care o’ mah kids!”
You’re supposed to take care of your kids.
If I’m one of those rampaging little spadelings, I’m going right for the Entenmann’s butter cake. Those and the Tastykakes taste like they came out of the oven an hour ago.
I say a bunch of us get together and flash-mob a Popeyes. See how they like it.
Those are “Bebe’s kids.” Remember that show in the late 80s or early 90s with the fat bugeyed black standup comic talking about small ghetto children wreaking havoc at Disneyland and other places where white people might have seen them? I would have laughed more at that routine (1) if I could understand what he said, which was filtered through a heavy Ebonics accent and a speech impediment, and (2) if he had not seemed to be so fond of those horrible children.
Clearly, there’s no one telling the mini-mulignans you’re not supposed to loot Wawas.
That bug-eyed mush mouth comedian was Robin Harris and he was pretty funny. He died of a heart attack at age 36 in 1990 just as his career was taking off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXvPZxavVXc
Was it Bernie Mac who called his young nephew a “little faggot?” It was a real nephew and he wasn’t happy about it.
When the Visigoths sacked Rome on August 24, 410 the empire was shocked, even though it was not breeding the sort of men who might have put a stop to it long before.
https://alchetron.com/Sack-of-Rome-(410)
It’s always a few thoughtful souls, like this article, who ask the right questions — like is this a harbinger of the end? Or the end’s already happened and these are our funeral games.
By 410 the Empire was facing grave problems as the legions lost the battle of Adrianoplois (378) attempting to keep barbarian (Huns) from permanently settling on Roman lands.
The battle was lost for political reasons although both Roman Emperors wanted the migrants stopped – unlike today.
Things could’ve still been turned around by 410 but the Romans were too divided by then. Often Romans would sell out other Romans for gain and armies would be destroyed by treachery. A difficult time for recovery.
Is it wrong to suggest Wawa is owed some reparations for the theft and damage?
It’s not.
Your mention of reparations – did you see that lady from England school that nasty half-caste don lemon when he suggested the royal family should hand over their billions to savages? If only more white people would stand up for their own when in the news.
I did. He looked like a nasty half-caste in the headlights.
The interview is discussed elsewhere on the site (link below). She was extraordinarily well spoken on such a hot button issue. Kudos. It is a lesson for all that one can get a lot more mileage on a topic by avoiding name calling and careful organizing of the facts.
https://counter-currents.com/2022/09/the-union-jackal-september-2022/
The difference between the post-2020 black crime wave and the 1980s AIDS/crack epidemic is black birthrates have collapsed below replacement-level fertility today because of postmodern attrition (LGBT, involuntary-celibacy and feminist ‘careerism’ ie eternal ‘schooling’) despite significantly fewer abortions and murder. So this will end up being a net loss for the black population going forward because there will be more deaths per annum than births for the first time within the next few years. That means they won’t be replacing us via natural growth, but contracting right alongside us instead. Ironically, signaling the end of the welfare queen.
The black blitzkrieg of the 1980s unceremoniously ended in 1993 with the Clinton Crime Bill and the Mayor Giuliani stop-and-frisk (preemptive gun-control), which swept away an entire generation of Trayvons into the Big House, while this latest recrudescent wilding was initiated by the Trump prison clemency-pandering (ironically shrunk his share of the Basketball-American vote from .04 to .02), the convenience of the ‘pandemic’ (mandatory-masking) and the Easter Island godhead who went to heaven in Minneapolis when ‘the man’ took a knee to the plight of the 13-percent. This enabled the cowboying up of the urban youths who didn’t do nothin just goin to they astrophysics class, which we see today at a Wawas near you, but had seen much less during the colored quiescence of the previous 25 years.
Many of us are not so sanguine as you. When one looks at what areas of the the world have the greatest population growth, plus our current immigration crises, there are a whole other set of numbers to consider.
It’s fun to watch the video and try to pick out the future brain surgeons and rocket scientists.
They all look like they’ve been snorting vibranium.
https://phl17.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2022/09/Looting-7001-Roosevelt-Blvd-DC-22-15-070047.jpg?w=780&h=440&crop=1
My neighborhood Safeway story is very similar to how you feel about Wawa. I visit my family every year in the summer and the past decade I’ve seen the store of my childhood slowly going to hell in a handbasket. Back in the day it was the idyllic suburban supermarket, complete with cute cashiers, even the ones in their 30’s fueling my teenage libidinal angst. It’s largely because of the recently opened light rail that goes through the suburb where I grew up. It basically spreads out the homeless and other derelicts from the city and makes them now the suburbs problem to deal with. So word to the wise anyone in the burbs reading this and there’s a vote to open a light rail that connects you to the city. First it was derelicts in the parking lot, then it was you had to get a key to use the restroom because people were shooting up, a year ago I saw a security guard because people were shoplifting. A clerk told my Mom that she asked someone if they were going to pay for their items and she got a resounding, “no” as they walked out. The proverbial punch in the solar plexus of my soul’s nostalgia center, as you put it, was my latest visit seeing a very masculine looking tranny with huge tits at the cash register. I made it my point to avoid him and went to shelf check out. I had a stop a chat with one of the cashiers I recognized from my youth, still cute even in her late 40’s early 50’s, and she said out the side of her mouth in a sort of deadpan fashioned, “nice shopping at the neighborhood Safeway, huh?” as though knowing that the place has totally gone to hell in a handbasket.
You forgot to mention George Harrison’s song dedicated to Wawa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNfBDnnZyuo
I discovered Wawa when driving from Philly to Assateague back in 2018, and I’ve loved the brand since. I was elated when one opened near one of the towns I stay in Florida. We often hit a Wawa for breakfast sandwiches when pressed for time and a long drive ahead of us. I’d rather go to a Wawa with higher gas prices than another place, just because of the cleanliness of the store and the quality of their products.
The thing I love best is the fresh pastries. Great croissants, chocolate-filled and non, and delicious muffins with great cakey texture, much better than Dunkin. The coffee is so good too, Sumatran or Senegalese or other exotic blends and so cheap for supersize that keeps me going behind the wheel for many hours.
These animals should get the chair for what they did.
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