I have previously said that the greatest loss I have suffered in moving away from the Keystone State was the loss of freshly baked, hot Philadelphia pretzels. Coming in as a close second is the loss of Wawa coffee. Yes, you can buy Wawa coffee in K-cups, but even though we use filtered water in our Keurig, it just isn’t the same.
Wawa in Philly’s Headhouse Square to close
Neighborhood groups had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store.
by Mike Newall | Friday, June 16, 2023 | 11:15 AM EDT
The Headhouse Square Wawa will close July 16, a company official told The Inquirer. The move comes after neighborhood associations had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store and outside on the sidewalk.
The site will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.
“While closing a store is always a difficult decision to make, Wawa constantly conducts careful and extensive evaluations of business performance and operational challenges of all stores on an ongoing basis,” said Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce in a statement Friday, confirming the pending closure of the Wawa at Second and Lombard. “We continue to invest in our home market of Philadelphia.”
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Joe Dain, cofounder of the Delancey Square Town Watch, which was formed earlier this year, said his group and other neighborhood organizations had met with Wawa officials in April to discuss ongoing concerns at the Headhouse Square Wawa. By that time, the company, he said, had already taken measures to curb panhandlers and other public nuisance issues, including curtailing its hours, hiring private security and working with city police to provide patrols.
“There were certainly efforts being made,” Dain said. “What we were addressing was the fact that more needed to be done.”
Wawa notified the group that it would be instead closing the location, he said. The closure will be only the latest vacancy to hit the historic cobblestone district. A CVS across the street from the Wawa also closed its doors in recent years. The drugstore had been battling many of the same concerns, Dain said. In 2019, Giant Heirloom said it planned to open a supermarket at Abbotts Square at Second and South, around the corner, but that project has since fallen through. The property sits vacant.
Crime affects everybody, not just the immediate victims. Owners see the value of their properties decline, shoppers have fewer options, including the loss of Wawa coffee, and things just generally deteriorate. Trouble is, among the good Democrats of the 5th Ward, which includes Headhouse Square, sort-of progressive but not wild-eyed crazy Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff received 4,777, 47.1%, of the votes in the May primary, while police-hating, hard, hard left progressive Helen Gym Flaherty came in second at 2,908, 28.7%. Primary winner Cherelle Parker Mullin, who campaigned on fighting crime among other things, came in fourth, with 931 votes, 9.2%.
The adjacent 2nd, 8th, and 30th showed similar results.
Simply put, the liberal Democratic voters of the area voted for their own problems!
Wawa has been shrinking its Center City presence.
In October, when Wawa announced it was closing stores at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market Streets, the company cited “continued safety and security closures.
Then, even further down, we get to the part where the Inquirer amused me:
Dain, of the Delancey Square Town Watch, said the Headhouse Square store had become more of a problem for residents in recent years.
“We would have groups of kids coming in and ransacking the place at night,” he said. Some of the panhandlers that often congregated outside the store had become aggressive, he said. The store had also become a gathering spot for people in addiction, he said, who would then camp in the historic Shambles structure or by the Headhouse Square Fountain.
“(P)eople in addiction”? That isn’t listed as a direct quote, and I had to chuckle; is that the newspaper’s stylebook phrase for junkies?
This is what you get when you tolerate crime, even the ‘little’ crimes, in what have been mostly minority neighborhoods. Sure, junkies camping out on the streets at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues aren’t bothering anyone in Center City . . . until now, they do. Someone knocking over a bodega in North Philly doesn’t really concern the people in Headhouse Square, and doesn’t even make the news unless a Temple University student gets hurt, so they can safely vote for soft-on-crime, police hating politicians like Mrs Flaherty, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, but crime, like any other cancer left untreated, metastasizes.
From what I can tell, part of this is WaWa’s own fault.
I live in the Hampton Roads, VA area. We don’t have the homeless camps or crap on the streets problems (yet), but panhandlers have been on the rise.
And one of their favorite hangouts is WaWa. I work about 20 miles from where I live and there are WaWas at both ends of the trip. I frequent both of them. The one near where I live, there are always at least one, usually more like two or three panhandlers outside the door asking for money. I’ve complained at the store many times and nothing changes. All they need to do is tell them to leave or they’ll have them arrested for trespassing. The cops here would respond slowly, but they would respond and they would arrest them. But the store refuses to do that.
The wawa near where I work, it just started about a month ago, but there’s a vagrant that seems to be living on their front sidewalk. They won’t tell him to leave and they even let him leave his meager possessions sitting in his little corner on the rare occasion that he’s not there. He comes in and uses the bathroom in the WaWa whenever he feels the need and no one says a thing to him. I’ve also complained to the manager of that store several times.
I finally used the contact form on the WaWa web site to contact corporate. The first time they replied and told me how seriously they take these types of things and that they’ll contact the store’s “security team”. I wrote again after nothing changed and they didn’t even bother to respond.
If they don’t put an end to it, the word will spread that they’re a safe haven and it will just get worse. For my part, I’m done with WaWa. I used to buy both breakfast and lunch at the one near work on the days I’m required to go to the office, and I used to always fill my gas tank at WaWa. I probably spent close to $200 a week there. No more. If they would rather be a homeless shelter than a place of business, that’s fine with me…I’ll do business elsewhere.
The point is, the story from Philly just tells me they’re starting to enjoy the fruits of their own policies.
We lived in Hampton from 1985 through 2000, and there were no Wawas in the area at the time. And there were no obvious homeless living in plain sight, either.
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