But when he retired in , Wood instead appointed the first outsider CEO: Howard Stoeckel, a former human resources executive at the Limited, who joined Wawa in and rose to become its enthusiastically folksy marketer in chief. Du Pont "was smart, but values and culture mean more in this company than being smart," Dick says. While not a family member, Stoeckel was a well-known quantity to Wawa employees. He approached the job with a healthy appreciation for Wawa's culture, and with a philosophy that continued laying the groundwork for Gheysens.
If you learn from failure, you're rewarded. Stoeckel's biggest practical goal was overseeing Wawa's first major geographic jump, to Florida, where Wawas started opening in While far from Wawa's supply chain and store clusters, the Sunshine State was otherwise welcoming: a big territory, affordable real estate, an established convenience-store culture, and many transplants from Wawa's home turf--including one Dick Wood.
At 59, when he became CEO, Stoeckel soon started looking for a successor. The board settled on Gheysens, who grew up working in his father's car wash. After graduating from Villanova, Gheysens went to Deloitte, where Wawa became a client.
He jumped to the retailer in and worked his way up to CFO. Five years after formally taking over, Gheysens regularly consults with his two immediate predecessors--even when he's departing from their longstanding suburban strategy.
The first test of his urban pivot came when he persuaded Wawa's board to sign off on a big new store in Center City Philadelphia--and built it within 85 days, ahead of the crowds who flocked to the pope's visit to the city. The bet, and hustle, paid off. Half a mile from the renovated Wawa's celebrations, at a larger, newer Wawa with gas pumps outside and tables out back, training general manager Denise Haley is overseeing operations.
A cheerfully competent presence with carefully plucked eyebrows and long brown hair, Haley walks me through industrial kitchens, past cold cases full of energy drinks and a freezer holding Halo Top and Wawa ice cream.
She greets colleagues and customers without breaking stride, and then throws a smile to the visiting cigarette sales reps. Haley started at Wawa in , and is in all respects a company lifer. After asking where I grew up, she quickly identifies the closest Wawa. Then: "That's Paul's store. My brother was married to his sister. She also makes a few appearances in The Wawa Way , as a paragon of Wawa's customer service.
In one anecdote, Haley made a house call to a regular, an year-old woman who fell and contacted the Wawa for help, and drove her to the ER. Beyond the occasional book cameo, or an annual resort trip for top managers, Haley and other longtime employees have been well rewarded for their tenures at Wawa, thanks to the company's ESOP, which, by some accounts, is the second-largest in the U.
This setup isn't without tensions; as Wawa's growth has accelerated, so have payouts. Wawa declined to comment.
That lawsuit, and a few others involving overtime and racial discrimination claims at individual stores, point to another challenge: Wawa's labor force has increased dramatically in recent years.
Wawa had 20, employees when Gheysens took over in ; it now employs more than 30, people--and 5, more in summer. Wawa says its turnover rate is lower than average for retail, a sector with a notoriously high churn. But as the company continues to expand, and does so without franchising, Wawa must figure out how to maintain its employee training and its customer service reputation at massive scale.
Another big issue: Technology, especially as Amazon, with its no-checkout stores and its takeover of Whole Foods, attempts to overshadow the brick-and-mortar retail ecosystem. After Wawa's long-ago bet on touchscreen ordering, Gheysens has introduced mobile ordering and delivery, through a partnership with Grubhub.
But perhaps the most immediate challenge will be finding the right balance for Gheysens's barbell. One end is obvious: Within the past year, Wawa has introduced "reserve" coffee sourced from small-batch beans from Kenya and Tanzania. Some stores have salad counters that could compete with those at Chopt or Sweetgreen. And the company is developing "artisan sandwiches" that have what Gheysens calls "really high-end" meats--and higher prices. Yet Wawa can't ignore longtime customers. Their loyalty helped Wawa sell 80 million hoagies and million cups of coffee last year--and can generate reactions like Philadelphia magazine's grumbling over declining hoagie quality, or the great hazelnut decaf backlash of , when Wawa discontinued a lower-selling blend and promptly "got blasted," Gheysens recalls.
He's trying to avoid a repeat. Most of the heavy lifting happens at Wawa's gleaming new headquarters, in a 10,square-foot test kitchen populated by chefs, nutritionists, food scientists, and beverage specialists.
One recent day, an employee offers tastes of the sesame-seed hoagie rolls she's rigorously comparing, before Wawa's beverage expert walks me through a small-batch "cupping," the coffee snob's sniff-slurp-spit equivalent of a wine tasting.
Meanwhile, two chefs study an array of chickpeas, scallions, and lemons, ready to experiment with a "green tehina" sauce that, one admits, "is a bit out there for our customers. Which won't necessarily stop Wawa from trying to sell it--so long as it can fit into what Gheysens declares to be the end goal of all of this transformation. About The overall number of plans has declined, which the NCEO attributes to inactive plans some companies registered in the late s, as well as low creation rates since then.
At Wawa, anyone who's worked more than a year, who's logged at least 1, hours, and who's at least 18 is enrolled. Spending so much time in Toronto, people often assume that I take in a good number. Well, I wish that were true. Quite simply, it is just hard to plan ahead so far because invariably something always comes up so I end up working most evenings too. I love hockey to be sure, but baseball has some unique traits that really appeal to me.
For one thing, I love the slower pace of baseball because really lends itself to storytelling, not only between innings but, between batters and plays.
Readers of this column know I do love a good story. When you watch baseball, the crowd of course cheers when a player crosses the plate to score a run. And when there is a grand slam… well, it brings the house down. The point is that ball fans want to see a player make it all the way. They want their hometown heroes consistently swinging for the bleachers. They want to see their guy going all the way. I echo the views expressed by many public health and medical officials that the Ford government has been choking up too much on the bat in their efforts to thwart COVID If I were to assign jersey numbers and Doug Ford was joining the team, I can tell you for sure that he would not get 25, 10 or I say this because it seems since day one, Doug Ford has not demonstrated a true commitment to hitting a home run, or even winning for that matter, but rather has chosen to implement a game plan full of half measures.
Whether Ford and his backroom buddies know it or not, as a result of his half measures, the COVID virus is mounting for a fourth wave assault on Ontarians. But unlike baseball , this is not a game. Back in June, Andrea Horwath and the NDP were trying to get the message across to Ford that the previous school year had been a debacle for our students and teachers as they had to muddle their way through lockdowns, online learning and school closures.
Ontario students missed more school days than any other province. Educators, parents, public health officials, the NDP and others have worked hard throughout the pandemic to encourage the government to reconsider and improve decisions. Beginning in June, the Ford government was called upon to formulate well-developed and fully funded plans to ensure our students have a better school year this fall. But Ford chose to ignore the signs, choking up on the bat and trying to just bunt despite the fact it is late in the game and Ontarians need a homerun.
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