Have you ever considered what it takes to serve one million customers daily?

When founder Grahame Wood opened the first Wawa store in 1964, he envisioned a new kind of convenience store that simplified customers’ daily lives with fast, friendly service, fresh products, and value prices. Today, one million customers each day have come to expect this brand promise when they frequent our stores and interact with our associates. A central theme for our associates this year is “doing it just a little bit better” – a slogan first introduced in 1981 after customers repeatedly told Wawa associates that their people, stores, and product were always a step above the competition.

To make sure we deliver on the expectations of our customers one million times per day, we have stringent quality control measures every step of the way, from selecting the right vendors, to supplying the highest quality products, to hiring the best associates. You’ve heard me say before that at Wawa we consider ourselves a tight-nit flock.  But it’s important to note that we don’t fly alone.  While our 16,000 associates are the most visible champions of our values and brand promise, we hold our network of suppliers and strategic partners to the same high standards. Whether the product is under the Wawa exclusive brand label or under our vendor partners’ name, we share the goal of delighting our customers and making their lives easier.  After all, it’s a team effort and they too play a critical role in simplifying the lives of both our customers and our associates.  

Last week we conducted our spring review of some of our direct store delivery partners and Wawa’s own internal support departments – we call this our Key Partner Review Process which we conduct twice a year. Our external vendor partners and internal support departments each received a report card evaluating their performance. Their reviewers: the General Managers responsible for daily operations at each of Wawa’s 570 stores. Through the evaluation, our General Managers provide valuable feedback to our partners and help better align our collective efforts to serve and delight our customers. It’s our way of ensuring we maintain meaningful, long-term relationships with our internal and external partners to simplify our associates' lives, strengthen our core offer and deliver on our brand promise time and time again.

Success in business today is predicated on effective relationships with numerous stakeholders – all of which are aligned and focused on our ultimate customer. Through the years, our key partners have helped us develop and improve on a multitude of new products, processes, and concepts that have given us the ability to serve our customers a little bit better through the years. So, the results are in and I’m proud to say that our partners are the best of the best, proof of which lies in the 90% or better satisfaction rating each of the participating vendors and departments received from our General Managers last week. Special kudos to our top external and internal partners at Tastykake and Wawa’s Facility Department - Fuel Equipment Repair Team respectively, who each earned 99% satisfaction ratings.  But the “keys” to the store go to our most improved vendor partner - Canada Dry.  Our valued partners at Canada Dry went the extra mile for their customers – our store teams – and they achieved an increase of 17.3 percentage points in overall satisfaction ratings since the last survey.  This level of improvement enhances our store teams’ ability to satisfy their customers, strengthens our partnership and will lead to many great achievements in the future. 

It takes a lot to serve one million customers each day, but through measures like our Key Partner Review, we can ensure that we have the best products, service, and people to consistently deliver our brand promise each and every time.  And through partnerships like the ones we’ve built over the years, we have faith that we will continue to fly higher and faster together.

‘Til next time…