Wawa, Inc., said yesterday that it is closing its College Park store because the shopping center location does not fit into the company’s plans to open larger stores that feature gas stations.
County planning documents show the Pennsylvania-based company plans to build a new store north of the Capital Beltway in Beltsville, but it’s unclear whether the Sept. 30 College Park closing is related. Wawa spokeswoman Lori Bruce, citing company policy, declined to comment on planned locations that have not yet begun construction.
Planning documents show the Beltsville location on Route 1 and Rhode Island Avenue will occupy nearly three acres, offer 116 parking spaces and a gas station. The store is also planned to offer 32-percent-more retail space than the store in College Park, documents show.
Wawa’s College Park landlord, JBG Rosenfeld Retail, also issued a statement yesterday saying that at Wawa’s request, the Chevy Chase-based firm terminated the store’s lease early.
“We are sorry to see Wawa close a store that became a College Park landmark, but understand the business decision behind it,” Rosenfeld Retail’s statement said. “We have set the wheels in motion to obtain a new, dynamic tenant for this space.”
Although rumors have swirled about what will take Wawa’s place, a spokeswoman for Rosenfeld responding to questions about potential tenants said in an e-mail that company policy prevents her from commenting “on any tenant and/or lease negotiations until a lease has been signed.”
Wawa, Inc., has apparently had plans for a Beltsville store since at least 2004. Although the last action in the planning process occurred in 2005, Beltsville Citizens’s Association President Karen Coakley said the project has been in the pipeline for years, but has been slow-going.
Despite some regional knowledge of the new store, College Park employees and elected officials alike said they were surprised at the decision to close the College Park location. Managers were notified less than two weeks before the store was to shut down, employees said.
They aren’t the only ones among Wawa’s 13,000 employees to see store closings. Even as the company has opened more than 30 new locations throughout Maryland, Wawa Spokeswoman Bruce said “dozens” of others in the state have closed.
“Businesses have to reinvent themselves,” she said. “If we never changed, we’d still be delivering milk to people’s homes.”
The College Park store’s strip-mall location was targeted for closure because of its “very limited parking,” Bruce said, and because it is difficult for delivery trucks to access. The shopping center storefront also “limits our ability to model it to today’s business model” because it is harder to expand, Bruce added.
The company’s decision will likely be roundly criticized by student customers, however, who so far have expressed the kind of sorrow often reserved for a best friend moving away. The news that the company plans a Beltsville location offered no consolation, several students said, because frequent visits just won’t be convenient anymore.
“I don’t feel like driving to go to Wawa when there used to be one right here. Plus there’s the 7-Eleven,” said senior architecture major Lauren Senior, who added that she is upset with the decision to close the store. “I was actually thinking of boycotting.”
But she left the interview clutching Wawa bags.
The mood at the store was also noticeably different this week. As a crowd of students in the Wawa sandwich line chatted contentedly about Wawa memories, an assistant manager preparing the sandwiches mentioned that they were out of onions.
Someone in the line asked when they’d be available again. Probably never, came the reply.
The line fell silent.
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