The Robot Wawa Was Always a Bad Idea. And Now It’s Closing

Wawa’s new all-digital store in University City / Photograph courtesy of Wawa

Not surprising news on the automation front: It looks like the experimental Wawa at 3300 Market Street — the one with no shelves, no racks, and no products, just a rank of slick ordering kiosks and serious HAL 9000 vibes — is closing for good today.

In a statement, Wawa said that despite “recently making investments in our store design to test a fully digital format … this test did not adequately improve performance or deliver an enhanced customer experience, which ultimately led to the decision to close the store.”

And honestly, I couldn’t be happier.

We initially wrote about the world’s first robot Wawa back in 2023 when the company first reopened the 34th and Market location as a brand new “all-digital” location. This meant that the store itself was more or less empty, and that all ordering would be done through the Wawa app or via kiosks inside. Employees would then package the orders and hand them over. And the whole thing (with the exception of the coffee bar, which would remain self-serve because even the suits, accountants, loss-prevention specialists, and consumer psychology nerds who came up with this idea understood that the daily coffee orders of your average Wawa consumer are far too chaotic and unhinged to be handled any other way) was meant to be a smooth, slick, seamless, and efficient transaction, accomplished with minimal human contact.

The problem was, words like smooth, seamless and efficient are words that precisely no one who has ever been to a Wawa would use to describe the experience of going to a Wawa. And while I’m guessing that’s precisely the problem that those involved with the design of the robot Wawa were trying to fix, those of us who are actually fans of Wawa saw that as a feature, not a bug.

Wawa is Philly to its bones. Its brand is built on the inefficiency of walking in the door looking for a meatball Shorti and walking out with two jugs of wiper fluid, some Peanut Chews, a fistful of scratchers, a tin of dip, and an Entenmann’s coffee cake. A smooth trip means not running into that neighbor you hate while sorting through the racks of snacks for the last bag of Herr’s hot honey cheese puffs. It’s the kind of place where a sweet little old lady will hold the door for a Cowboys fan, then hit them with her car in the parking lot. Where everyone will cheer, but no one saw it happen.

But this automated, high-gloss/low-drag futuristic vision of a Wawa built for the coming robot dystopia? It was a soulless, placeless branding experiment that wanted nothing to do with Philly. It was an attempt at scrubbing all the grit and weirdness out of Wawa; of sanitizing it in a way that would leave it with all the heart and charm of an airport convenience store. I wrote about the place in the winter of 2023, shortly after its debut, and was not kind in my assessment:

“Being there feels like being nowhere. Or like being anywhere, which is almost worse. And that kind of shiny, address-scrubbed blandness will always have an uncanny valley type effect on people here because Wawas are supposed to have personality. There’s supposed to be a grubby kind of humanness to them. They’re NOT supposed to be dead-eyed simulacra of the ‘Wawa experience’ smoothed and sanded and epoxy-sealed for maximum efficiency.”

I then went on to quote sociologist Ray Oldenberg’s theory of “Third Places” — the idea that, if your home is your “first place” and work is your “second place,” a society requires a variety of “third places” in order to remain sane, engaged, and functional. These can be almost anything: bars and cafes, clubs, churches, the gym. But among the many qualifiers for third-place status were requirements that these spaces be open and inviting, informal, convenient, unpretentious, and full of regulars. Your average Wawa is all of those things. Even though it exists primarily as a delivery vector for hoagies and 32-ounce almond milk double-pump cinnamon bun and cold foam iced coffees, they are entirely viable (and vital) third places for a lot of Philadelphians. But the all-digital Wawa? It was none of those things. Well, except for open, I guess.

And now, it’s not even that anymore.

So goodbye, digital Wawa. You were a bad idea, conceived at a bad time, implemented in a place that still values honesty and the messy company of their fellow man over corporate branding strategies, and now you’re gone.

Good riddance.