Mitt Romney, WaWa, And Pennsylvania Gas Prices

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

This weekend, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney took some heat for using WaWa’s “amazing” touch-screen ordering system as a symbol of private sector creativity.
(The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also solicited heckles from the crowd for praising WaWa while deep in the territory of its archrival, Sheetz, which also uses touch-screens for food orders.)
But as the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple points out, the Central Pennsylvania convenience store market really is a competitive environment where chains are doing their best to one-up each other. “According to [the National Association of Convenience Stores],” he writes, “convenience-store competition is perhaps no keener anywhere across the country than among the hills and truck-heavy corridors of southern Pennsylvania. ‘The York, Pa., area is probably as competitive as you’re going to get,” says Lenard. “You have Sheetz, Wawa and Rutter’s.'”
And as we reported earlier this year, that competition helps keep Pennsylvania’s gas prices down:

So why is Pennsylvania’s aver­age gas price lower than most of those sur­round­ing states, even when its taxes are higher?
Tom Kloza, the chief ana­lyst for the Oil Price Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice, said the state has one of the most com­pet­i­tive gaso­line mar­kets in the coun­try. “That’s because you have com­pa­nies like WaWa, Sheetz. There’s Turkey Hill,” he said. “There’s a lot of inde­pen­dent chains where the busi­ness model isn’t so much about mak­ing money on gaso­line at the pump. It’s about get­ting the cus­tomers to come inside and buy deli items.”
So stores don’t need to mark up their gas prices to make money. “You’re break­ing even on gaso­line. But the customer’s com­ing inside for a dough­nut, or a sand­wich, or a sand­wich, or a candy, snack, soft drink. That’s where the real profit lies,” explained Kloza.

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