The new Leesburg Wawa will officially open for business on Thursday – and customers who have long awaited the moment will receive free coffee for four days.
The new minimart, located at the busy intersection of U.S. Hwy. 441 and Griffin Road, will open at 8 a.m. with a ribbon-cutting event to follow an hour later. Limited edition “Wawa Leesburg” T-shirts will be given out to the first 100 customers while supplies last.
Crews were bustling about at the new convenience store on Tuesday morning as the final preparations were taking place. A variety of work trucks could be seen in the parking lot and employees were scrambling around inside the facility to stock product and have everything ready to go Thursday morning.
Wawa originally had hoped to open the new store before Christmas, which was announced at a Leesburg Commission meeting in July. But that didn’t come to fruition for the store, which is located on property that once was home to a large Citizens First Bank branch and a historic Sonny’s BBQ location.
Over the past two years, Wawa has flooded the tri-county market. The first area store opened in in Oxford in November 2017 and was followed by a somewhat controversial location at the corner of U.S. Hwy. 27/441 that opened in July. Another location just down the street at 13535 U.S. Hwy. 27/441 in Lady Lake – not far from the Sharon L. Morse Medical Building and the soon-to-be-renamed UF Health The Villages Hospital – opened in September.
Further north, the chain opened new locations in Ocala at 3601 East Silver Springs Blvd., 1001 S Pine Ave. and 3312 W. Silver Springs Blvd. Those openings followed groundbreaking ceremonies in September 2018 that were heavily attended by Ocala and Marion County officials.
Another store at 4025 SW College Rd. opened in May, followed by a Belleview location at 5726 SE Abshier Blvd. in September. Like the other three locations, those two have been quite busy since first welcoming customers.
The properties that contain two of the Marion County Wawa stores – 1001 S Pine Ave. in Ocala and 5726 SE Abshier Blvd. in Belleview – currently are for sale for $4.5 million and $4.07 million, respectively. SRS National Net Lease Group is handling both locations, which come with 20-year lease agreements with the popular minimart company, as well as six five-year options to extend.
In late December, Wawa customers faced somewhat of a headache when the company announced that a large-scale data breach had compromised the payment information of customers who used a debit or credit card at any of its more than 850 locations since March. Company officials sent letters to customers saying they discovered malware that was capable of capturing customers names, card numbers and expiration dates at both the inside pay stations and gas pumps.