Visual story

The Wawa line

Ask where North Jersey ends and South Jersey begins and you get an argument. The convenience stores answer it: 261 Wawas fill the south, 118 QuickCheks the north, and the line where one gives way to the other runs across the middle of the state. And the price of a home? In the 10 counties the line cuts through, QuickChek towns and Wawa towns cost about the same (−2%): the line divides habits, not wealth.

Wawa onlyQuickChek onlyBoth

Wawa’s share, south to north

Each bar is a band across the map, at the height of the band beside it: Wawa’s share of the two chains’ stores there.

Sussex · north0 Wawa · 1 QuickChek
Sussex 3 Wawa · 10 QuickChek
Bergen 12 Wawa · 27 QuickChek
Union 9 Wawa · 21 QuickChek
Middlesex 17 Wawa · 25 QuickChek
Monmouth 27 Wawa · 16 QuickChek
Monmouth 31 Wawa · 13 QuickChek
Burlington 54 Wawa · 5 QuickChek
Camden 46 Wawa · 0 QuickChek
Salem 14 Wawa · 0 QuickChek
Atlantic 28 Wawa · 0 QuickChek
Cape May 10 Wawa · 0 QuickChek
Cape May 9 Wawa · 0 QuickChek
Cape May · south1 Wawa · 0 QuickChek

Either side, same county

30 QuickChek-only towns against 20 Wawa-only towns, in 10 counties the line crosses. Pricier on the QuickChek side: Madison borough, Scotch Plains township, Fanwood borough.

Stores: OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License; the counts here are offered under the same licence. A store mapped twice, its shop and its pumps, is counted once. Volunteer-mapped, so a store nobody added is missing. Prices: Zillow’s typical home value, each town against its own county’s average, compared only in counties holding both kinds of town. More visual stories →