New Jersey’s Convenience Stores

Everyone has a convenience store that they favor. We get our coffee there, cigarettes for smokers, lottery tickets for gamblers, pornography for balding middle-aged men without computers, and milk and handmade sandwiches at 4 a.m.  Heritage’s Dairy Stores are as native to South Jersey as extra butter on a pork roll. For instance, they do not carry lottery tickets or have any porn at all behind the counter. A friend of mine works at Heritage’s, and claims the reason that the privately owned convenience store chain is owned and operated by a very Christian family. Heritage’s egg sandwiches are microwaved, and as a breakfast sandwich aficionado, which is automatically points off in my book.

In Bergen County, we have many Krauser’s convenience stores.  Krauser’s, which does not have a website as far as I can tell, are generally the sleaziest of the corporate convenience stores, and are mainly frequented by bearded foreign men who go right to the extensive porn magazine section. Other than that, they do all their business in tobacco and the lottery as far as I can tell. You would have to be nuts to get a sandwich where they have that much porn.

I generally prefer the Wawa in town; it is cleaner and better organized, and their sandwiches are better. Wawa’s are also a South Jersey thing; in North Jersey, we have Quick Chek. Quick Chek has more than 100 stores in North New Jersey and so-called Central New Jersey.

My breakfast sandwich ratings are as follows.

1. Quick Chek

2. Wawa

3. Heritage’s

4. Never had one from Krauser’s, and I do not plan to.

~ by vonawrath on November 2, 2008.