September 10, 8:30 A.M.: Wawa Finally Has a Date on Veterans Parkway — and Buc-ee’s Is Right Behind It
Murfreesboro has been watching this building go up for the better part of a year without knowing when anyone would actually be allowed inside. Now there is a date. The city's first Wawa opens Thursday, September 10, at 5208 Veterans Parkway, with a ribbon cutting scheduled for 8:30 that morning.
It is the last of three Middle Tennessee openings the Pennsylvania chain has stacked into a tight late-summer run: Dickson on August 26, Lebanon on September 2, and Murfreesboro on the tenth. All three get the same 8:30 a.m. treatment.
What one store actually costs
The economics behind a convenience store are easy to underestimate until you see them written down. Each Wawa location represents better than $7.5 million in investment. Building one pulls in roughly 140 contractors and local trade partners. Once it opens, the store runs on about 35 employees — and Wawa is currently hiring for its Tennessee stores.
Zoom out and the ambition gets clearer. Tennessee's first Wawa opened in Clarksville on June 18. The company expects seven Tennessee stores running by the end of 2026, and has publicly targeted more than fifty across the state over the next decade, which it estimates at roughly 1,750 long-term jobs. Murfreesboro has already been named in the company's plans for additional locations beyond this one.
The strangest retail season in years
Here is what makes the timing worth paying attention to. Murfreesboro is about to get two national convenience brands with fiercely loyal followings within roughly two months of each other — and they are not the same animal at all.
Wawa is a neighborhood-scale store built around a made-to-order food counter: hoagies ordered on a touchscreen, a serious coffee program, in-and-out in six minutes. It wants to be your Tuesday morning.
Buc-ee's, now aiming at a November opening on 47 acres with 120 fuel pumps, is the opposite proposition. It is a destination — the kind of place where people plan a stop, take a photo, and leave with a bag of Beaver Nuggets. Nobody runs into a Buc-ee's for a quick coffee.
That the city is getting both, in the same season, is a fair measure of where Murfreesboro sits in retail site-selection models right now. Interstate access, a fast-growing rooftop count, and a young student population make it read as a market worth planting a flag in.
Veterans Parkway keeps filling in
The Wawa site is another piece of the Veterans Parkway build-out, a corridor that has gone from a bypass concept to one of the more active commercial addresses in the county. AutoZone is also coming to the parkway. A road built to move traffic around the city has, in familiar Murfreesboro fashion, become a reason to stop.
None of which is free. The same growth filling these pads is what has the city and TDOT working through a long queue of widenings and interchange projects. New pumps and new lanes tend to arrive in that order.
For now: September 10, 8:30 in the morning, Veterans Parkway. Expect a line.
Planning around it? Our guide to the best restaurants in Murfreesboro covers the places worth a longer stop.
