PHILADELPHIA – With baseball season upon us and fans aligning with their favorite team, the Philadelphia Inquirer offered its take on the state’s competitive but very friendly convenience store rivalry, highlighting the ways Wawa and Sheetz have divided the loyalties of the state’s c-store consumers.

“The state's two big gas-and-milk, Cokes-and-smokes, Tastykakes-and-store-built sandwich chains try not to fight,” the Inquirer wrote. “They're not like Ford vs. GM. Instead, they have mostly drawn lines and split the land between them. Like Comcast and TimeWarner Cable…”

Unlike other competitive rivalries, the one between Wawa and Sheetz is a friendly and respectful one.

"You want me to talk smack about Wawa?" asks Lou Sheetz, executive vice president and a third-generation boss. "I never have. We have a very equal product. What they produce in fresh food, fresh coffee, their commitment to taste and quality, is equal to ours. The gasoline is of the same quality. Their commitment to price point, their commitment to well-trained people…"

While Wawa added stores last year in Florida, it bypassed Harrisburg or other places closer to Philadelphia, a reason Wawa attributed to respect.

"Go west, we're in Sheetz country," Wawa's then-chief executive, Howard Stoeckel, said at the time. "Sheetz is like us. We respect them. That's why we leapfrogged to Florida. That's an underserved market."

Despite the respect and friendliness each offers one another, there’s an understanding that the competitive nature of today’s retailing environment has changed things. Sheetz said he misses the days when his family could call on Wawa to talk business.

"We learned a lot together about the coffee business," he recalls. "We learned a lot from them on the deli business. They learned a lot from us on the gasoline business. We used to visit. We used to pick up the phone and chat."

But in the 1990s, when the companies began converging in several Pennsylvania towns,

"We realized we can't have these conversations anymore," Sheetz said.