Sunoco.

Overview

If you are driving Route 250 west out of Crozet, past the orchards and the turn for Afton, the Sunoco at Greenwood is the kind of stop you register almost without meaning to: the tall sign, the canopy over the pumps, the reliable fact of it being open when you need gas and a cold drink and nothing more complicated than that. It sits at 7653 Rockfish Gap Turnpike, in the stretch of Greenwood where the turnpike is still doing the work of connecting Crozet to the gap in the mountains, and where a full tank matters more the closer you get to the climb.

This is a corner-of-the-map kind of business, and there is no shame in that. A gas station on a rural highway is infrastructure with a roof and a cooler. What it offers is not novelty but dependability, and out here, dependability is the whole point.

At the pump

Sunoco's pitch, stripped of the racing glamour, is about what goes into the tank. Every grade sold here carries TOP TIER detergents, the additive standard that a number of automakers point to for keeping engines clean over the long haul. That is the same fuel formula across all grades, not just the premium.

The one genuinely distinctive item is the 94 octane. Sunoco bills it as the highest-octane pump gasoline on the market and sells it exclusively at its own stations, which makes a small station like this one an unlikely outpost for something you cannot get down the road at a competitor. Most drivers filling a commuter car will never reach for it. But it is there, and its presence is a reminder that Sunoco's whole identity is bound up with fuel performance. The company is the official fuel of NASCAR, and it wears that connection openly.

If you fill up here regularly, the Sunoco GoRewards program is worth a look. Enrolling and linking a bank account through the Sunoco Pay feature in the app stacks a per-gallon discount onto the base rewards rate. Whether that math is worth the app real estate on your phone is a personal call, but the discount is real and it is per gallon, which adds up for anyone making the Crozet-to-Waynesboro run often enough.

Inside

The convenience store is the other half of the operation, and it does what convenience stores do: coffee, cold cases, the shelf of snacks you tell yourself you are not going to buy and then buy. Sunoco runs more than 5,200 locations nationally, so the interior here follows a familiar national template rather than any local invention. That is not a knock. When you are half an hour from home with a kid asking for something in the back seat, familiar is exactly what you want.

The station is open seven days a week, early to late, which is the quality that earns it its place in a driver's mental map. Gift cards are available and work at any Sunoco location, which makes them a passable last-minute option for anyone in your life who commutes.

Why it earns its spot

Greenwood is not a place with a lot of retail, and the businesses that hold down its highway frontage do a specific job for the people passing through. This Sunoco is a fueling point at the western edge of the Crozet orbit, the place you top off before the mountains or fill back up on the way home. You can reach it at (540) 456-6340, and the corporate page for this exact location, with its live hours and directions, is at sunoco.com.

There is no romance to be manufactured here, and it would be dishonest to try. What there is instead is usefulness, plainly delivered: fuel that meets a real standard, a store that is open when the rest of Greenwood has gone quiet, and a location that happens to sit right where a lot of local trips need it to. For a highway gas station, that is the entire brief, and this one meets it.

More grocery in Crozet

Grocery

Brownsville Market

Grocery

Crozet Market

Primary regional grocery store, deli, butcher. Open seven days a week.

Grocery

Crozet Mart

Grocery store in Crozet, Virginia.

Grocery

Harris Teeter Crozet

Blue Ridge Shopping Center.

← Back to the Crozet business directory