It’s the beginning of your three-day weekend. Family and friends, barbecues, beaches, a sunny day in the park, or by the pool. Then — most importantly — there’s a very good chance you’re road tripping somewhere exciting. This is America, after all. And in the spirit of the holiday, I’d love to share a grand new piece of ours from G.B. Rango, in honor of the most beloved pit stop in the country.

Have a beautiful Labor Day, and enjoy. I’m unlocking this one for the afternoon, so share it with your friends.

-Solana

Roadtripping through the South is an experience that I associate with empty Arizona cans, endless stretches of interstate, Spotify, the occasional Hostess Zinger, and my compulsive noticing and reading-out-loud of every passing billboard. After a couple hundred such noticings of these advertising relics, the thematic frequent fliers become apparent: ALL-CAPS fireworks-warehouse placements, PSAs of upcoming generic gas-and-food oases, phone numbers promising to chastise you out of eternal damnation (often abortion-adjacent), anti-balding serum promotions with “before and after” pictures of hairless men growing terribly thin-haired, and the occasional reminder that sex shops selling pornographic DVDs remain standing in valiant defiance of inexorable digital apocalypse.

While occasionally mountebankish, many of these billboard advertisements are imbued with the associative charm of small town America and “the open road.” Their transparent lack of persuasive power makes them endearing. They’re real, physical, localized. They feel more like “Small Business” than “Big Business.” There is something about personability and warmth that is almost impossible to scale, that is naturally abstracted away as a thing becomes bigger and more powerful and increasingly incentivized to exercise that power.

There is one billboard, however, that seems to gleam and rise spiritually above its baser counterparts. Its bolded yellow letters sit atop a black background. Below, the face of a 1950s-esque cartoon beaver, plastered with a manic bucktoothed grin, looks up and to the right in delirious optimism. “TOP TWO REASONS TO STOP: #1 AND #2,” the sign reads. “BUC-EE’s, 42 MILES.” You, the hypothetical roadtripper and Buc-ee’s uninitiate, are intrigued by its aura and figure that this place is probably as good as any for handling the necessary road trip action items (refueling, assorted bathroom activities, meandering and leg-stretching, the excessive purchasing of snacks, and so on).

You diverge onto the appropriate off-ramp, the cartoonish beaver logo reappearing to guide you, this time as the oversized, circular finial crowning the lollipop sign of an industrial park. As you pull closer, a behemoth of a lot grows before you: dozens of gas pumps, spaced out so as to accommodate even the most monstrous of SUVs and gratuitous pickup trucks. Behind these is a building that looks more like a Walmart Supercenter than a gas station convenience store. Families pile out of parked cars and shuffle into the megacomplex. Oakley-wearing guys — who you might suspect have dating profiles that heavily feature bass-fishing — haul ice bags and propane tanks, young roadtripping couples exchange eager words as they pass through the sliding glass doors of the vestibule, a hefty woman in a Mickey Mouse shirt ushers in her three chaotically swirling children. Some people pose outside with a stodgy, brass, anthropomorphic version of the beaver from the logo, thumbs-upping for Instagram shots.

Inside the store, as outside, everything is saturated with an overwhelming sense of “bigness” and cornucopic choice — the 70,000-square-foot interior is filled with sprawling aisles, horseshoe-shaped “Texas Round Up” BBQ stations manned by palpably hospitable Southern folk, heated display cases of sandwiches filled with freshly sliced brisket, an entire wall dedicated to myriad beef jerky flavors (Bohemian Garlic and Korean Barbecue among them), trays upon trays of just-made fudge (over 22 different varieties), the sweet waft of glazed pecans and roasted almonds making its way through the nostrils of bustling gawkers, racks filled with bags of the signature “Beaver Nuggets” sweet corn puff snacks, gummy candies and packaged confections covering every wavelength of the visual color spectrum, homely collections of Buc-ee’s-branded rubs and sauces, soda fountains equipped with eighty or ninety different dispensers carrying both big-name flavors and Buc-ee’s exclusives — you pause, realizing that you’re agape and twirling slowly in place like somebody taking a panoramic photo.

And that’s just the edible stuff. To describe with any integrity the vastness of its broader merchandise offerings, including Buc-ee’s-branded t-shirts, logo-stamped pajama pants and undergarments, embossed hoodies, embroidered hats, beaver onesies (both infant and adult), beaver dolls, welcome mats, blankets, flags (both Buc-ee’s and American), shot glasses, Stanley-type tumblers, deer feeders, mugs, fishing rods, portable fire pits, and more, is a fool’s errand.

This endless bigness, however, is not one that makes you feel inadequate by comparison. It provokes some age-agnostic version of the trite “kid in a candy shop” emotion, one that in the American mind is almost always tied to shopping splurges and giddy overconsumerism. But even the aforementioned “candy shop” of our collective imagination is more boutique than expansive, owned not by the Waltons but by some positively connoted “Joneses” with whom you often make small talk at church or the local market. This place seems to have established itself on liminal emotional ground, existing both as a temple of spending dollars and a relatable fixture of neighborliness. Despite having never heard the name “Buc-ee’s,” let alone been inside one, you are struck by an unexpected pang of patriotically tinged nostalgia.

Reeling, your body reminds you of the primary reason for stopping here in the first place. You turn into the men’s room — more palatial than room-like — and are greeted with a space that is as gargantuan as it is pristine. You see over a dozen urinals, some obscured by wide-stanced and stooped purveyors, and others a shining white porcelain. There are at least as many stalls, each its own closed-door room equipped with green and red occupancy-indicating lights. (This dedication to creating a comfortable space for doing what must be done, it turns out, is the tangible catalyst and crux for much of Buc-ee’s incredible success.) You reemerge not just relieved, but refreshed — pampered-feeling, even. Like you have discovered and now carry with you some secret knowledge of the highway traveler, as if this monument to the spectacle of American excess is somehow your home away from home — paradoxically intimate and larger-than-life.

Buc-ee’s is both an embodiment of this paradox and a tool for its elucidation: an examination of the backbone of American culture reveals this conflictual phenomenon as central. Our perverse but beautiful intertwining of consumeristic excess and down-to-earth-ness, the fraught coexistence of megacorporations and family-first folksiness, the tension innate in championing both the values of individualism and neighborliness. The attachment that people feel to Buc-ee’s, myself included, is an emergent property of our basest instincts around the symbolic importance of “huge stuff,” the treasured sanctum of a pleasant bathroom experience, the dopaminergic thrill of over-purchasing, and a hacked Neanderthalic lust for food-gorging. Distilling the competing, elusive American ideals of materialistic self-indulgence and “home is where the heart is,” and appearing to dwell in the sweet spot between them, is why the Buc-ee’s experience has led to a cult-like following (and increasingly rapid expansion).

How did a gas station chain with humble beginnings morph into some kind of up-and-coming cultural juggernaut? This all started back in 1982, when a 23-year-old Arch Aplin III, fresh out of Texas A&M with a degree in construction science, wrote a check for land in Lake Jackson to open a gas station. Aplin used to work at a general store in Louisiana owned and operated by his grandparents, known affectionately as “The Biggest Little Store,” and took much of that paradoxical ethos with him when opening the first Buc-ee’s location. His origin story, and the openly oxymoronic name of his grandparents’ convenience store, highlight the dueling American ideals that he sought (consciously or not) to tame and unite under the Buc-ee’s roof.

The now-iconic beaver logo, hand-drafted by Aplin and finalized by an unknown artist-for-hire, was a riff on his childhood nickname “Beaver,” and on the beaver mascot of Ipana Toothpaste, Bucky Beaver. (This latter point of inspiration, as we will see later, is laden with irony). The Buc-ee’s name itself is derived in part from his dog “Buck,” on some level functioning also as a play-on-words with “bucktooth.” All of this, of course, gives the thing both a slapstick, guffawing, dopey sort of lovable energy and a backstory that reads like someone free associating the history of Cracker Barrel or American Apple Pie. It all seems in ethos drawn from a time long, long ago, by a Western, cowboy-booted traveler traversing prairies, or at least from an era when diners still had rollerskating waitresses in poodle skirts and TVs were barely past monochromatic. This is one of the anchors keeping public perception of Buc-ee’s closer in spirit to 1970s Disney than a 2020s Walmart. (Notably, the recent backlash to the minimalist, aesthetically conformist redesign of Cracker Barrel’s logo and restaurant interiors is a reflection of these forces.)

Three years after the opening of his first store, in 1985, Aplin forged a fifty-fifty partnership with Don Wasek, who oversees the operational aspects of Buc-ee’s. They decided to focus on making travelers — not long-haul truckers — the heart and soul of the business, banning eighteen-wheelers entirely. (This repudiation of the idea of “big business” again reinforces their tightrope-walking act of pulling off an American paradox.) Aplin has described his vision for Buc-ee’s as “a happy, Texas version of Grand Central Station,” emphasizing that he uses “the faces [and] the mood” of customers “to judge how we’re doing.” They banked on the idea that motorists would drive extra miles for a guaranteed-clean bathroom and well-supplied pit stop, a strategy which turned out to be wildly successful. While traditional gas stations generate around two-thirds of their total revenue through fuel sales, Buc-ee’s bucks the trend: two-thirds of its gross intake comes from “inside” sales (i.e. people buying food and merchandise in the store). In general, since gas stations make only pennies per gallon in profit on petroleum sales, gas pumps serve primarily as a lure for customers who will go inside and purchase higher-margin items. As such, gas stations typically rely on this smaller chunk of revenue for the majority of their operating profits. Buc-ee’s margins on its white-labeled products are estimated to be nearly 40 percent — so not only does the company have much greater control over its primary revenue source, that revenue source is also vastly more profitable. Doesn’t seem quite so “guffawing” and stoogeish now, does it?

Notably, Buc-ee’s has been sued for allegedly selling gas below cost (since fuel, for them, is essentially a marketing tool): Oasis Travel Center LLC sued the company in 2019 in Alabama after it was selling regular unleaded gasoline for $1.79 per gallon at its first store in the state, significantly below competitors’ prices of over two dollars at the time. Buc-ee’s won the suit and was not required to pay any damages regarding potential violations of the Alabama Motor Fuel Marketing Act (which prohibits the sale of motor fuels below cost).

The Buc-ee’s revenue model, however, is a lot more than just swapping “gas” and “store sales” on a revenue pie chart. As the Cato Institute put it, “the story of Buc-ee’s is, along with being a must-stop place on the highway, a story of labor productivity, what drives it, and how it benefits both consumers and workers alike.” The scale and practices of Buc-ee’s mean that every employee is adding far more to the brand (and the bottom line) than your typical convenience store worker. Since each location is capable of serving upwards of 10,000 to 15,000 vehicles daily, and each of these customers is more valuable to the business due to its revenue distribution, Buc-ee’s can afford to pay wages far above the industry norm, attracting higher-quality employees and engendering company loyalty. This creates a positive feedback loop for the engine that drives Buc-ee’s forward.

As Buc-ee’s General Counsel Jeff Nadalo puts it, “I think when you have the best employees, you’re able to offer the best service and the best experience to your customers. And when you do that, they come back.” This encapsulates the Buc-ee’s model: pay well, demand excellence, and reap the rewards of customer fandom. In Texas, where the legal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour, the Buc-ee’s baseline of $18 (and often higher) is far above what many workers in rural areas of the South would be able to earn elsewhere. Managers can make well into six figures, with some clearing $200,000 or more. Full-time employees benefit from 401(k) matching, paid vacation, and robust medical packages. Matthew Henriques of West Memphis, Arkansas noted that “there are car wash managers here [in West Memphis] that probably make $40,000, maybe. And you’re talking about Buc-ee’s coming in saying, ‘Hey, yeah, I’ll give your car wash manager $125,000! It’s got people excited.”

The provision of high wages to areas of America whose values it is actively nurturing is a key way in which the Buc-ee’s business is able to culturally bolster itself. It is, for the most part, not seen as an invasive corporate entity looking to extract value and steamroll communities; these are good, honest jobs. And I say that without any sort of liberal snark — these truly are good, honest jobs that create economic development and provide earned livings for people who need and greatly appreciate them. If that means we all get to indulge ourselves in a bath of overconsumption post-six-hour highway drive, who’s the worse for it? The corporate and the personal merge — you are, actually, by giving your hard-earned cash to Buc-ee’s, supporting the hearth and home of America. This is not a coastal thing, or a cloud-computing-buzzwords thing, or some horrifying form of exponentially improving computer intelligence that is going to steal and automate away jobs, it is a tangible and comprehensible and straightforward thing cherished by red-blooded Americans, blue-collar and white-collar alike.

The Buc-ee’s bathrooms are the places where these wages make the most striking difference. I have been to countless Safeway, Shell, BP, and Chevron gas station bathrooms on cross-country drives, holding my breath and swatting at horseflies the size of buzzards while I try to get things out of my body as quickly as humanly possible. At Buc-ee’s, people appear personally motivated by a monastic sacredness to uphold sky-high cleanliness standards.

At many Buc-ee’s locations, people in charge of cleaning the bathrooms earn over $20 an hour. Employees with “restroom crew” badges undergo specific training on sanitization protocols, continuous rotation schedules, and all sorts of other toilet-cleanliness-optimization methodologies. There is something special about this assiduous dedication to the provision of a comfortable bathroom. It serves as a psychological mark of trust, evidence of their attention to the details of your experience. It endears you to Buc-ee’s, makes you feel like the brand cares about you (or at least that it acts in a way commensurate with such feelings). That Buc-ee’s is some corporate stand-in for your mother, providing a reliable touchpoint on an otherwise winding and indeterminate journey of tangled interstates and unfamiliar environments. It’s an act that I, and other Buc-ee’s fanatics, really truly and personally appreciate. Buc-ee’s was built on bathrooms, because bathrooms are the mothers’-bosom counterweight to being a cog-dominated, profit-lusting, multi-billion-dollar machine that feeds off of an uncontrollable need to consume. Neither of these ends of the barbell are fully true, but they both contain kernels of truth, and that alchemical seesaw is the source of the Buc-ee’s magnetism.

This cohort of strategies has allowed Buc-ee’s to evolve into a high-stakes player in the local economic development of the south (and, increasingly, other areas of the United States). In 2022, the chain reportedly generated $2.5 billion in revenue, with an estimated $200 million in net income. Both of these numbers have ostensibly gone up significantly since then alongside the business’s continued expansion. According to the Cato Institute, “for every $100 in revenue, Buc-ee’s makes a profit of $40,” an insane figure for an industry plagued by razor-thin margins. Even more impressive is the clip at which Buc-ee’s continues to grow, pegged by some analysts at around 20 percent per annum. Towns in Arkansas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Florida, and beyond are eagerly courting the iconic beaver business, offering incentive packages similar to those reserved for large-scale manufacturing plants: multimillion-dollar infrastructure grants, free land, tax abatements, and more. In Harrison County, Mississippi, $15 million of an $18 million bridge-expansion project was spent specifically to accommodate traffic for an incoming Buc-ee’s. In Wisconsin, Buc-ee’s is splitting $15 million in road upgrades with the state. Local officials expect new Buc-ee’s locations, each providing upwards of 200 well-paying, entry-level jobs, to set new wage floors, boost property values, and bring in sales tax revenue. In Calhoun, Georgia, monthly sales tax receipts spiked by 15% after the opening of a new Buc-ee’s location.

In a conversation with Texas Standard, Bloomberg reporter Mike Sasso remarked on the scale of these incentives, something which he has also written about more formally. “They’re basically being treated like they’re building a manufacturing plant or a major warehouse operation,” Sasso notes. Discussing Biloxi, Mississippi, Sasso said that “one of the economic development chiefs there was telling me they landed a new chemical plant… but the chemical plant that’s a $500 million investment only brings 80 jobs. So, you know, 80 jobs for a $500 million investment versus 200 jobs for a $50 to $60 million investment like you’d get at Buc-ee’s… that kind of explains why they’re interested.”

In West Memphis, Arkansas, one civic leader characterized the arrival of their new Buc-ee’s as “the biggest thing to hit [the city] since Elvis Presley’s broadcast debut in 1953.” If there is a better quote for capturing truly how much the American subconscious associates Buc-ee’s with the rolling of old-fashioned good times, I have not yet discovered it. (Tangentially, in Athens, Alabama, Keith Urban held a free, surprise concert in the Buc-ee’s parking lot and drew over 5,500 fans). Mayor Marco McClendon describes how the forthcoming location is expected to draw 5 million visitors per year, matching the annual foot traffic of Yellowstone, and projects a dramatic uptick in sales-tax receipts for an area in need of new revenue sources.

While Buc-ee’s is generally viewed as having a friendly disposition, it has been surprisingly litigious in the aggressive defense of its beaver branding. Over the years, it has sued a number of smaller enterprises for (questionable, in my layman’s opinion) infringement on their iconic logo. Perhaps best-known is the dispute with Texas-based travel center Choke Canyon, whose logo featured a grinning alligator. Buc-ee’s alleged that Choke Canyon had copied the general “look and feel” of its beaver design (circular shape, bright color scheme, and the seemingly generic concept of an animated animal wearing a hat). A federal jury sided with Buc-ee’s, finding that the alligator logo was likely to confuse potential customers, forcing Choke Canyon to change its logo (to a cartoonish cowboy). They have also successfully sued Duck-ees (cartoon duck in a circle), Super Fuels (dog wearing a cape in a circle), Frio Beaver (literally just a beaver), and Buk-II’s (this one is fair — a convenience store in Mexico using some hilariously cursed, hand-painted copy of the Buc-ee’s logo).

This is all, of course, extremely ironic given Arch “Beaver” Aplin’s aforementioned use of the Ipana Toothpaste “Bucky Beaver” as original inspiration for the company’s brand. It is also a potentially illusion-shattering element: it’s not very endearing or small-town-vibes of you to lodge dubious lawsuits against significantly smaller businesses. Punching down is not in the American ethos, but this aspect of Buc-ee’s has not hit public consciousness in any real way.

The future of Buc-ee’s is bright, as the rise of electric vehicles will lead to more and more time spent “refueling,” i.e. recharging. It takes only a minute or two to refill the tank of a gas car, but even Tesla’s superchargers are looking at a 15 to 40-minute range for a 0 to 80% charging session. If you have to spend 20 minutes somewhere on a road trip stop, I am hard-pressed to imagine a better scenario than Buc-ee’s. (Elon’s newly opened Tesla Diner in Hollywood, CA is an interesting, if unproven, challenger.) The company also has a unique advantage here in the development of charging infrastructure: since the Buc-ee’s model is so profitable, and they are receiving financial expansion support from local jurisdictions, they have plenty of cash on the balance sheet to invest in upgrades. Their competitors? Not so much. Installing high-capacity chargers costs $100,000 or more per unit. Analysts predict that Buc-ee’s will roll out EV charging at scale once consumer demand hits critical mass, and their newer locations already include basic charging infrastructure. Buc-ee’s already operates fifty-four large-scale stores — with thirty-six in its home state of Texas — and has more than a dozen under development across Arkansas, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arizona, and North Carolina.

Buc-ee’s stands for many of the things that we see reflected in modern American culture. Arch Aplin III’s story is one of entrepreneurial success, not enabled by the peddling of convoluted financial derivatives or internet grifting, but by building tangible, useful spectacles that people love. It is a cathedral to both dumb consumerism and some higher subliminal hospitality. The religious undertones of zeal are not incidental — Buc-ee’s constructs something that draws people in and creates within them a desire to be part of the group, of the lived experience, of the meme, of the club, of the cult. To really understand what this big, stupid convenience store is all about, if not gimmicks and gimcrack goodies. The niche food items, the grinning-beaver merchandise, the porcelain confessionals, tales regaled of whizzes and dookies unparalleled in their grandeur.

The regional aspect of Buc-ee’s prevents the paradox of largeness and personability from collapsing. It is, by my speculation, part of the reason why locations are not popping up at an even more rapid pace than they currently are. The fact that Buc-ee’s is still climbing its way up the chain into greater public consciousness is part of its appeal — it is up-and-coming, it is expanding, but not expanded. There is still something to evangelize. I can write this article and reach entire masses of people who don’t know what a “Buc-ee” is (Solana, our pirate king, formerly among them). McDonald’s and Starbucks and Disney and Facebook really ceased to be something of cult interest once their ubiquity rendered them more of an ever-present commodity than a special sort of life spice. Nobody wants to be a missionary for Starbucks. These brands, as part of a natural progression, lost control of the “biggest little” American paradox: everyone wants to root for the underdog, for their families and the families of others like them, for values that are (in areas where Buc-ee’s dominates, at least) seen as fundamental to the American spirit. Everyone wants to buy and eat and experience and collect and consume until their hearts burst or they lose interest — but nobody wants to be lost in the shadow of the Megacorporate Overlords that make it all possible and are the logical conclusion of our most gluttonous dispositions, our self-worship.

The evangelism of this American cultural bastion is ongoing, wielding rhetorical weapons of excess and hospitality and good-old-fashioned economic impact, all softened by its tendency to burrow within customers’ hearts. At its head is the beaver: naturally industrious, instinctively pressured to pursue productivity, representing an American ideal of indomitable economic fruitfulness. At the same time, Buc-ee himself appears both stupid-looking and overjoyed, happy not to the point of contentment, but of hysteria. A silly, goofy thing that is disarming in its unseriousness. It gazes up and to the right, somehow warmly inviting us to copy its watching. The subject of its focus is unknown, and maybe doesn’t matter (or, at least, Buc-ee’s is indifferent to its significance). It seems as likely to be staring down a hurtling, imminently earth-splitting asteroid as to be welcoming the second coming of Christ.

Buc-ee’s, a near-highway megachurch and pilgrimage destination for the uniquely American blend of comfort, commerce, spectacle, and hometown folksiness, stands unrivaled. It singlehandedly creates family memories, feeds our most desperate attempts to fill various God-shaped and antisocially created holes, raises up some of our most disavowed and disaffected, hooks us on sugar and stupid white-labeled landfill filler, and puts smiles on millions upon millions of traveling American faces. Paradoxical cultural phenomenon, beloved landmark, bona fide megastore, and bearer of the American spirit, I salute you.

— G. B. Rango