Another Buc-ee’s breaks ground in Georgia. Are you on the beaver bandwagon?
WARNER ROBINS — It is a Tuesday afternoon at Exit 144, a largely barren I-75 interchange two hours north of the Florida border. There is, in the distance, a manicured peach orchard and, next to that, an out-of-sight auto junkyard abutting a swampy pond. But there’s not much in the way of amenities to lure freeway travelers. Aside from a galaxy of gas pumps and the grinning face of a bucktoothed beaver.
The cartoonish rodent’s mug, perched atop a towering pole overlooking the freeway, serves as a great big “welcome to me” above his namesake roadside domain: Buc-ee’s, a convenience superstore, a branding phenomenon, a prefab town square.
Outside the main entrance stands a man smoking. His name is Jim Weed and he is waiting on his wife who is shopping inside. It is their second time at a Buc-ee’s. Their first visit came five days before, at this very Buc-ee’s, while they were driving to Florida. Now they are heading home to Franklin, North Carolina.
Weed and his wife have stopped to buy a Buc-ee’s sweatshirt. For their dog, Skye, a Yorkie-poodle mix. “For winter,” Weed explains.
Offbeat charm is part of the allure. With nearly five dozen stores, most of them spanning the South, including a growing footprint in Georgia, Buc-ee’s has tapped into an American craving for the big top, the seismic splash, the get-out-and-stretch-your-legs spectacle swaddled in gasoline and gedunks.
If half the fun is getting there, Buc-ee’s is a mirage of arrival. It is a sensory splurge, an off-ramp to hokey along highways that, to many, are seen as miles and miles of meh.
Buc-ee’s are somewheres in the middle of nowhere.
They are the guilty pleasure that might spring forth if Stuckey’s and Walmart and QuikTrip and Golden Corral and Six Flags and South of the Border and IHOP and Phillips 66 and the Superdome and Dinosaur World and pork rinds and rocking chairs and Howard Johnson’s and “Free Color TV” and Krispy Kreme and Bob Evans and the State Fair of Texas and Ponderosa and Love’s Travel Stop and Winn-Dixie and coin-operated binocular stands and Hardee World and Whataburger and Cheerwine and Ruby Falls and Goo Goo Clusters and Waffle House and Dollar General and pecan log rolls and Cracker Barrel and Rock City and “Smokey and the Bandit” and Jellystone Park and the Goat Man and your grandmother’s quilts had a baby.
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In a couple of years, Middle Georgia will be home to the two most proximate Buc-ee’s in America. Customers, if so inclined, can cruise to both before their blue-raspberry Icees melt. The stores will sit just 28 miles apart. One is slated to open in March 2027 about an hour south of Atlanta along I-75. The other, less than a half-hour farther south, between Macon and Perry, began reeling motorists up the off-ramps at Exit 144 five years ago.
Not long after it opened bearing a Warner Robins address, former Peach County Sheriff Terry Deese met the Buc-ee’s founder, Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, there. The then-lawman asked Aplin why on Earth the company chose Peach County, which has a population of about 29,000, and little of it living near the interstate. At that seemingly remote interchange, Deese reckoned, there wasn’t much shaking. He had grown up in the area. He knew it well.
But what the sheriff hadn’t considered was that here in the crossroads of Georgia, and in neighboring Houston and Bibb counties, some 350,000 people reside. And, more importantly, that I-75 adds an ever-flowing river of motorists seeking a bathroom or anything to break up a long drive.
Deese says Aplin told him Buc-ee’s expected somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 cars a day to cruise in to shop, buy gas or both. “Man,” Deese thought, the number seemingly staggering, “you have bumped your head.”
But after the place opened, Deese noticed that on busy days his agency’s traffic-monitoring cameras detected upward of 18,000 cars rolling into Buc-ee’s.
Buc-ee’s has seamlessly and playfully spread its everything’s-big-in-Texas roots to the east across Georgia on up into Virginia, says Raji Srinivasan, a marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Think historically before Buc-ee’s. You have an exit and you’d have the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and maybe a Taco Bell and some gas stations and a Subway,” Srinivasan says. “And, you know, in a state like Texas that’s really, really large … and people do drive around quite a bit, so I think this gives them something to break the monotony.”
Dangling the carrot of slightly cheaper gas at 100 or so pumps that stretch well beyond the lengths of their 50,000-plus-square-foot buildings, Buc-ee’s has essentially turned its canopied fueling stations into parking lots. For the stay-in-their-cars motoring public, the layout offers a sort of streamlining, the closest thing to a drive-thru without staying in your car. There are so many pumps that you don’t feel pressured to move your car after gassing up before going inside to browse.
“It’s what’s called experiential retail,” Srinivasan says. “Disney would be another example. … It’s all about the experience.”
She says that in the current economic climate, Buc-ee’s supplies “something for everybody.” Everything from beef jerky to brisket to Skittles to bird feeders with cameras to floating ice chests to gleaming bathrooms to candied-popcorn “Beaver Nuggets.”
“We have inflation, we have a lot of joblessness,” Srinivasan says. “People want to treat themselves with small things. … It is something to do.”
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A few miles north of the Middle Georgia Buc-ee’s, a billboard adorned with the company’s meme-like yellow lettering declares: “DEER CORN & BEAVER NUGGETS.”
On this Tuesday afternoon, a family of four from Atlanta has ventured about half an hour off their route to Hilton Head to bask in their first foray to Buc-ee’s.
“Everybody is talking about Buc-ee’s and we were, like, ‘We’ve got to go this time,’” Shalonda Callender says as she gets out of her car in the parking lot.
She is traveling with her three daughters and they saw the bold billboard that beckoned with “deer corn” and others like it as they approached the store.
“I know what Beaver Nuggets are,” says Callender’s daughter, Amariyah, 24. “I have no idea what deer corn is.”
The women, told that it is feed that hunters use to attract the animals, soon march toward the door.
Inside, in a vortex of merchandise meets meals to go, they will try banana pudding, coconut pie, brisket sandwiches, sour candies and cherry soda.
“Sensory overload is definitely the proper description,” Amariyah says. “My mom was, like, ‘This is all so overstimulating.’ But at the end of the day it’s still a gas station. But this is a lot for a gas station. Think, like, a Southern Trader Joe’s. And I compare Trader Joe’s to the Ikea of groceries. So, maybe Buc-ee’s is the Ikea of gas stations.”
She will consider going back.
And, in fact, she has — three days later on the trip home from Hilton Head. Never mind the half-hour detour.
“My mom needed to use the bathroom,” Amariyah says, “and wanted to make sure it was clean.”
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A couple of years ago, Mat Gendle, a psychology professor at Elon University, wrote an opinion piece that appeared in newspapers across the Carolinas.
It was about how Buc-ee’s represents “a prime example of end-stage American consumerism at its worst.”
Gendle wasn’t blaming Buc-ee’s.
“I’m a silly guy at heart,” he wrote of a proposed Buc-ee’s in North Carolina, “and on one hand I love the idea that this Buc-ee’s might provide travelers with a place to rest, use a clean restroom and browse a seemingly endless selection of humorous tchotchkes.”
He was more concerned with the environmental impact of such wares that are “certain to lose their perceived value once the purchaser’s road trip has ended.”
Asked recently why people are drawn to Buc-ee’s like hungry mouths to Big Macs, Gendle wonders for a moment.
“Our interstates are boring. They’re flat and they’re straight and there’s not a whole lot going on,” says Gendle, noting that his specialty is biological psychology and that he has no professional expertise in consumer behavior. “We’ve got corn fields and tobacco fields and more fields … and cotton, whatnot and water towers. So I wonder if part of it is just a combination of, you know, it’s something to look forward to.”
He also says that on the highway there is not always somewhere good to eat and Buc-ee’s is known for decent food. “I can see the appeal.”
Gendle figures that Buc-ee’s has seized on people’s love of clean, jumbo gas marts. Sheetz and Wawa, for example, which have devout followings.
“They’re all perfectly fine,” he says. “But I’ve not been able to figure out what sort of drives a level of fanaticism that’s akin to (loving) your favorite sports teams.”
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Dave Dundas, a 65-year-old Texan who lives north of Houston, wanders down the candy aisle, a kaleidoscope of Snickers and SweeTarts.
He and some motorcycling friends are bound for the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Dundas, who lives near a Buc-ee’s that boasts the world’s longest car wash, has seen the quarter-century evolution of Buc-ee’s into a national brand and rest-stop destination.
“It’s become a thing that you’ve got to go see it if you’re anywhere near one,” he says. “The buzz about this place is that it’s got everything. They’ve got the jerky, they’ve got the gas pumps. They get you out of your car. And the other thing is there’s no places to sit down. … They get you in and they get you out.”
Dundas marvels at the smorgasbord of stuff, this destination of doodads around him, and mentions how some customers no doubt say, “‘You know what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna go to Buc-ee’s just because that’s like a family event.’ … The appeal is it’s a brand now like Starbucks was and people are willing to come here and spend money.”
Outside, two men are eating lunch. They’re standing over a pallet of deer corn stacked waist-high as a makeshift table for their $8.50 brisket sandwiches. The men are from Florida, in town helping open a BJ’s Wholesale Club up the road.
“We don’t have a lot of Buc-ee’s in Florida. So when you go to Buc-ee’s it’s like you’re in ‘the spot.’ You take a picture. You share it with your family,” says Bassem Zakhary, an automotive retail manager for BJ’s. “People working here, they are smiling. You don’t see this anymore, especially in the retail business. So it brings joy to the people shopping inside. Even if you don’t want to say anything, at least you have to smile when you have a person smiling at your face.”
Between bites of brisket, his cohort, Jorge Alvarez, chimes in: “You go in there and you’re happy.”
About the Author
Joe Kovac Jr. is Macon bureau chief covering Middle Georgia for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
