Oh boy, that's a glowing recommendation if I ever visit the US.
I had to look them up, I did read that they are praised for the cleanliness of their bathrooms. Not sure if it makes up for the rest though.
I went into a Buc-ee’s on a visit to Texas in 2014. Fortunately, I was there at about 3:30a on a weeknight.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer, bland brownness of everything in there. The next thing I noticed, coming in from that entrance, was a bunch of cheap wearable swag adorned with not even half-amusing quips about hunting and driving and idr what else, except…
whyyy, I implored to myself. Not even local stuff. Just mass-produced garbage cheaply made and with the blandest, lowest-effort attempts at being amusing, but failing.
What I was hoping to find was anything novel one doesn’t see in convenience or grocery shops very often anymore — things like bottled sodas from the last remaining, independent drink makers, or maybe those vintage clove and blackjack (licorice) chewing gums. Or Choward’s violet mints. Or
something interesting. And if none of that, then maybe some locally-made treat or snack, home-packaged or whatnot.
No on all fronts.
I walked toward the back, where they had remainder prepared food under heat lamps from probably earlier in the day, next to a wide row of slushy-icee-slurpee-styled machines with all manner of flavours. Nothing novel. I mostly remember hot dogs, nachos, and maybe withered burritos.
Then, by happenstance, the streaming music feed coming in started playing Pablo Cruise’s “
Love Will Find a Way”, which was the high point of the visit. Lastly, also remembering the thing about the washrooms (which were nearby the slushy machines and prepped food area, conveniently enough), I went in to look. They were tan-brown and clean. That was about the only positive thing I could find to be true-to-form.
I left, having spent, like, 20 minutes dawdling around, with a couple of co-workers briefly taking notice of me and maybe one or two other people looking around. I think one was doing the floors with one of those self-propelled floor cleaners. I left having spent nothing (I was hoping to leave with
anything worth piquing my interest or taste buds.
My take on Buc-ee’s was it was a decidedly overwrought, repressed, soul-crushing Texan vision — a very particular Texan vision, certainly not representative of other aspects of the state — lacking all manner of imagination or character. [And before folks roll up in my replies to gripe, I was born and raised in that very part of Texas, by parents who were also Texan-born from that very part of Texas, whose parents were also born in that geographic half of Texas… and so on for another three or four generations… you get the point.]
Contrast this against some of the Fiesta supermercados to open a decade or two before in the area, with incredible variety, plenty of colour, and even one location with their own hydroponic garden behind a two-storey-tall glass wall, growing and selling tomatoes whose seeds were cultivated on a Space Shuttle flight). But this Buc-ee’s was basically in the middle of (for now) nowhere, plopped along a recent U.S. highway expansion which detoured from the older route it used to follow.
Yes, Buc-ee’s isn’t a supermarket, but its footprint at most of their locations are orders bigger than most supermarkets, so the side-by-side is fair game.
I will say that the best gas stations in Europe I saw were in Italy as it had a pretty decent restaurant and a nice shop with souvenirs and a similar one in Greece. The bathrooms were ok - you had to pay to use them.
Although I’ve been to the UK and Iceland, I didn’t drive. I have yet to experience a continental rest stop, and it’s still something I’d like to experience. I really love the konbinis (convenience stores) in Japan, including the 7-Elevens and Lawson chains. Corner stores in Argentina also have some interesting offerings, snack-wise, including localized products of major international brands. Same goes for Thailand, especially with Frito-Lay potato chips.
I suppose the pay-for-washrooms thing is a way to assure both customers and staff strive to not make things an unaccountable disaster. I do appreciate a clean rest stop washroom inside which I don’t have to do “the hover”/pelvic floor squat over the bowl. 🤦♀️ Having worked in food service during my mid-teens, I don’t envy anyone who is tasked with hourly washroom inspections.
Back on contrasting the Buc-ee’s experience, there was a rest stop/truck stop Esso in Timmins, ON (birthplace of Shania Twain, y’all), which impressed me: it still had a full-service diner built into the place. One could sit to order a hearty breakfast or supper at any hour (I ordered a breakfast with pancakes and some of the better peameal I’ve had anywhere.)
Then I remembered how rest stops and diners were once a hand-in-hand thing pretty much wherever one travelled, especially along principal highways. Sometimes they were all-in-one stops, and other times a 24h diner was immediately next door from the fuelling station (where every dining booth would have wall telephones… yes, this was 1996), letting you walk over if you so chose.
As noted above, I value and have valued those minor highway fuelling stops with walk-up, short-order counters run by a handful of folks who have their own speciality/regional delicacy on the backlit, usually drink-branded menu board (with slots for the red and black glyphs, and bonus, an analogue clock which stopped working decades earlier).
It doesn’t take a lot of hype and superlatives to do something well. Those were places where you could find on the convenience store shelves the locally-made snacks with something unique to the area — like alder-smoked coho salmon jerky (Washington state) or some sweet-salty-spicy-umami concoction with the nut grown locally (or legume, as peanuts go).
The only thing Buc-ee’s does well is size. And blah-brown.
Real talk: Buc-ee’s is an object lesson on what happens when an entrepreneur has all the creativity, vivacity, and imagination beaten out of them by the time they reach ten years old. It’s a banal kind of tragedy, really.
