The town that hosts the world’s largest convenience store smells like ass. For many decades, Luling, Texas, was regionally famous for its excellent barbecue, locally grown supersized watermelons, and the unpleasant rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide, the toxic and highly flammable byproduct of its abundant oil wells. Some locals swear they can’t detect the odor; others profess to love the smell of their own farts, bragging that it’s the “smell of money.” But today, Luling might be best known for a very, very large gas station. Four miles southeast of the town of about six thousand, rising out of the brush alongside Interstate 10, is the mother of all convenience stores—the flagship of Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of “travel centers” that has become a cult phenomenon and one of the state’s most eminent brand ambassadors. The 75,593-square-foot travel center—with its 120 gas pumps, more than two hundred employees, fifty-one bathroom stalls, nineteen urinals attended 24/7 by workers who flit in and out of an “employees only” janitor’s closet, food court of cowboy-hat-wearing staff chopping brisket, clerks chirping “Welcome in” to every visitor, stacks of deer corn, $1,499 deer blinds, and racks of in-house gummy bears and jerky—has the distinct odor of caramel-coated Beaver Nuggets. But really, it smells like money.
For years, I’d assiduously avoided Buc-ee’s. My objections were part environmental, part aesthetic, part political. The bigness bothered me. The stores are monstrously large, a scourge on the Earth. At night they glow with the force of a spaceship. You know the tune “The stars at night / Are big and bright / Deep in the heart of Texas?” Well, no. The stars these days are actually pretty faint: Our once dark skies are washed out by the glow of a growth machine that pushes hideous sprawl in every direction. Buc-ee’s—previously a novelty, now an empire with fifty-four stores and counting, rapidly expanding across the South and beyond—seemed symbolic of a pave-the-planet transit policy, the crazy-making idea that evermore highways will fix congestion.
There was also my quaint Gen X attitude about the brand. Everywhere you turn in our blessed state, there’s the Buc-ee’s logo: a buck-toothed, wide-eyed, goofy-hat-wearing beaver whose idiotic, grinning likeness adorns trucks, T-shirts, tumblers, and ball caps. During Covid, the fascistic Boogaloo Boys militia masked up with Buc-ee’s bandanas. Like a prion disease, the rodent has wormed its way into the brains of grown-up men and women who go about in public wearing Buc-ee’s pajamas—demonstrating such a lack of sartorial self-respect that I almost find myself sympathetic to the Trump administration’s admonition to Americans to dress up when traveling.
Over the past three decades, Buc-ee’s founder, Arch “Beaver” Aplin III—an aw-shucks type who as a college student dreamed of building skyscrapers—has increasingly transmuted some of his fortune into campaign contributions to GOP politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, which in turn earned him a plum appointment as the chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. As Buc-ee’s has expanded outside Texas, it has sought massive tax breaks from local governments, many of them small towns desperate for any kind of economic development. But my views are not widely shared. A store in Gulfport, Mississippi, expects five million visitors a year—more than Yosemite National Park. Social media is filled with content creators posting about their Buc-ee’s visits with libidinal excitement. No less an authority than Austinite Joe Rogan has explained the appeal: “This is like if you were in the middle of a full-on cocaine binge, and someone came up to you and said, ‘Dude. I want you to make me the ultimate gas station.’”
Clearly Buc-ee’s is more than just a large gas station. It has come to symbolize Texas, the world-conquering juggernaut. As Steve Bannon said recently, Texas is “where the future is being built.” Or as Abbott put it in 2024, at the grand opening of the Luling location, “Beaver and Buc-ee’s are now icons across the United States. They spread Texas hospitality, great barbecue, and Beaver Nuggets wherever they go.” A lifelong Texan, I came to realize that I needed to see the future for myself. I needed to eat some Beaver Nuggets.
No. 1 in Superlatives
One unreasonably warm mid-February day, I zipped south at eighty-five miles per hour, the speed limit, on what some have termed “the fastest highway in the Americas”—a toll road that has accelerated the suburbanization of the little towns south of the capital. I detoured a bit west to I-10 so I could see the famous Buc-ee’s billboards, strategically located between major cities, right around the time drivers are ready for a potty break and a sensory experience. only 262 miles to buc-ee’s. you can hold it, reads one—some of the only splashes of color in an otherwise featureless landscape. The most extreme went up in enemy territory, California, in 2024: 1327 miles. The bulk of billboards, however, traffic in an irritating internet patois: my overbite is sexy; omg! lol . . . it’s a beaver; i love the way you look at me. Occasionally, the cutesy rubs shoulders with America’s violent undercurrent, like the two billboards outside London, Kentucky: on the top one, a gun range admonishing drivers to protect 2a next to an image of an AR; below, the beaver staring at a single word: slay. On my short time on I-10, I encountered only two billboards. The second one screamed exit now, but it would’ve been hard to miss the Luling store.
In 2015, Aplin threatened to abandon a new store in Denton, in North Texas, if the city council didn’t approve $8.1 million in sales tax reimbursements. He got his way.
The store encompasses 1.7 acres, large enough to swallow twenty-five regular-sized convenience stores, which average a mere 2,500 to 3,000 square feet. Its Alamo-like facade is fronted by more than a thousand feet of covered gas pumps. There are jacked-up trucks and a few Teslas, at least two overlander-type Jeeps equipped for the apocalypse, Sprinter vans, and senior citizens in RVs. Out front is a human-sized statue of the beaver, its paws thrown wide for selfies. Later, I watched a TikTok video by Eros Brousson, a Frenchman who has amassed a huge following, in part for his incisive, loving takes on his new Texas home. “I saw grown men taking photos with a statue of a rodent,” he said of his visit to Buc-ee’s. “In France, we have revolutions. In the U.S., you bow down to a squirrel on steroids.”
The Luling store, which opened in 2003, was “the first Buc-ee’s location that looked like what most Texans now think of as a Buc-ee’s location,” reported Texas Monthly in a 2019 profile of Aplin. It was on a major interstate in between cities, semitrucks were banned, and customers could purchase beaver-branded T-shirts and Beaver Nuggets. The store was big—about ten thousand square feet, three to four times the average size of a convenience store—but that was mere foreplay. Aplin nearly doubled the size in 2006 and then again in 2009. Profits soared. Meanwhile, Aplin began an arms race with himself, building ever-bigger “travel centers” across the Lone Star State; by 2022, the Luling store seemed almost puny in comparison. The old building was razed and a new palace built in its place.
Texas is a state that fetishizes bigness. The grocery chain H-E-B—perhaps the most beloved Texas brand, one known for responding to disasters more swiftly than local and state governments—sells food and products in “Texas-size” portions. Why settle for a regular chicken nugget when you can get Texas-sized, Texas-shaped “heat-and-eat” nugs? A mere twelve rolls of toilet paper in a bundle? That’s for sissy states. Texans buy thirty-six at a time! The biggest carbon footprint in the country. The most highway miles. We’re also home to the biggest asshole in the world, coincidentally its richest human. We are on track to have the biggest AI data center market in the world. By mid-century, we will surpass California as the state with the most people. Our towns traffic in superlatives—the largest rattlesnake, the biggest rocking chair. This milk-and-honey land of fundamentalist Protestantism is also No. 1 in people without health insurance and No. 1 in executions.
Buc-ee’s promises unlimited abundance—the civic religion of Texas. Or, I should say, abundance for some. From the time of the first Anglo settlers, the state’s economy has been built on rapacious resource extraction. The founding fathers were land speculators and slavers who fought for independence from Mexico in order to preserve a booming cotton-based plantation economy. The Republic of Texas, which lasted from 1836 to 1845, was the first “fully formed slaveholders republic in North America,” in the words of Texas historian Andrew Torget. The West Texas rancher may loom larger in the public imagination, but the Southern farmer deserves credit for the state’s origin story. The discovery of oil in East Texas in 1930 opened new gushers of profit. Fossil-fuel fortunes helped fund Texas’s university system, but private profits were plowed into a right-wing political project that crushed the labor movement, fueled the John Birch Society, and today provides financial backing for the extremist wing of the Texas GOP, which is trying to remake higher education in its image. The endless frontier continues apace in the digital age; rural Texas—which has virtually no land-use policies—is being consumed by Bitcoin and AI data centers. By and large, Abbott and other Republicans have left locals to figure out how to fulfill the mines’ vast energy and water demands (some of the digital wildcatters have turned to power plants fueled by fracked gas). They speak of the “Texas economic miracle” and emphasize the effect of low regulation and light (but regressive) taxation in attracting businesses. Growth comes at any cost: the environment, community, rural ways of life, the rights of ordinary people to have a say in local affairs. Bigness is not just for bigness’s sake—it’s the fruit of limitless expansion.
Peaches and Penumbras
Inside Buc-ee’s, there was plenitude. Half a dozen employees chopped steaming brisket in the “Texas Round-Up” island, where one could also buy kolaches and a tortilla-wrapped sausage on a stick. Behind was the jerky counter, where I picked up half a pound of ghost-pepper-infused beef jerky. There was a wall devoted to gummies bearing the beaver brand. Another enormous rack sold a dizzying array of Buc-ee’s-branded prepackaged snacks, and I snagged a bag of Beaver Nuggets (review: they taste like Cracker Jacks) while country crooner Dierks Bentley’s “Drunk on a Plane” played on the PA. Roughly half the cavernous space was given over to retail: Buc-ee’s air mattresses, Buc-ee’s foam kneeling pads, Buc-ee’s onesies, a Buc-ee’s plushie that plays “On the Road Again.” “The selection is almost overwhelming,” Aplin has explained, “which is good.” The goal is a kind of consumer stupor that induces buying; the real profit is in the brand, not the petroleum.
One influencer describes the Buc-ee’s experience as “Costco Cracker Barrel.” Turns out this isn’t hyperbole. There is even one of those machines that flatten pennies, in this case into a Buc-ee’s-themed souvenir. As I wandered the aisles, overstimulated, I thought of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.”
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
The merchandise here was aggressively hetero and politely Christian. Lots of tacti-cool items for the operator/cop/hunter set. You can buy a game camera, a “critical task carry tool” for AR-15s, or a deer feeder. You can buy a $319.99 ice chest—the kind of leaden trophies of prepping that turned Austin-based Yeti into a multibillion-dollar corporation. In a more femme-coded section, offerings included mugs with cheeky sayings such as “Why y’all tryin’ to test the Jesus in me?” ($14.99), a cow skull covered in blue crystals retailing for $398, and towels listing the “Southern 10 Commandments” (“7. No killin’, ’sept for critters”). A tiny bookshelf featured two titles by Admiral William H. McRaven, a book on how to survive animal attacks and natural disasters, and The Official John Wayne Big Book of Dad Jokes:
Why did the rancher’s cows seek therapy?
They felt seen, but not herd.
Miracle Man
In 1982, Aplin, at age twenty-four, opened his first store in his hometown of Lake Jackson, a Gulf Coast company town that was founded by Dow Chemical in 1942 on an old plantation. Lake Jackson is for Dow’s engineers and managers, a pleasant, mostly white town with whimsical street names like This Way and That Way. The Dow plant, the largest integrated chemical manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere, is located in nearby Freeport, a grim fence-line community—nearly 80 percent people of color—surrounded by petrochemical plants, including a natural-gas export facility that exploded in 2022, sending a fireball 450 feet into the air. Freeport represents the dark side of the Texas miracle. Enormous profits are extracted and exported here; the local community gets cancer clusters for its trouble. A Buc-ee’s in Freeport is one of the oldest—and smallest. Sadly, it has just eight gas pumps.
The brand, so strongly associated with Texas’s rising omnipresence, is not universally loved.
Aplin’s first store bore only a faint resemblance to what was to come. It took him slightly over two decades to figure out the winning formula: enormous stores, relentless branding, bathroom floors you could eat your Beaver Nuggets off of, though Aplin, unfortunately, is not an interesting narrator of his own success. “It’s virtually impossible to explain,” he told the New York Times in 2025 about Buc-ee’s popularity. But part of the explanation for Buc-ee’s growth is tax breaks. Towns in the South, hungry for economic development and cashier jobs that pay $18 an hour, shower the company with incentives. Last year, West Memphis, Tennessee, gave Buc-ee’s $3.5 million in land, lowered its annual property tax bill by 65 percent, and invested $1.5 million in roads and infrastructure. In 2024, San Marcos, Texas, gave Buc-ee’s a 50 percent break on its sales taxes for fifteen years, worth $3.2 million. In 2015, Aplin threatened to abandon a new store in Denton, in North Texas, if the city council didn’t approve $8.1 million in sales tax reimbursements. He got his way.
It’s hard to blame Buc-ee’s for grabbing the cash. In Texas, state lawmakers have crafted elaborate systems for directing local and state taxpayer dollars to corporations. The most galling, called Chapter 313 for its place in the tax code, has cost the state at least $10.8 billion with dubious benefits. In exchange for direct kickbacks, euphemized as “supplemental payments,” local school districts offer enormous breaks on property taxes to capital-intensive industries. Because the state makes up any lost tax revenue on top of the kickbacks, school boards have few reasons to say no. But the program bled billions from the state’s public education budget, depriving hundreds of underfunded schools across the state of desperately needed funds. Worse, there is little evidence that Chapter 313 actually encouraged investors. One study found that up to 90 percent of the projects receiving tax breaks—from semiconductor plants to wind farms to Elon Musk’s Austin Tesla Gigafactory—would have come to Texas anyway. A 2021 Houston Chronicle investigation determined that taxpayers may have forked over as much as $1.1 million per job.
Chapter 313’s costs were so astronomical, its flaws so glaring, the Texas legislature in 2021 let the twenty-year-old program expire—a rare loss in Austin for the business lobby. However, in 2023, the legislature rebooted it. Under Chapter 403, as it’s now known, companies can no longer pay kickbacks to schools, and the tax abatement deals come with more stringent job requirements. Lipstick on a pig. In Texas, Buc-ee’s tax breaks come under other parts of Texas law, Chapters 380 and 381. These city- and county-based incentives haven’t attracted nearly as much scrutiny, perhaps because this particular corporate welfare program doesn’t claim to bring business from out of state. Instead, Chapters 380 and 381 pit rural towns against each other. If one interstate community doesn’t want to cough up cash, Aplin can easily move on to the next. He rarely has to ask more than once.
There is a symbiosis to this system. Dollars flow from government to corporation, corporate titan to politician. Texas has no limits on individual or PAC contributions to nonjudicial political candidates. Combined with the ever-increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of multimillionaires and billionaires, Texas produced a fairly stable political finance system. During Abbott’s thirty years in statewide office—first as a Texas Supreme Court justice, then as attorney general, and finally, for the past twelve years, as governor—he has raised a mind-boggling half a billion dollars. As of this writing, his campaign account has $105.7 million in it. His Democratic opponent, State Representative Gina Hinojosa, has about $1 million. Such asymmetry virtually ensures that Abbott will win a record fourth term as governor this fall.
Aplin has donated about $3.8 million to Texas politicians in the past decade; all but $5,000 went to Republicans. Of that, about $2 million went to Abbott. What does this get you? For one, the governor will appear at your ribbon-cutting ceremony, as Abbott did for the opening of the Luling store. Texas isn’t a land of irony, so few seemed bothered that the guy responsible for paving over a good portion of the state’s rural areas was appointed by Abbott as chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. Aplin did take some heat after the commission failed to stop a Dallas developer from buying a state park—leased from an energy company for fifty years—and turning it into a subdivision of multimillion-dollar homes and a private golf course. Still, Aplin is comparatively harmless as a political actor; another of the state’s top contributors, Midland oil baron Tim Dunn, has used his fortune to install a cadre of far-right Christian nationalists who have transformed many of the state’s institutions.
LOL, It’s Party Time
Until 2019, Buc-ee’s was a resolutely Texan institution. All its stores existed within the state’s ample boundaries. But in the six years since, the company has rapidly expanded to other states, with nineteen locations from Florida to Colorado and plans to move into Wisconsin, Ohio, and other virgin territories. (Woe to the regional competitors who also have an animal mascot: among the convenience store brands that Buc-ee’s has sued for alleged copyright infringement are Barc-ee’s, a Missouri chain that caters to dog owners, and Mickey’s, an Ohio chain that features a smiling moose.)
But the brand, so strongly associated with Texas’s rising omnipresence, is not universally loved. Take Buc-ee’s foray into North Carolina: In 2021, the company fled Efland—an unincorporated interstate town not far from the liberal college enclave of Chapel Hill—after residents objected to a proposed 64,000-square-foot travel center with sixty pumps and a 250-foot car wash. Locals had a litany of familiar NIMBY-esque complaints: worsening traffic congestion and destruction to nearby local watersheds. But the heart of the matter involved aesthetics.
“A lot of it goes to the identity of this county, and that’s not a massive eighty-foot bucktooth beaver sign with billboards saying ‘LOL, It’s Party Time.’ It’s quite frankly tacky,” an activist told Texas Monthly in 2021. After commissioners asked Buc-ee’s to shrink the size of the project, the company announced that it was moving on. Buc-ee’s was too big to be failed. But the reception wasn’t much better eight miles down the interstate, in Mebane. An Indigenous rights group warned that the proposed gas station would cover up a historic Occaneechi trading path. An environmental justice group released a forty-page report linking mega-gas stations to the climate crisis and warning that cancer-causing compounds such as benzene could pollute the air and water. That wasn’t enough to stop the project, though. The store is set to open in late 2027.
Buc-ee’s biggest defeat came in Colorado, where the beaver caused utter chaos after it proposed, in December 2024, a seventy-four-square-foot, 120-pump “large format” behemoth for Palmer Lake, a small town of 2,600 that lies a few miles west of I-25. Locals were incensed about the usual things—pollution, congestion, the ruination of dark skies—but Buc-ee’s was unprepared for the community’s attachment to values antithetical to the Buc-ee’s spirit. Palmer Lake lies midway between Denver and Colorado Springs, at the outer edge of the Front Range’s sprawl, the last stand against an emerging megalopolis in the foothills and plains east of the Rockies. The town’s master plan is designed to preserve a “small rural-town character”; just north on I-25, the state is building one of the nation’s largest wildlife overpasses, a bridge over six lanes for the charismatic megafauna like elk and pronghorn to cross from the Pike National Forest to habitat on the other side. Palmer Lake’s most durable bulwark against suburbanization is Greenland Ranch, a twenty-two-thousand-acre green space that was saved from development through a massive land deal twenty-six years ago. Buc-ee’s wanted to build on twenty-five acres adjacent to Greenland and asked the town council to annex the property so it could access the town’s water supply. When local officials seemed open to the idea, residents coalesced into a movement that rallied under the slogan “Heave the Beave!” The Jacobins ended up recalling two town trustees and forcing the resignations of four other local officials, including the mayor, whose text messages calling opponents “terrorists” and “fucking losers” found their way into a lawsuit. Governor Jared Polis and Colorado’s two U.S. senators added to the pile-on, urging Aplin to find another location. In February, Buc-ee’s withdrew its application.
Characteristically, the company had little to say publicly about its defeat. It probably didn’t need to; other Colorado towns were begging Buc-ee’s to build in their jurisdictions. But back in the motherland, few could understand the fuss. “This is literally about whether or not a Buc-ee’s gas station will be built on the interstate,” wrote a Chron reporter. Big is beautiful, and it is coming to a town near you.