The 50% owner of BucEes is from my hometown (pop ~3000). I don’t know him, but I know his family and in fact I talked to his brother yesterday about something. At one time we had 3 Bucees in our town, two smaller ones and one medium one. Smaller ones had like 6-8 gas pumps and the store was probably 3000-5000 sq ft. They closed the small ones down, and did a complete tear down rebuild of the medium one, now we just have the medium one.
Not all Bucees are huge. The one in our town is medium sized. What draws people into Bucees is the fact that they have so many gas pumps you don’t have to worry about it. You just pull up and park, fill up, no rush to move and let someone else use the pump. For a long long time they had really cheap ice, $1.50 for a 20 lb bag when others were getting $3-5 for the same. And clean restrooms, but clean store as well. A few weeks ago I was in the next town over and needed to fill up. Bucees was on my left, Stripes (much larger chain) was on my right. Traffic was heavy so I made the right turn into Stripes and pretty quickly realized why Bucees remains so popular. Had to drive around the pumps several times because so many were out of service, the area was dirty, sticky stuff all over the ground. Store was dirty and cluttered, lines were long.
Bucees is known for paying top dollar, and they are always cleaning and fixing stuff.
