How a Tone-Deaf Lawyer Wrote America’s National Anthem

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. If you’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s, and I pity any of you who haven’t, it’s a good bet,
00:00:18
Speaker 2: that you will soon enough.

00:00:20
Speaker 1: Beaver Applin built his massive convenience chain into a Texas empire, and his tactics are translating outside the state. Here to tell the story is Eric Benson, the man who wrote the definitive story for Texas Monthly about Buc-ee’s and its founder, Arch Beaver Applin.

00:00:42
Speaker 2: Let’s take a listen.

00:00:48
Speaker 3: Buc-ee’s is a Texas phenomenon. It is a gas station. The kind of industry standard has been at a normal gas station convenience store is twenty-four hundred square feet. The large Buc-ee’s travel centers are getting close to eighty-thousand square feet. You walk into a Buc-ee’s, it feels a little more like walking into almost a Walmart in terms of: you walk in, you can’t see the other end. Instead of hot food that’s sitting in under heat lamps that was prepared, who knows when, they have a big kind of
00:01:29
Speaker 4: island in the middle of the store.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: Half of it is a team that’s preparing barbecue and barbecue sandwiches. In the morning, they’re preparing breakfast tacos. On the other side, they’re roasting nuts and making these things called Beaver Nuggets, which are almost a combination between a potato chip and a French fry. They have a full deli area with a very large kitchen. Instead of a little display of beef jerky, they have walls of their own house brand of every kind of flavor and stripe you could imagine. I know Beaver is a fan of. Beaver is the CEO of Buc-ee’s. He turned me onto the Bohemian garlic beef turkey. So it’s this sort of food emporium. The bathrooms are the size of bathrooms. They’re actually larger in bathrooms at an NFL stadium. People are cleaning them twenty-four hours a day. The gas at Buc-ee’s is cheap. It’s kind of the cheapest gas you’ll find because they want you to stop, and they want you to come in, and they want you to spend money in the store. It’s a lost leader for them, as it is, I think, for most gas stations, but it really is for them, and people do spend a lot of money in the stores.

00:02:46
Speaker 5: Buc-ee’s has everything.

00:02:48
Speaker 6: It’s a mall, it’s a funeral home, it’s a football stadium.

00:02:51
Speaker 3: As soon as you walk in, have you have a smelt love being made?

00:02:56
Speaker 4: Do you know how that smell when you get into it and is real passionate?

00:02:59
Speaker 5: And I forgot I can’t gas.

00:03:00
Speaker 2: And I’m pretty sure I came to Buckets with my mommy.

00:03:02
Speaker 3: If anybody see or find my mom in now, please hit me up on Facebook.

00:03:06
Speaker 5: I’m sure now.

00:03:06
Speaker 4: And I think that was having church service at one point.

00:03:09
Speaker 5: It’s that Buck who.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: Owns buck. He’s got to be a conglomery, got to be a record label.

00:03:13
Speaker 4: So the night probably allwn Buck’s.

00:03:15
Speaker 5: At this point.

00:03:16
Speaker 3: And the story of how that thing, these giant travel centers, came to exist is the story of a business that grew very, very slowly.

00:03:27
Speaker 4: He’s a very interesting business story.

00:03:30
Speaker 3: Especially today that, I think, we’re familiar now, especially with sort of startup culture and Silicon Valley venture capital culture.

00:03:39
Speaker 4: Someone coming in with an idea, getting a ton of.

00:03:43
Speaker 3: Money from venture capitalists, raising rounds of funding, rounds of funding, and wish, of course, they’re giving away equity in their businesses over time, and these things grow very, very fast, very, very quickly, become very, very big, and sometimes they really hit and they become Facebook, Meta, Google, and sometimes they flame out. First Buc-ee’s started in nineteen eighty-two. For the first twenty years of the store’s history, they were almost entirely in Brazoria County, which is a county in Southeast Texas on the Gulf Coast, which is where Beaver Applan, the founder of Buc-ee’s, is from.

00:04:26
Speaker 5: I grew up in a family. My dad was an entrepreneur.

00:04:29
Speaker 6: He started out as a school teacher and then ended up started building houses and doing developments, residential and lack commercial development.

00:04:37
Speaker 5: So, you know, I grew up in.

00:04:39
Speaker 6: a family that was wired that way, and my mom did the books for the family business, and my dad ran the business, and I worked in the business, and my brother worked in the business when we were young, you know, summer jobs kind of things. We grew up like that, and so did not grow up in the communion store business, though. Grew up in the construction business. But did grew up in an entrepreneurial family. So it was fun, and I don’t know, it just kind of made sense for me to pursue my own thing.

00:05:07
Speaker 5: So when I got out of college, I wanted to build tall buildings.

00:05:10
Speaker 6: I mean, I graduated with a degree from Texas A&M University, a construction science building construction degree, and so I wanted to build tall buildings. And my first job that I got offered was contingent on the company getting the bid to build the engineering building on the Texas A&M campus. And I put all my eggs in that basket. But what I didn’t trump template was they didn’t get the bid, and so I found myself just graduating without a job, which was a bit stressful for me, if you will. So I worked a little while in my dad’s business, and I just got this hair brain idea, said, “I’m going to build a convenience store.”

00:05:51
Speaker 5: My grandpa had the small.

00:05:54
Speaker 6: town general store, if you will, in a little town in Louisiana, and I remember being a kid going in that little general store and wishing I could run the rich or they never would let me, but I always wished I could. So, you know, I found myself with that a real job that I was wanting to do without the career I’d planned on, and I.

00:06:14
Speaker 5: Just kind of pivoted and decided I was going to build a communience store. So there you go.

00:06:19
Speaker 4: They grew the business.

00:06:20
Speaker 3: It was profitable. Beaver took on a partner, a guy named Don Wassik, and the two of them became fifty-fifty owners in the business, which they still are today, and they got the idea over time that they wanted to get into. They went to build bigger stores, and so they built what’s called a travel center. It’s a big gas station, food, restaurant option off of an interstate highway, off and between two big cities, so it’s going to have a ton of traffic going through it. They built their first travel center in two thousand and three.

00:06:56
Speaker 6: As I look back and think about the process, it was, it was slow, it was methodical. It was in a gradual evolution. The first store I built was three-thousand square feet and had two gas pumps.

00:07:10
Speaker 4: At the time, seven.

00:07:11
Speaker 6: -Elevens, which was the leader in the industry, was twenty-four hundred feet. So, it was a little bigger, a little nicer, but very much the same business model. And over the next twenty years, I just kind of always tried to tweak it, improve it, make it a better experience. So to me, the way to continue to improve and evolve is just be the best provider in the market.

00:07:38
Speaker 4: Is just run a better business, and.

00:07:39
Speaker 6: Still, to this day, my mantra is: business is really simple. At Buc-ee’s, let’s be clean, let’s be friendly, let’s be in stock. Subsequent I’m not sure where it came from, but I had this idea of what y’all see now, which is this travel center and the products, and that that was a slow evolution, took me long time. I’ve designed it, thought about it through the plans and the trash, designed at a gantam in the trash, and in two thousand and three, twenty-one years after the first Buc-ee’s is when we opened the first travel center.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: And in the last twenty years has been about those travel centers first popping up over all of the key roadways of Texas between all of the big cities: San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Houston. And then the story of the last five years is about that brand that has a ton of grand loyalty. You’ve seen the kind of the Beaver move out of Texas and begin to conquer the Southeast of the United States, and now they’ve moved into the Midwest.

00:08:50
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Eric Benson of Texas Monthly and the Buc-ee’s founder himself, Arch Beaver Applin, tell the story of how Buc-ee’s can aim to be, and what a story! What a slow, beautiful growth story, the opposite of the Silicon Valley go-go culture, where you grow faster, you go home.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: Most companies get built this way.

00:09:14
Speaker 1: The first Buc-ee’s opened in nineteen eighty-two and stayed in Brazoria County in Texas for twenty years, and a slow evolution that changed, well, change travel in Texas, then the South and now the Midwest. Our family always gives ourselves thirty minutes when we go to Buc-ee’s because we can’t find each other when we land. The gas is never the point. The point is always the store: the experience. When we come back, more of how Buc-ee’s came to be: the story of a great and iconic American brand. Here on our American Stories, and we continue with our American Stories and the story of Buc-ee’s. The travel center conquered Texas and has been spreading throughout the Southeast and even the Midwest. Let’s pick up with the story. Here again is Texas Monthly’s Eric.

00:10:24
Speaker 4: Benson getting people.

00:10:26
Speaker 3: You know, people who like really have a connection to Buc-ee’s the way they have to very few other corporations. I think the only deal for the equivalents that I think of are things like Apple.

00:10:39
Speaker 4: Now, Apple’s kind of conquered the world. iPhones.

00:10:41
Speaker 3: Everyone has to have an iPhone, so it’s, I think, there’s less of a cultish thing is Apple has become themselves kind of to the end degree.

00:10:49
Speaker 4: Costco, I think, is a company that has a real kind of brand affinity. But Buc-ee’s even has something that those companies don’t.

00:10:57
Speaker 3: I think there’s still a little bit of. They’re still so regionally associated with Texas. The Texans are proud of it and love it. That’s one story about how we got to the point that there are fifteen Buc-ee’s outside of Texas, and I’m sure in another five years there might be twice that many. Part of the appeal of Buc-ee’s is that they’re overbuilt, because even on the busiest days, it’s pretty comfortable to be there.

00:11:26
Speaker 4: I’ve been at Buc-ee’s on July.

00:11:29
Speaker 3: Fourth weekend, which I think might be one of their very busiest weekends, and it’s pretty crowded on July Fourth, but it’s totally manageable, and on a normal day, you’re like, you’re never bumping into shoulders with anyone. You’re never, I’ve never seen a Buc-ee’s parking lot full where you can’t find a spot at all. There’s always a spot for you. There’s almost always a gas pump ready there for you. And I think as a consumer makes you feel a little special, like you’re wanted there, not like you have to compete to get there. It’s interesting because I think there’s businesses that have kind.

00:12:10
Speaker 4: of cult followings.

00:12:12
Speaker 3: A lot of places get that through scarcity. They make people line up for hours for an experience. Then Buc-ee’s really goes the other way. You know, they have these, yeah, I mean, bass Drop Travel Center, which is, I think, a normal size travel center for them, maybe even on the small side at this point, ninety-six gas pumps, fifty-six thousand square feet. And I think there’s an insight there that they had, which is maybe someone will wait online for a special dinner out, but I don’t think anyone wants to wait. If they’re driving from Austin to Dallas, no one wants to take more time on their gas stop.

00:12:55
Speaker 4: I think that would be where it doesn’t matter.

00:12:57
Speaker 3: How special the travel center is, how cheap the gas is, how much better the brisket sandwich you’re going to get there is than at another gas station. No, he’s going to wait twenty minutes waiting online for a gas pump to do that. The parking spots and themselves are bigger. You’re never going to go into a Buc-ee’s parking spot and have to kind of wedge yourself out of the door because someone parks a little too close to you. They’re parking spots that are designed for big trucks, and even if you have a big truck, you’re going to be comfortable opening the door pretty wide and hopping out. And then there’s the Disney World element of Buc-ee’s, which is the employees there. There are strict dress and personal presentation codes about how you can be at a Buc-ee’s. You don’t use no visible tattoos, you got to be clean-cut. When you walk in there, everyone is supposed to clearly say, “Welcome to Buc-ee’s.”

00:13:54
Speaker 4: They’re very nice on the way out.

00:13:56
Speaker 3: Too. And they sell a lot of things that are. It’s not to, I mean, they sell tons of these plushy beavers, they sell all these kind of texas are chatskis, and so you can go. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a big gift shop too, and it’s clean, and I think the wrap on gas station convenience stores is that they often are not clean. And who hasn’t been to a gas station cavenience store bathroom where the door kind of doesn’t close, some of these metal door, the lock isn’t on there, the toilet is unflushed, and that’s that’s. You know, Buc-ee’s offers an experience and a promise that.

00:14:36
Speaker 4: You’re not going to face that, that you’re going to get your little, you know, you’re you’re a little bit of gas station Disney World when you stop there.

00:14:46
Speaker 6: Clean restrooms! What a basic concept, you know, for people traveling to have a clean not only the restrooms, but a clean store, a clean environment, a well lited environment, a safe environment. So, yeah, the restaurants we became a little bit famous for our restrooms, which is, you know, to me, just kind of such a basic need, but we continue to try to maintain sparkling clean restaurants.

00:15:13
Speaker 3: I got the opportunity to spend some time with Beaver Applan, who’s the CEO of Buc-ee’s, co-CEO, founder, and the guy who kind of gave Bucky Buc-ee’s his famous for its beaver logo. And Beaver the CEO is his. Beaver is his nickname, as you might imagined, not his given name, but it comes from him.

00:15:32
Speaker 4: Uh, he’s, you know, he’s Beaver.

00:15:34
Speaker 6: I had a Labrador Retriever named Buck, and my nickname was Beaver, so I named the store Buc-ee’s. I made my logo of Beaver, and that was my business plan. You know, my mom named nicknamed me Beaver when I was born. My real name is Arch. I’m the third. My dad went by Arch. I still go by Beaver. I guess I’m never going to outgrow that. So it just kind of made sit, and here we are.

00:16:00
Speaker 3: I wanted to go to a store with him and sort of see what this place was like through his eyes. And, yeah, we walked in, and he, you know, I think the first thing he said, “Wow, you know, I don’t want to. We can do this as long as you don’t make it seem like I’m bragging.” He’s a down-home Texas guy. Christianity is definitely part of his life, and I think he wants to. Maintaining humility is important to him. Beaver has clear political views if you look at his donations, but he’s not someone who’s trying to, and the stores are not trying to ram his kind of politics and religion down your throat.

00:16:37
Speaker 4: For sure.

00:16:39
Speaker 3: He wants Buc-ee’s to be a space for everyone, and it does feel that way. One thing that’s clear about that store, there’s nothing that’s there by accident. There are these islands, refrigerated islands, where they have what they call protein packs, and it’s a hard-boiled egg and some half-inch by half-inch tubes of cheese, that kind of thing. Those have been kind of designed and tested. Someone didn’t just throw that in or buy it from a third-party vendor. They thought there was a customer interest in it, and they tried to kind of optimize it and taste test it to be the best that it could be. And, yeah, I think in walking around too, we interacted with some employees, and he was very one.

00:17:28
Speaker 4: A Beaver is not a big person. I think he’s five-seven, and he’s kind of slight.

00:17:33
Speaker 3: He does, he does dress beautifully. I think he was wearing a cup of doora and a sport coat when he walked in.

00:17:40
Speaker 4: But he’s the CEO of this company.

00:17:42
Speaker 3: And the people working there, they got a, you know, what’s, what’s like a pretty good job for working at a gas station. They pay well at buckets, and they have good benefits, but they, you know, these people don’t interact with the sea of the company. There’s so many levels down. And so we went to, uh, I think, a woman making nuts. Beaver kind of interacted with her and asked her what she was doing, and she said she loved her job. And I think it seemed genuine. It seemed like a really genuine moment in Beaver said, “I’d love that you love what
00:18:11
Speaker 4: you’re doing,” and, yeah, I don’t think. I don’t think she knew who he was. She didn’t. She didn’t give that.

00:18:16
Speaker 3: I didn’t see anything in her eye that said, “Oh, this is a setup.” They, you know, they told all the employees Beaver is coming in today, but, “act cool.” It seemed like a genuine moment because then we did interact with some employees who did know who Beaver was, some people who were a little higher up in the managerial chain who also really loved it.

00:18:34
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Eric Benson and Arch Beaver Applin tell the story of Buc-ee’s, and what a story!

00:18:41
Speaker 2: Indeed, part of.

00:18:42
Speaker 1: the appeal was just its overbuiltness. It’s just