I had never heard of Buc-ee’s until I drove to Texas in 2021. Like so many first-timers, I was intrigued and amused by signs on the highway hundreds of miles away from a Buc-ee’s location telling me “You gotta pee it to believe it.” By the time I arrived in Austin, I had a clear picture in my mind of what Buc-ee’s is supposed to be about—even though I didn’t actually visit one for a few more years. Everyone knows Buc-ees is an enormous gas station with immaculate bathrooms, high quality and unique foods including fudge, brisket, and “beaver nuggets”, and an expansive line of branded merchandise featuring their ubiquitous beaver mascot. The fact that Buc-ee’s branding is so pervasive and effective, reaching far beyond the limits of the US highway system, is a testament to the effectiveness of its marketing.

Buc-ee’s may be a model for aspiring marketing majors, but it also emphasizes a glaring deficiency in the efforts of the competition. To my knowledge, no other gas station company has engaged in anything close to Buc-ee’s widespread campaign. I’ve travelled all over the United States, and I’ve stopped in many gas stations. Some are operated (or at least franchised out) directly by major oil companies: Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP. Others, like Circle K, 7-11, and Quik Stop, are gas station specialists, and these stores often provide a slightly upscale experience, including hot food, fresh produce, and in the case of truck stops, things like showers and lockers. Nevertheless, none of these establishments have, in my experience, come anywhere close to touching Buc-ee’s on the things Buc-ee’s has chosen to compete on. The only place that has even tried to offer “something different” in the gas station sector is SQRL, and they are still extremely few and far between. Also, the one I did stop at was, frankly, pretty much like every other gas station I’ve been in.

Here is my point: for all the differences we might be able to find, gas stations in the US are more or less the same, even interchangeable. Furthermore, gas stations are almost universally dismal, decrepit, depressing places. Part of the reason for Buc-ee’s runaway success as a brand, which has crossed over into veritable meme status in some circles, is that they defy everyone’s expectations of what a gas station typically is. I’ve seen phrases like “gas station bathroom,” “gas station sushi,” and “7-11 soda machine” used as metaphors for the superlative in disgusting, dirty, and unappealing. Here’s an exercise you can do at home: imagine any object or activity, then place it inside a gas station in your minds eye. I expect your chosen thing instantly becomes at least a few degrees less attractive and desirable. Gas stations may not be the worst places in the world, but they are pretty much always not great.

I’m not just talking about the bathrooms here. Think of the experience of buying gas: one is surrounded by the smell of acrid chemicals and the noise of large vehicles, typically exposed to the elements. Some gas stations have started playing loud, cheaply-made advertizing reels on tiny screens with suspiciously broken mute buttons. Other buttons and readout displays, especially for the lowest-priced gas options, are also frequently inoperable. Complimentary windshield-washing tools lie in a bucket of tepid water at arms reach, probably just to give customers something to do so they don’t walk away and risk a gas spill. Inside the building, merchandise shelves offer a certain kind of grab bag of bare minimum products—everything you could want or need, as long as its cheaply made and sold at a markup. No shortage of options for cigarettes and lottery tickets, though. Out-of-order registers, wet floors, flickering lights, understaffed counters—these problems are endemic in the gas station sector. Obviously, not every gas station is consistently bad, but try comparing the experience of gas station shopping to the experience at your local Target or grocery store. I would be surprised if the gas station profits from the comparison.

Even when gas stations aren’t that bad, they usually do a poor job of advertising that fact. Again, Buc-ee’s is the exception that proves the rule. If you are especially savvy or especially particular as a traveller, you may happen to know certain gas stations in your area that are better than others. You may have developed brand associations or be able to identify which parts of town usually keep the most well-appointed facilities. But this discernment requires inside knowledge and experience. It is a rare gas station that openly advertises its cleanliness, the friendliness of its staff or the uniqueness of its food and merchandise offerings.

What does all this mean? For me, it suggests that Buc-ee’s is some combination of a) a fluke and b) a surprisingly unprofitable business model that only works in specific geographic areas. How else are we to explain why no other major gas station chain has attempted to recreate the model? If we follow the logic of disruptor theory, we would expect that Buc-ee’s, having entered the gas station sector with the aim to meet a previously unmet need, would eventually grab so much of the market share that competitors would have to either adopt its model, come up with a new alternative model, or get swallowed up by the monolithic beaver. Perhaps that scenario is still in the future, but I, for one, am skeptical. My skepticism stems from a long-held suspicion about the nature of gas stations, one that explains everything about the essential gas-stationiness that is so ubiquitous and perplexing. Namely:

Gas stations exist at the center of the universe in the American capitalist economic landscape.

What I mean is that when all else fails, no matter the socioeconomic circumstances, no matter who you are or what your ideology, pretty much everybody always needs gas. We need gas because, in the words of E. B. White, “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”

We are so dependent on cars and gas that they have no incentive to compete on any metric other than location and price. There is no substitute for the gas station that is in the right place at the right time. When you need gas, few people are going to cruise and shop around looking for the best experience. Some people will cross town to save a few cents per gallon—that’s why the only advertizing these places do is with giant signs showing up-to-the-minute price readouts. In every other possible area of competition, Buc-ee’s stands alone. It is self-evident in the behavior of gas station owners that it just isn’t worth the investment for them to hire the staff necessary to clean or repair or design their spaces in any way beyond the bare minimum. Doing so would, apparently, only serve to increase their costs without having any effect on their income. People might say they would like a cleaner gas station or one with a more inventive brand identity, but for the most part, their actual spending behavior continues to reinforce the status quo. They’ll still pretty much always get gas at the nearest convenient location.

Gas stations, then, have found the rock-bottom, eye-of-the-storm position for capitalism. No further spending or innovation is necessary, and if it is unnecessary, then it is wasteful (such is the efficiency-optimization paradigm of capitalism). Absolute necessity means absolute stagnation, like a ball at the top of its arc. Everything else in the capitalist economy is built on top of oil, or is viewed in comparison to it. When gas prices go up, the price of everything else goes up. The value of anything is measured by comparison to its equivalent purchasing power in petro dollars—how many barrels of oil would this get me?

It goes without saying that this is all really a carefully maintained illusion in the broader economy. There are alternatives to oil, just as there are alternative occupations to the corporate ladder and alternative pasttimes to consumption. But by design, these alternatives are hard to find and hard to pursue, while Capital’s preferred paths are also the paths of least resistance in the short term. By making one easy decision after another, we find ourselves trapped in a maze surrounded by nothing but bad roads. In the immediate, local, near-term, gas stations represent one of those easy choices, one that has really already been made for us. “Of course, I need gas now, so what does it matter which station I choose? They’re all the same, really.”