Remember when, very briefly, and for only a few but very vocal motorists (as in electric motor-ists), gas stations were absolute hellscapes where any manner of unpleasantness might go down, and at a minimum, they were filthy places one vacated as quickly as possible once the precious fuel had been dispensed? This guy laid it on particularly thick.
As entertaining as the destination of that link is, I’m actually thinking of that guy because, truth be told, gas stations can be sketchy places where weird things go down. Most are not, of course, as we live in the year 2026, and if you’re in a decently populated area, your local gas stations are probably perfectly benign, well-lit places to fill your tank and potentially grab a roller hot dog. The hot dog is the scariest thing in this scenario.
… Usually. There are times, late at night and well off the beaten path, that a gas station can feel like a spooky or even menacing place. The only truly off-putting gas station I’ve encountered was in the most middle section of nowhere between Texas and Rhode Island, where I found myself in need of gas as the family slept. The gauge was close enough to E that stopping sooner rather than later felt prudent, and Waze said a station was nearby, so why wait? A few turns and barely a mile off the highway, I thought I had somehow been transported to a primordial forest. As I crested a hill, the gas station appeared: two dimly lit pumps, an open sign in the window, and a collapsing door over the lone service bay. Two figures appeared as silhouettes, each with the faint orange glow of a cigarette in their head shapes. One nudged the other to look at the stranger they were about to meet.
(Unrelated scene from Duel, enjoy!)
I noped right out of there and drove like a hyper-miler to make sure I made it to a legit fuel-and-food oasis butted up to the highway and full of both light and patrons. I’ve seen horror movies, I know what’s up.
Your turn. What’s your sketchiest gas station experience?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
Back in the early 90s I used to work at a sketchy gas station next to a trailer park. Though I don’t have any particularly juicy stories from there–most the bs I encountered was just depressing.
Oh fun, I just typed a shorter version of this story into a guy’s YouTube channel about moving to Brazil. My favorite fill-up/sketchy station story happened when my wife and I were seemingly out in the middle of nowhere, which was actually somewhere in central São Paulo state on our way to Votuporanga.
It was 2007 during what may have been the last long road trip I’ve been on without some type of GPS assist, quite late and our rental Corsa was running alarmingly low on fuel. Finally, we spotted a 24-hour Shell station a little ways off of the main road. Except the bulbs under the “S” had went dark. Yep, we filled up in “hell”, and the station certainly looked the part.
My nervous, broken Portuguese was not cutting it with the attendant and he exclaimed as such. As my wife started to speak for me, I tapped her knee, calmed down a bit, and began my request to “completa o tanke com o alcool por favor” once again. He suddenly started yelling for some other guy to come out and talk with us. As we were the only vehicle in the place and I was well out of my comfort zone, I should have probably been more nervous, but by that point this guy who was best described as “quite a character” seemed to just be having a good time.
After his buddy came out and started talking with my wife and I, I got to learn all of the assumptions. Apparently I looked like one of the German guys that were coming by who worked at a nearby fertilizer plant and the first attendant was wondering what I was doing out so late with a nice-looking Carioca lady. So, he also had to signal his buddy to see things for himself.
After they learned that I was from the US and we were road-tripping to see my wife’s family after attending Carnaval in Rio, they were happy to chat, did a double-check on the car’s vitals and suggested a possible shortcut to where we were headed which may or may not have involved driving through a sugarcane field (we didn’t try it). They also seemed to get quite a kick out of hearing about how we were stopped by the Policia Militar earlier that day. That of course, is a another story.
I’ve driven cross country a few times, both with a pal and also alone. My solo record for NYC to LA is 2 days and 17 hours in a Mk 1 GTI w/no muffler or radio (I was in a rush to start a new job). I’ve done it in that ratty VW, but also in a crapbox Nissan, a rented box truck, and the longest trip was a summer loop of N. America in an air-cooled VW camper I bought in Brooklyn while still in college at NYU. That was an 11,700 mile trip, and included a variety of adventures including a melted cat that blew oil out the head gaskets, being stranded in Ketchikan, Alaska when a ferry broke down, a brown recluse spider bite, and a night-time bigfoot encounter deep in the woods of BC among others.
During that big camper trip w/my pal, we almost ran out of gas more than once. Very late one night, we were in that mode: anxiously making our way forward down an unlit New Mexico highway, hoping to encounter some sign of an exit that might suggest a gas station (this way years before cell phones, GPS, etc… we just had paper maps from AAA). Anyway, as the clattery VW was getting down to fumes, we decided to gamble on an unremarkable exit because we didn’t think we’d have enough gas to get to the next exit. So, we exited despite there being no sign of civilization at the exit at all. We chose to make a right and headed towards the dark horizon, gingerly using my right foot to feather the throttle just enough to keep the van moving w/o wasting even a fraction of an ounce of fuel.
Purely by absolute luck, after a few miles of this, waiting for the engine to give up any moment, we chanced upon an open gas station in the middle of nowheresville. As best I can recall, it looked a heck of a lot like the photo in the top shot, only a lot more run-down. The lights over the pump island were on and there was a ratty flatbed pickup parked nearby, with a mangy dog running around in circles on the bed, chasing its own tail or having some sort of psychotic episode.
The whole thing had such a strong Stephen King atmosphere: the surrounding desolation, our desperation and sense of impending dread, the creepy run-down station, and us: two skinny white city boys making a cross-country trip in a VW old enough to vote/drink/be drafted. It seemed entirely plausible that something truly awful could happen to us at any moment, and our bleached pelvises would turn up in an arroyo a few years later, covered in tooth marks.
Luckily, we got gas and got the hell out of there, but the potential dread I felt was so palpable that I remember it clearly even now, 40+ years later.
Driving east from California to New Jersey had a pretty unexpected and unpleasant encounter somewhere in rural Tennessee. My girlfriend at the time was driving as we pulled in to fill up after we’d been driving all day. I’m honestly not sure who was at fault, probably both of them, but being a little road weary she felt he was veering towards our tiny Hyundai in his Dodge pickup as we crested the entrance down into the gas station and she flashed the brights at him once or twice.
Neither of us think anything of of it and pull in to fill up not realizing that dude has driven out and circled back around to give me a piece of his mind. As I get out to gas up, this guy, with his young son in the passenger seat too, just goes off on me like we’d given him a near death experience. I really wasn’t sure if this dude was trying to start some sh*t or was just a dick. Fortunately he didn’t seem to want to do more than yell at me and I mostly just kind of sat there while he ranted, and eventually he drove off.
A month or so ago, I was bringing back a rented car to Porte Maillot car park in Paris, and as usual (even if it was for work) I went after the nearest petrol station to refill the tank and avoid the company I work for the massive overbilling of a refill by the car rental… I ended up in a side street in Neuilly that had a petrol station… And to my surprise, when I stopped I was asked by the owner what I wanted…I was astounded that stations like that still existed in France nowadays…(usually it’s self serve, and nowadays it’s mostly empty stations with automatic dispensers. where you use your card.
I had a good chat with the owner as it’s something I usually see in the backyard of nowhere (say central France, and even there there’s those automated thingie) or in small out of the way villages in the Alps.
Was chilling at the fuel depot when 110 tankers, all marked with what seemed like the logo of some Eagle-themed sports betting app I had never heard of, rolled in and filled up, one by one.
When I asked the driver about payment, they said they worked for the Freedom Fuel Network, and that their boss was going to handle that. Anyway, they drove off with 1.1 million gallons of gas, and I never heard from them again. My boss was pretty pissed, I think he’s suing them.
Haha, well played.
Guy needed a jump and had his own cables. They must have been made of 18ga wire they were so thin and when I hooked it up to my battery the wires instantly started burning the insulation off.
I grabbed the broomstick he was using to prop open his hood and beat the jumper cables off my battery.
Handed him his broom stick and said good luck.
Driving through Oregon and while filling my car some guy wearing attire that matched the gas station came up saying it was illegal for me to fill my own car. I was already done at that point so I just apologized and moved on; I assume he was trying to scam people out of tips or something.
Self-service is allowed in Oregon now, so they have different islands that still have the full service, or you can pull up to self-service and do it yourself.
Yep. They’re the same price either way and I find that it’s almost always faster to do it myself. And the attendants usually don’t wash the windshield. That has to be one of the most boring jobs one could have in Oregon.
Ah cool, good to know!
It probably didn’t help that based on my experience at Oregon gas stations most of the attendants are a bit uh rough around the edges.
I worked overnights at a Mobil station in mid-Missouri back in the mid-ninetys. I came in one night about 10pm as the evening guy was closing out his shift. A regular customer comes in and accuses my co-worker of having an affair with his wife, then proceeds to leap over the counter at him. Unfortunately for the guy, my co-worker had recently left the Marines and had a good 50 lbs on him. As he defends himself, I get to call the cops. Customer gets hauled off (he had done this a few times to other guys around town), and I never asked my co-worker if it was true!
That’s a nasty husband, or maybe an even nastier wife…
I hate to get gas sometimes when I’m motorcycle touring. Soft luggage strapped across the pillion. Had a guy try to pull my backpack while I was pumping gas once.
But the worst was a couple of times one winter on the Jersey Turnpike. I’d talked my way into borrowing a ratty Range Rover and I had a dozen different encounters with people trying to sell me knock off high end perfume. Worse than trying to run the gauntlet through those department store entrances back when malls were big. I got sprayed with all kinds of nasty perfumes. I’m not a scentologist but I’m sure they weren’t Dior or whatever the bottle said. Same stations over at the diesel pump in my rusty vanagon were blissfully quiet.
Interesting; I had the opposite experience driving across Pennsylvania with my diesel station wagon. At the solitary diesel pump off to the side of the station, some guy in a Lincoln SUV pulled up and tried to sell me an “18K gold” ring in exchange for cash that he was allegedly going to use to book a hotel for his family. He was very insistent that it was easy to walk over and use the ATM…
Absolutely weird, and I suspect he’d have left me alone if I’d been at one of the gas pumps directly in front of the station.
The sketchiest was at a reservation gas station where some 5ft lady with sunglasses and a bandana over her face asks to see my phone. I see all the red flags, but oblidge because 1. my phone’s a piece of crap, and 2. I could take her in a fight pretty easily if she did try to steal it. It was okay because 1. the cracked screen protector make my phone look broken, and 2. She only steals iphones. The convience store clerk finds the whole thing amusing.
The next sketchiest was in college when the old minivan overheated. I was waiting for the radiatior to cool down enough to add coolant and this smelly guy on a bike sits next to me and pulls some cash out of a toliet paper roll and stuffs it into his pocket. (2020 was weird) Then he starts ranting about how wonderful it is that biden got elected. The guy was like, “Yeah man, he’s all buddy-buddy with Iran and gas is gonna be cheap again.”
I’m stuck listening to him for 45 minutes.
That aged about as well as all the folks who said trump was gonna make gas cheap again. Or most presidential promises in general.
I have two, one personally experienced, the other only viewed.
2004, I bought an ’00 Saab 9-5SE V6t wagon (great car) in Oklahoma City, flew out and drove it back to Maine. Along the way, stopped at a random gas station off the Interstate in middle-of-nowhere Ohio to fill up about 10pm. Put the nozzle in the tank, started pumping, thought for a second that it felt odd, but didn’t think much of it. Trigger clicked off when it should – but the gas didn’t stop pumping! Gas is now FOUNTAINING out of my car! I run into the station, the yell at the pimply-faced teen behind the counter what is going on. He has NO IDEA where the emergency shutoff for the pumps is! I eventually spotted it on the side of the building before he did and killed the pumps. My car is now sitting in a LAKE of gasoline. My buddy who was with me and I gingerly push the car out of the lake. The kid wants me to pay for the IIRC 40-50 gallons of gas. I gave him $30 or whatever and tell him to have his boss call me if that is a problem. Never heard a word.
There were several adventures on that particular car-buying road trip. My buddy missed his connection to meet me in OKC (I ended up picking him up in MO) and we ended up chasing his checked bag across the country. The battery died along the way. And while he was driving in western NY, got pulled over by a state cop who couldn’t understand why we were driving through *NY* to get to *Maine* from *Oklahoma*. Obviously, not a geography scholar.
The other one was wilder. Post college, I had an apartment in downtown Portland, Maine (Pine street in the West End for the locals) overlooking a Cumbie’s convenience store/gas station. One night I am sitting at my computer, looking out over Cumbie’s from the second floor, when there is a commotion – a bunch of Asian guys come running across the parking lot, obviously several chasing one dude. They caught up with him, there is a flash of something shiny, and the dude goes down. Blood is spurting and running off him all over the walk at the front of the store. Turns out, he got whacked with a *machete*. The Cumbie’s clerk comes out and gives first aid, and the cops and EMS showed up VERY promptly, there being a fire station right around the corner. He made it, thankfully. Reported in the news as some sort “gang-related incident”. Asian gangs in the nicest neighborhood (albeit kind of the worst side of it) in Portland, Maine of all places. Wildest thing I have ever seen with my own eyes. I went down and made a statement to the cops, but I was a bit too far away to really see any details of what the perps looked like. Just what color clothes they had on and that they were Asian.
Reading your Portland story and my minds eye kept insisting on picturing the 7-11 on Congress, because that absolutely seems like the type of place that would happen. Though I suppose they’re really only a block or so from each other.
I know right? That 7-11 was FAR more sketchy then the Pine St. Cumbie’s.
I lived there five years (’96-’01), got more than my fill of “walkable city living”. Bought a house in the ‘burbs and never looked back. It WAS kind of fun in that was definitely the “gayborhood”, and all of my homies lived within a few blocks. All of us are in the ‘burbs now though.
Early fall 2013, outside of Zhengzhou, China. My 11pm arrival flight was very delayed, getting in after 1am, and the driver my company had arranged to pick me up and take me to the rural-ish hotel 1.5 hours away from the 14-gate airport (servicing a city of maybe 3 million at the time) had given up and gone home long before I walked into Arrivals. Thankfully I had a Blackberry that usually worked on the local provider and cash in hand, so I walked to the taxi stand. After pulling up the hotel’s website in a browser (Google Maps? hah!) the first three drivers all refused to take me. Finally found a willing partner, loaded up my 2 weeks worth of luggage, and settled in for what was a somewhat familiar drive after 7 or so prior trips to the same place that year.
Except we weren’t going the same way I’d gone the last 7 times. Trying to play it cool and dealing with a spotty connection and archaic navigation apps, I screenshotted my location and started drafting a goodbye email to my mother. We pulled into a well-lit but fenced-in facility, and the driver made it clear I was to exit the vehicle. Resigned to my fate, I got out and tried to figure out where I was and what was going on…
Apparently, he had to fill up the LPG tank in the trunk to make the long drive, and we were at the taxi company’s fuel depot rather than a normal gas station. Once topped off, the rest of the drive was uneventful.
There are no shortage of sketchy/gross gas stations in rural Texas, mostly out west and up into the panhandle. In a lot of these small towns that is pretty much the only thing open later than about 8pm, so also functions as the teen hangout and bar. It’s still fairly common to find the doors/stalls of the men’s room have been removed (to deter doing drugs in there).
Despite oil being the primary industry out there and the whole desert smells like diesel, roughly 70% of the gas pumps out there are broken. You’ll pull into a station, half the pumps have bags on the handle, the first one that doesn’t has a broken credit card reader, the next one has a little handwritten note that says “pay inside”, then one actually turns on but it dispenses gas at rougly pissing speed so even filling up a motorcycle takes about 10 minutes.
Never get gas at a station that has the ice chest on the inside.
Through a series of events that only an Autopian member could find themselves in, I had 24 hours to tow a wrecked ’12 Ford Focus from the street outside of my apartment before my (new) landlords called the city on me. I was also scheduled to head out of town for a business trip the following day.
I rented a tow dolly, loaded up the Focus behind my regular cab Ford Ranger and got on the road to northern Vermont where a friend offered to let me keep the hulk until we could find a new front end clip for it.
I managed to make it all the way up there, drop it off and was an hour out of St. Johnsbury when I realized I wasn’t going to make it to civilization for more gas. One station popped up at an off-ramp with lights on. I hopped off on fumes, rolled in and the station was deserted. It was actually closed for the night, but for some reason they had left the pumps active. I was able to swipe my card and buy a tank of gas…I asked my friend about it, and he said they don’t typically leave pumps on unattended.
Here’s from the other side – the people who own the station.
Remember the great electrical blackout of 2003? My in laws owned a full service station on Telegraph Rd in suburban Detroit at that time.
I was leaving a meeting on a Friday afternoon, and I noticed that all the traffic lights were out, all the way home. My car’s radio didn’t work (I had a 1970 Electra 225 convertible at the time, whole other story) so it was literally radio silence.
I got home before my wife, and I saw the neighbor, who asked if we had power. I said that the power was out all the way home.
Just for the hell of it, I plugged in an old-fashioned wall phone, and within seconds, it rang.
I picked up, and it was my wife. She was panicked, and said that I needed to get to the station NOW!
When I got there, the place was swamped; cars all over, people all over, everyone losing their minds. A lot of people go to gas stations on fumes, particularly on Fridays, and they were going nuts, “You’ve got to have some gas somewhere in the back!”
No electricity, no pumps, no gas. Full stop.
Eventually, we restore order, and the place clears out.
The next day, there’s still no power, we’re driving to to the office, figuring that we can at least do some cleaning and organizing while the sun shines.
We are listening to the radio, and the DJ says that there’s a Sunoco station on Telegraph road that is open and has gas. We were thinking “That can’t be right…” We went the back way to the station to avoid traffic lights, and it was pure chaos. Absolute Madness. People accusing us of lying, “How can you tell the radio station that you have gas when you don’t?” 10 times worse than the day before.
We had to call the police to help restore some order.
Meanwhile, we tried calling the radio station to tell them to stop telling people that we were open and had gas. But no one was picking up the phones at the station.
The police officer is really annoyed, so they had to send a squad car out to the radio station to tell them to knock it off.
We saw that there was a backup to the station that ran maybe 3 miles…
So the question is “how did this even happen?”
Saturday morning, the person scheduled to open the station called my uncle in law (who owned the station with my father in law), who happened to be on vacation somewhere down south, and asked him “are we opening today?” My uncle in law didn’t know that there was a power outage, and the guy who called him didn’t tell him. So of course, my uncle in law says yes…
So someone saw an open gas station, and got word to the radio station, and the rest is family history…
Probably that time I was taking night classes to get my master’s degree in Baltimore and I stopped at a station on the way home at around 11 pm, and some guy there tried to sell me crack. Surprisingly, telling him I was a broke student with a shitty 15 year old car (which was true, and said car was right there with me as evidence), got him to leave me alone. Sometimes you just have to honestly level with some people.
The only time anyone’s ever tried to sell me drugs was in the parking lot of a gas station, in a scenario not dissimilar to yours. My buddy and I were walking home from late class, around 10:30, and decided to cut through the parking lot of a TimeSavers. This dude who was also hanging out there opened with “fine, fine gentlemen!” which was just weird enough to stop us in our tracks, which was probably a mistake. He asked if we might be in the market for some cannabis. My buddy, more worldly than I, told the man “nah dude thanks we already got some” (to this day, I’m not sure if this was a lie). The guy nods, disappointed but understanding, takes a breath, and asks “yeah, awright. You wanna buy some crack?”
You’ve lived a quite sheltered life if that’s the first time you were randomly offered crack. They’ll leave you alone if you’re not interested, no crackhead is out there trying to run a pressure sales approach.
Can’t say anyone has EVER offered to sell me drugs. I probably just don’t look like the buying type.
Uh-oh, I may look like the buying type. 12 years clean and sober, though, these days.
That’s awesome – seriously! There is quite a lot of addiction and alcoholism in my extended family, thankfully I have never partaken of ANYTHING illegal, and very vanishingly rarely even drink.
My only nephew finally lost his mother recently to an overdose (not remotely her first, but the Narcan kept saving her), so this topic is a bit front of mind at the moment.
Hell I probably look like a narc. 😉 Other than behind the wheel, I have always been a bit of a “goody two shoes” type.
Perhaps you’ve simply missed the subtext in the conversation?
I actually had a pressure sales approach from a drug dealer once. One night walking with a date in Washington Square Park after a movie I encountered a weirdly persistent drug dealer doing a hard sell for some hash. When I politely declined he went into spiel about the quality of his wares, and how he wasn’t just selling resin rolled around in keif (I suspect that was exactly what he was selling), and how he had integrity and self respect as a drug dealer. It was quite a pitch, and he sounded remarkably like a predatory car salesman.
Stopped at a gas station after a bike ride to get a drink for the drive home. As I’m in the back looking at the coolers, I hear angry shouting from the cash register area. At first I ignore it and hope it would be over by the time I was ready to check out, but then I hear something slam into one of the shelves. Then another one of the shelves.
By this point I realize that I’m not going to be able to ignore whatever is going on and I stand up from getting my drink, and I see someone go flying down one of the aisles, then this guy follows and throws her into another shelf. It took me a second to figure out what was even going on, but basically these four young guys were beating the crap out of the girl working the cash register.
Fortunately, once they saw me they took off (being big and scary looking FTW!). I checked on her after they left and she seemed fine. She was actually pretty excited because I’m guessing she had a restraining order against the guy and she thought he was going to jail for this. There are, of course, security cameras everywhere in the store.
Some of her friends pulled up to the station a couple minutes later, so I felt okay leaving at that point, but that was by far the sketchiest thing I’ve seen in a gas station.
There are some positively nasty filling stations along I-40 through rural Tennessee and northern Arkasas. Even the state rest stops in northern Arkansas are horrific. But, when on a 17 hour caffeine fulled drive, you gotta go when you gotta go.
Yeah, that would probably 30 years ago when I rented a moving truck and drove from TN to MA. I stopped for the night at some spot on the road in the middle of upstate rural NY somewhere. There was a gas station with hotel right next to it. So what. And so I got a room, went to sleep almost immediately. It became clear to me this was where all of the drug deals, hookers and drunks hung out. I could “hear” it in the rooms on either side and at one point the owner got into a fight with someone. Not sure what over, I just heard. Well it went from hurling F-bombs to a full on drawn out brawl and at that point I got up and looked out the door to see these two guys and a few other people in the parking lot, with the two just wailing on each other. Eventually the cops show up. And at this point its around 3:00AM. I think I wound up getting up at 5 and getting the fuck out of there.
Not really sketchy because nothing actually happened, but I have two amusing stories nonetheless-
The first was back when I worked at CCC Manhattan, we had a Gulf-livery GT40 replica. On one of the odd days when it wasn’t broken, a member took it out and got about an hour into Jersey before one of the axles snapped. I drove out there in our 993 to swap with him, and I rode back home with the flatbed tow truck driver who spoke almost no English.
Much to his dismay, the truck was running on fumes and we had to stop for gas in a pretty bad area outside of Newark. He nervously looked around while we waited at a pump for minutes (NJ being full service only). Finally, frustrated he got out and started pumping his own gas which led to a shouting match between him and the attendant, the gist of which basically being “I have a 60s race car on the back of my truck, I want to get the fuck out of here ASAP”
The second was when I was living in Japan. Once a month or so I’d rent a motorcycle and spend the day riding around the mountains. I pulled into at a gas station to fill it back up before I returned it, but all the pumps were occupied, so I waited off to the side for one to open. A car finished and left, but before I could get to it, another car zoomed and and stole it from me.
My Japanese wasn’t good enough to actually confront them, but I stared disapprovingly at them as they got out of their car, hoping to get their attention. An older guy got out, shaved head and full tattoos all down both arms. I was more than happy to wait for the next pump to open up after that
Around midnight in Strasbourg in 1992 – I was feeling like a king in a mostly new Fiat Tipo with a Tokai CD changer (the luxury!!!) that skipped at the slightest road seam, and three giggling girls.
Pulled over at a very decent-looking gas station (closed at that time, no one in sight, automatic pumps), started fiddling around with the pump when two guys showed up around the corner. One of them started walking towards us in a very determined manner, while the other grabbed his jacket, frantically pulling him back, pleading “No, no, no, Please don’t !!!“.
I didn’t linger around to hear the end of the discussion.
Maybe more weird than sketchy, but on a recent vacation we came across a gas station that had no building. It was in a smaller Midwest town a few miles off the interstate, but it was just 2 pumps under an awning. No attendant or even any sort of building. Even though it looked newer, we moved on to another regular gas station
I went to Bucees two weeks ago and they charged me $1.89 to refill my own reusable water bottle with water from the machine, but only charged my son 89¢ for a larger size orange pop in a styrofoam cup that won’t ever decompose. The healthier, earth-conscious decision cost twice as much. Let that sink in.
Combine that with the fact that their lawyers are assholes suing every mom and pop shop around and Bucees is definitely on my “I’ll never stop here again” list.
I have never understood the obsession people seem to have with Buc-ees. I live outside Austin and between work and personal life road-trip semi regularly. Pre-covid and their rapid expansion outside of Texas, it was….fine? I’d stop to take a shit, get a $5 bag of jerky or $2 breakfast taco that was pretty huge, and be on my way. The idea it was a “destination” to take visitors from out of town I always found absurd. It’s a gas station with a big overpriced gift shop, that is really the most interesting thing you can think to do?
I hadn’t been to one in a few years until this past weekend, and wow, things have gone downhill. Everything had got drastically more expensive. The breakfast taco was now $5.99, half the size it used to be, and had about two shreds of brisket in there. The $5 bag of jerky was now $9. I got this chicken caesar wrap- ten fucking dollars- and it was absolutely inedible. A gross slimy tortilla, chicken drier than west texas, and 90% of it was this nasty dry cole slaw, which no idea why that was in a caesar wrap. Two bites and threw it out. Yeah, not eating there again.
Despite their CEO being a more and more outspoken asshat and making a point to sue any small business- that was there first- that has any even slight reference to “beaver” in it’s name or logo, people still lose their shit when a new buc-ees opens.
Plus, even mid-day on a Friday the place was an absolute mob scene. The huge parking lot and pumps was an absolute free for all, everyone forgot how to drive and was mostly navigating by honking, getting from the gas pump to the store felt like playing Frogger. The line for the bathrooms, even the mens, was halfway across the store, all the checkouts were mobbed. F that. On the way back I stopped at a new QuikTrip that was the exit before. No chaos, still had a nice bathroom, and got a surprisingly decent Italian sub for like $7.
On this same visit I walked in the door and there was a little girl of about 6 or 7, shoeless, just laying on the floor by the line for the registers. The place is a Walmart with gas.
I will say my sliced brisket sandwich was pretty good, but not “I must go out of my way for this sandwich” good.