Not all world records are bigger in Texas
Guinness says it doesn’t recognize state favorite Buc-ee’s as having the largest convenience store and longest car wash
KATY — A Texas passion for big Texas things is what feeds Buc-ee’s.
While the chain of colossal travel centers has for years touted that it is the largest convenience store in the world and hosts the longest car wash in the world, those titles are not recognized by Guinness World Records, the global authority on human achievements.
Kylie Galloway, a spokeswoman for Guinness, said the buck-tooth behemoth’s Katy location no longer holds its 2017 title for the world’s longest car wash station.
“There is no current record holder for this title,” Galloway said. “Since the competitive landscape of this record is continuously changing, the record is only valid for one calendar year and the title is further researched at that time.”
As for the “largest convenience store” title, trumpeted by the company for the last decade, Galloway said Guinness does not monitor it.
Neither does anyone else. Unlike the world’s tallest buildings, there is no authority that officially tracks the largest footprint.
The general counsel for Bucee’s, Jeff Nalado, says the company started bragging about its size when it built its “world record holder” travel center in New Braunfels on Interstate 35 in 2012. The title likely came from news organizations, Nalado said.
“The media would come to us and say, ‘wow, you’re building such a large store and we’re not aware of any other store that size,’” Nalado said. “And so the media started printing it.”
Buc-ee’s world records are notable because of how the company uses them in its branding. There is a “World Record Holder” section on its website dedicated to its two titles.
More recently, the size of the next largest Buc-ee’s has grabbed headlines nationwide as the company announced plans to outgrow its “world record holder” travel center in New Braunfels on Interstate 35.
At 66,355-square-feet, it’s 20 times the size of the average 7Eleven. This store will be eclipsed by three new 75,000square-foot Buc-ee’s, one in Tennessee, the other about 60 miles east of San Antonio in Luling.
Experts say that the hype over Buc-ee’s size also taps into the myth and stereotype of the Lone Star State, with its large land mass, big trucks and oversized highways. And as the company expands to other states, so does the Texas myth.
“To a certain extent, Buc-ee’s is a sort of ambassador to Texas, where people just say, ‘Oh yeah, they’re from Texas and everything is bigger in Texas,’ ” said Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade organization that represents about a third of the industry.
“The phrase ‘everything is bigger in Texas’ applies to how Buc-ee’s came to be,” Lenard said. “It used to be a traditional convenience store and it just became Texified to the point where it’s as large as it is.”
If you had walked into one of the first 3,000-square-foot Bucee’s in Lake Jackson in the 1980s, you might not have thought it was any different from its competitors. But that changed when Buc-ee’s opened its first travel center in Luling in 2003.
The large store along Interstate 10, which has doubled its original size in recent years, resembled what most Buc-ee’s fans recognize today. The store was designed for long-distance travelers, and it sold gasoline, branded T-shirts, snacks and Beaver nuggets.
At their core, convenience stores act as a quick means to get gas, a soda, milk or any other item. Lenard said customers spend about 45 minutes in Bucee’s — about the amount of time you’d spend in the grocery store.
And unlike convenience stores, Buc-ee’s are along the highway on the way to some place. The company also offers an experience that appeals to someone on the road for a long time.
“Buc-ee’s is basically reinventing this idea of gas and convenience store. It’s a category on its own,” said Venky Shankar, the Coleman chair professor of marketing and director of research at the center for retailing studies at Texas A&M.
The newest format for Bucee’s is 74,000 square feet, Nalado said. That is four times larger than Love’s biggest Travel Stop & Country Store in Madison, Ga., which comes in at 17,000 square feet.
If a company can make the economics work, the larger the store, the greater the quantity of items it can sell and the cheaper it is to operate, Shankar said. While increasing the size of Buc-ee’s stores might not have an enormous economic advantage, it does give the company news value and bragging rights, he said.
But the store’s size isn’t the main attraction, Shankar said. It’s the experience, which just happens to come in a very large size.