Buc-ee's Record Car Wash

The Buc-ee's at Katy is the one that holds the record. Its car wash runs 255 feet of conveyor, the longest in the world, so long that a car takes several minutes to travel it from end to end and drivers routinely film the trip. The chain itself began a long way from here and on a much smaller scale. Arch Aplin the Third, known since childhood as Beaver, opened the first Buc-ee's on July 28, 1982, in Lake Jackson, south of Houston, with his business partner Don Wasek. That original store was three thousand square feet, roughly the footprint of a large house. The name came from two directions at once. A colleague of Aplin's father had called him Bucky Beaver, after a cartoon character in Ipana toothpaste advertisements, and Aplin had a Labrador retriever named Buck. The founding idea was almost embarrassingly plain. Keep the bathrooms spotless, sell ice cheaply, and give drivers a reason to plan a day's route around a filling station rather than merely tolerate one. It worked well enough that the stores became destinations in their own right, with brisket counters, wall after wall of jerky, and a cartoon beaver on everything. The company still refuses to build parking for eighteen wheelers, on the reasoning that truck stops attract a slower turnover and a different crowd. The largest store in the chain is at Luling, further along this same drive, at 75,593 square feet, which is also a world record. Katy holds the other one. The two sit about a hundred miles apart on one highway.