Moneymakers: Making a big splash from spending a penny

Buc-ee’s has grown from a modest convenience store in 1982 to a US titan with sales of $275m last year by providing travellers with five-star toilets.

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"You can get a lot of people to pull off the highway and spend money if you guarantee them an immaculate place in which to heed the call of nature," says Peter Carbonara in Forbes. This is the rationale behind Buc-ee's, which has grown from a modest convenience store in 1982 to a US titan with sales of $275m last year, and whose billboards carry messages such as: "Your Throne Awaits. Fabulous Restrooms 32 miles". Owners Arch Aplin III and Don Wasek target well-off customers with high-margin private brands. This has proved lucrative and fostered a "cultlike following". The company offers no discounts and won't let commercial lorries use its petrol stations. Most outlets consist of a single store, but the group also has 12 "enormous" travel centres that resemble "a Texas-themed amusement park". Yet the main attraction is the toilets, which boast "spacious entryways decorated with Texas-themed maps and memorabilia" and are patrolled 24 hours a day. Of course, to reach them "customers have to walk past endless aisles" of snack food and coffee.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.