TL;DR - I bought one of everything from a popular and outrageously Texas gas station and am reselling it all on a Shopify store, starting this week.If you've been to Texas but never been to Buc-ee's, then you've never really been to Texas. Buc-ee's is a larger-than-life chain of 36 gas stations that are as big as grocery stores. Despite only having 36 locations, they do over $500M in annual revenues. They are known for pristine, gargantuan bathrooms, entire walls of gourmet beef jerky, and hundreds of other gourmet snacks and foods you can't find elsewhere. It's less of a gas station and more of a tourist trap or destination. It's really a marvel to behold, and there's nothing quite like it.Buc-ee's is interesting because they refuse to sell their products online. I imagine the reason is that they want people to continue to have a reason to travel to their expensive, debt-laden gas stations to spend more money than they might online. As a Texan, and the owner of an eCommerce fulfillment brand in Dallas, I strongly believed that Buc-ee's is missing out big time by not selling any of their products online. Only 5% of groceries are sold online, and my company happens to specialize in shipping food. So clearly I am invested in the opinion that society is still in the very early years of being accepting of buying food online.Having had great luck in the past getting responses from Mark Cuban, John McAfee and many others via cold email, I spent months chasing down the two Buc-ee's founders via cold email as well. My pitch? Let me sell your food online for you. We can handle the warehousing and fulfillment of all orders, and you won't have to lift a finger. It's common for people all over the country to pull into a Buc-ee's on the way to the beach, fall in love with their products, only to never have opportunities to buy them again. I wanted to help them fix that problem, but they never responded to me.This is when I took matters into my own hands.After reading an article about Pirate Joe's, the small Canadian retailer who would drive across the border, buy thousands of dollars of Trader Joe's foods, only to resell them in his own store, I was inspired to do the same with Buc-ee's, except in an eCommerce fashion. You see, the owner of Pirate Joe's was protected by what's called first-sale doctrine. This law means that it's perfectly acceptable and legal to resell something that you buy, as long as you don't claim or pretend to be the original seller of the product. I can legally resell a new iPhone that I bought from an Apple store, as long as I'm not claiming to be Apple. The Pirate Joe's owner got in trouble because his branding and store were technically causing confusion in the eyes of shoppers. At lease that's the (somewhat weak) argument that Trader Joe's made to the judge. The bigger reason he lost this legal battle is because Trader Joe's had much more resources than him.So a few weeks ago I set out to do the same with Buc-ee's, if for no other reason but to finally get the attention of the founders. I took my wife and 4 small kids to Buc-ee's and we spent about 2 hours buying one of every non-perishable snack in the entire store. In case you were wondering, there are 282 of them. It cost around $1,500, and the cashier told me it was the biggest purchase he had ever seen. Pics here and here and here. The receipt you see is only 1 of 3.We then took the snacks home and tediously categorized them all into a Google Sheet, one by one. We marked the price we paid, the weight of each item (with a small food scale), and the price we wanted to charge. Every item is marked up by around 32% on average. We decided to call the site Beaver Snax. We intentionally wanted the site to look a little hokey, but simple, and to not look anything like the Buc-ee's brand, logo or colors. I've had Shopify stores for the past 8 years or so, so Shopify was a no-brainer when it came to which platform to choose.I then paid a professional photographer to spend a full day taking pics of each product, which cost about a thousand bucks. We then uploaded everything to the site and spent a few hours throwing up some content on there. There are four of us working on this project: Me, my co-founder, my brother-in-law and a virtual assistant that I've used to years. The VA spent a week or two finding every writer who has ever written about Buc-ee's or anything Texas/food related, for that matter. We start outreach to them all on Thursday. So as of right now, you fellow Redditors are the only ones who even know about this master plan. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to drum up some buzz and attention to the site, which should be perfectly timed, right before the holidays. Much much attention, and to what effect? I have no idea.In my mind, the potential outcomes of this project are:No one ever really goes to the site and it flops entirely. In this case I have a few months' worth of delicious snacks to eat.We generate some attention, but few sales, and the site slowly dwindles into obscurity. I stiull have snacks to eat!It becomes popular enough to generate meaningful sales, and thus the attention of Buc-ees, which ultimately results in a cease and desist letter.The site generates 4-6 figures of monthly sales, the attention of the founders, and brings attention to my eCommerce 3PL as well.Regardless of what happens, I have had a blast launching this and that' what entrepreneurship is about, right?We plan to make two shopping trips to the store per week, and have order cutoff times the night before each trip. The hardest part of this plan will be the logistics involving this, in my opinion. Luckily I already have some awesome employees that can help with all this.I would love to hear your ideas, input and feedback, whether good or bad. As I said before, we know the site is simple and hokey, but that's what we're going for here! You can see this is clearly done on a budget. I'll be sure to report back if we generate any news articles or make any meaningful traction.Thanks for reading this far! see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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