Stuckey's, a Texas road-trip icon turned 'ghost store,' sees revival under founder's granddaughter

Stephanie Stuckey bounds up the driveway of Houston’s Beer Can House in red sneakers, white jeans and a souvenir-stand T-shirt. She whips an iPhone from her back pocket and starts recording a video to share on social media later. “I’m delighted that you are preserving this,” she tells her tour guide on this Tuesday morning in early May, peppering him with questions about the house enshrouded in smoothed-out beer cans and pop tops, one of the city’s quirkiest landmarks. “It’s more than just something you drive past.” Stuckey is not one to drive past. As she notes in her Twitter bio, she will “pull over for the world’s largest ball of twine.” But it’s more than an indulgence. As she promotes roadside attractions, Stuckey is betting that Americans haven’t lost their affinity for car trips and hoping they’ll still be charmed by a particular bit of Americana — the eponymous retail chain her grandfather founded in 1937. Stuckey, 56, is in the third year of a turnaround for Stuckey’s, which, at its 1960s peak, boasted 368 travel centers along highways in 40 states. Their teal, steeply arched roofs were visible from afar, and their pecan log rolls were a staple of family vacations. The company also owned a manufacturing plant, a trucking division and some 4,000 billboards that beckoned drivers with the cheesy come-ons for clean restrooms, Texaco gasoline and souvenirs for the kids. A sort of Buc-ee’s before Buc-ee’s. That heyday was well in the rearview mirror by the time Stephanie Stuckey bought the company in 2019. The few branded stores remaining were owned by licensees. The handful of original buildings that weren’t torn down exist today mostly as “ghost stores,” still recognizable by the roofs but repurposed as everything from a quilt shop in Pennsylvania to a strip club in Florida. An observant traveler can spot one just off the Gulf Freeway in La Marque and another at the northwest corner of Interstate 45 and Texas 21 in Madisonville, catty-corner from a bustling Buc-ee’s. Stuckey paid $500,000 for the company, which by the time she took over had been reduced to two employees in the corporate office, three sales reps and a handful of workers in a rented warehouse. It closed the year $133,000 in the red. Stuckey quickly set a new course, focusing on pecan treats and the nostalgic power of her family name rather than on building new brick-and-mortar convenience stores. She revved up online candy sales, which have grown by 850 percent. The roster of retail clients has swelled to 5,000 locations, including truck stops and grocery stores. In the summer of 2020, Stuckey’s acquired the snack company Front Porch Pecans and brought on its founder, a third-generation pecan farmer with more business experience, as president of the combined company. The following January, it purchased a candy factory in Wrens, Ga., to bring production of pecan log rolls, divinity and other candies back in house. On HoustonChronicle.com: The cost of a summer vacation has skyrocketed. Here's what Houstonians are doing about it. Stuckey, who remains as chief executive officer, revived the original recipes developed by her grandmother and boasts that most artificial ingredients are gone, replaced by real chocolate and vanilla. “We produce the best pecan snacks you will taste, period,” she said. Retail empire The Stuckey’s story dates to the Great Depression. Looking for an alternative to working the cotton fields of rural Georgia, W.S. “Sylvester” Stuckey opened a roadside stand to sell pecans he bought from local growers and candies his wife made. The family added souvenirs and began to build stores. By the 1950s, they were familiar to highway travelers, including the those touring Route 66. Stephanie says her grandfather never refused service to Black shoppers, unusual for a Southern company in that era. The advent of the interstate highway system allowed Sylvester Stuckey to create a retail empire. He focused exclusively on the new super-highways, combining fuel stops with what we now know as convenience stores. The kitschy souvenirs and Burma-Shave-style billboards proved a powerful draw. His granddaughter tells a story about his early consumer research. Sylvester would grab a coffee at a Stuckey’s, then get back in the car and drive until nature called. He’d build his next store at the nearest exit. The elder Stuckey sold the company to Pet Milk in 1964 to raise capital for growth, and he stayed on to help run the division for several years. After his death in 1977, Pet was sold to Illinois Central Industries. The new corporate owners started closing stores, and Stuckey’s began to fade from memory. A group led by Stephanie Stuckey’s father, former U.S. Rep. W.S. “Bill” Stuckey Jr., bought the brand in 1985, adding it to his Interstate Dairy Queen holdings. Stephanie credits her dad with launching Stuckey’s Express, a store-within-a-store concept that put Stuckey’s treats in branded displays. The company rebounded to more than 165 licensed stores in 17 states. Its candy plant in Eastman, Ga., continued to operate until 2009. Production was then outsourced to contract vendors, according to the company. Bill Stuckey sold Interstate Dairy Queen to Berkshire Hathaway a few years later. He and his partners then began looking to unload Stuckey’s, as well. The group approached members of the family about taking over. Stephanie was the only one to bite. She dipped into her life savings with a plan to make over the company as a manufacturer and online retailer. “Our future is in the product,” she said. “Our future is in selling the pecans and pecan-based products.” Celebrating the road trip But Stephanie Stuckey, a former Georgia state legislator and chief sustainability officer for the city of Atlanta, also was convinced that nostalgia for the old Stuckey’s stores still had value. She built a social media presence from Instagram to LinkedIn and beyond, using each to promote the link between the American road trip and Stuckey’s treats. “You don’t have to own a bunch of roadside retail stores to celebrate the road trip,” she said. “I tell stories of road trips. I celebrate small-town America. I post about the places that are fun that you can visit. And so, we are bringing back the road trip in a different way.” The effort is succeeding. Stuckey’s finished 2021 by posting $2.5 million in profit on more than $12 million in revenue. On HoustonChronicle.com: Despite record-high gas prices, Texans expected to hit the road for summer travel Stephanie Stuckey said her priority is finding outlets to carry her products. She continues to sell licensing rights, but insists she doesn’t have the capital or inclination to build company-owned stores. Any “flagship” stores in the future — likely no more than five — would be built in tourist areas primarily to market the brand. Baby boomers are a natural target audience, but long-term success depends on younger generations, said marketing professor Venkatesh Shankar, director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. “How do you make the brand relevant to the growth population?” he said. Getting the story out in quick bursts, often accompanied by videos, as Stuckey does on TikTok and other social media, is critical, Shankar said. Parents and grandparents can reinforce the messaging by sharing memories of Stuckey’s during their own childhood trips. Millennial and Gen Z consumers might well respond to the story of an established family company, especially run by someone with a record of supporting the environment. “The younger generation craves authenticity,” Shankar said. Nostalgia sells Southeast Texas businessman Shahbaz Raza is bullish on Stuckey’s, even though he’d never heard of it when he bought a fading store off I-10 on the road to Beaumont. Raza, who immigrated to Houston from Pakistan in 1989 when he was 17, bought his first gasoline station in 1998. In 2011, he bought the circa-1965 Stuckey’s store in Anahuac. The seller convinced him to wait six months before changing the name. Raza said he was overwhelmed by the number of customers who wanted to reminisce about the store. One lady confessed she had stolen a candy bar there while on a trip with her parents 40 years earlier. She tried to pay him $100 to clear her conscience. When the previous owner came back after six months to see how things were going, Raza said he was sticking with Stuckey’s. Pleased, the man sold him another piece of I-10 frontage property 9 miles away in Hankamer, where Raza built a brand-new Stuckey’s that includes a Baskin-Robbins counter and old-timey souvenirs. Texas Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox Raza expanded into Orange County and, with his brothers Zain and Ali, now own four franchise stores in the region. They are building a fifth, and Raza says that next year he will tear down the Anahuac store to rebuild it in a grander fashion — possibly rivaling a Buc-ee’s in size. “The roof will look exactly the same,” he said. “We call it a ‘Stuckey’s blue’ roof.” How do you say ‘pecan’? After wrapping up her tour of the Beer Can House, Stephanie Stuckey popped into the gift shop and emerged wearing a turquoise ball cap she’d bought. “I love swag,” she said, beaming. About 90 minutes later at the Omni Houston, smartly attired in a cream-colored dress, she addressed a crowd of accountants and blue-blazered students from a charter school supported by the luncheon’s host, GLO Certified Public Accountants. The firm bought 500 shrink-wrapped tins of Stuckey’s treats to get her there. Her delivery was crisp, with a touch of Southern humor as she instructed the audience on the preferred pronunciation of “pecan.” (PEE-can, not puh-CON) “It’s been a wild, crazy road trip that I’ve been on,” Stuckey said from the ballroom dais, outlining lessons she learned from her family regarding “bootstrapping,” resilience and reinvention. “I didn’t want our legacy to be a bunch of ghost stores, shuttered.” Among those taken with her presentation was the Rev. Willie Davis, a Third Ward native, founder and pastor of MacGregor Palm Community Baptist Church and trustee at Houston Baptist University. “She made it clear that Stuckey’s was a company for everyone,” Davis said, recalling his own visits to the stores while traveling with his dad in the 1950s and ‘60s. “It was always a joy to stop at a Stuckey’s.” After the speech and the well-wishes and selfies that followed, Stuckey rushed to get packed up and on the road to Hobby Airport. But she made time for one more roadside attraction in Houston, pulling over to get a photo of herself in front of the North Montrose house that the Winona Ryder character and her friends called home in the 1994 movie “Reality Bites.” You can find it on her Twitter account. ronnie.crocker@gmail.com

Stuckey's, a Texas road-trip icon turned 'ghost store,' sees revival under founder's granddaughter

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