Buc-ee’s founder and CEO Arch “Beaver” Aplin III was at the grand opening of his company’s first Arkansas location in Benton last week when he said something that resonated across the country: “I’m starting to realize life’s too short to try to build in places that people don’t appreciate what you’re bringing.”Seven words. The entire red state/blue state business migration story in one sentence.
Aplin explained his expansion philosophy plainly: “When you find a conservative, business-friendly state with a phenomenal workforce, it makes a difference.” That’s the formula. And it explains why Buc-ee’s — a company that has become a genuine American phenomenon, the kind of roadside stop that a German soccer tourist goes viral raving about after visiting for the first time — is expanding through the South and choosing Arkansas over California.
Buc-ee’s pays its employees an average of around $17-22 per hour depending on position, provides health benefits, and has turned the humble gas station into what is genuinely a destination. They’ve done this without union mandates, without government subsidies, without virtue signaling their way through quarterly reports. They found a product people loved, hired people well, and built in places that wanted them.
California would have them jumping through permitting hoops for years. Arkansas gave them a business-friendly town and a governor who showed up to celebrate the opening on social media. The choice isn’t complicated.
The Great Sorting that Aplin is both describing and participating in is real, documented, and accelerating. Red states are seeing incomes rise 40 percent faster than blue states since 2000. Companies are fleeing California at a rate that has become self-sustaining — each departure makes the next one easier because the pool of talent available to join an exodus grows with every departure.
Tesla. Oracle. Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Charles Schwab. Chevron. SpaceX. And now, even more symbolically, the beloved roadside attraction that a German tourist can’t stop raving about is choosing Arkansas over the Golden State.
Gavin Newsom is running for president on his California record. His record is a state that the Buc-ee’s CEO looked at and said “life’s too short.” That’s not a conservative talking point. That’s a market verdict rendered by a man whose only obligation is to grow a successful business.
The blue state political class will call this greed, or racism, or some other -ism that absolves them of responsibility for the policies that produced the flight. What it actually is: a business owner reading a simple cost-benefit analysis and deciding that the cost of doing business in states that treat commerce like a problem to be regulated has exceeded the benefit of access to their markets.
“Life’s too short.” Buc-ee’s is now in the red state of Arkansas. And the rest of America should take careful notes about why.