Stuckey’s Stages a Comeback

Sitting in the back seat of a woody station wagon in the 1970s, Stephanie Stuckey, the third of four children, knew that was her family’s name up there on those roadside stores that popped up every 50 miles or so.

Or, more specifically, she knew it was the name of her grandfather, W.S. Stuckey, a Georgia businessman who started selling pecans from his Model A coupe in the depths of the Great Depression, and who, in 1937, opened his first roadside stand.

Before long, Stuckey had single-handedly invented a staple of the American highway: the one-stop roadside destination, with a restaurant, gas station, candy store, and souvenir shop under one teal roof.

“Eat Here and Get Gas!” proclaimed a Stuckey’s T-shirt from the 1960s, and millions of Americans did just that. By the 1960s, Stuckey’s boasted 368 locations in more than 30 states. A 1976 Stuckey’s ad shows the U.S. Interstate Highway System dotted with Stuckey’s, like ants crawling on branches, nearly coast-to-coast. Carloads of families poured out of their Ford Country Squire station wagons into Stuckey’s parking lots and fanned out. While Dad filled up on Texaco gas, the rest headed to the reliably clean restrooms and, inevitably, down those aisles laden with products that can only be called American.

“Before there was Wawa, before there was 7-11, before there was Buc-ee’s, there was Stuckey’s,” says Stephanie Stuckey.

The company never owned those stores; all of them were owned by franchisees. They paid W.S. Stuckey a percentage of every gallon of gas they sold, and he provided every single item that stood on their shelves, from sets of jacks to rubber snakes; from T-shirts to state-themed salt and pepper shakers.

And, of course, the pecan rolls, first whipped up in the 1930s by W.S.’s wife, Ethel. It’s probably best to explain the pecan roll by going with Ethel’s original description: “A light, fluffy nougat center mixed with maraschino cherries which are hand-dipped in an antique copper kettle holding fresh-made buttery caramel” — all rolled in pecan chips.

No doubt that antique copper kettle has gone the way of leaded gasoline, but even today there is nothing quite like coaxing a grown adult who has spent an entire lifetime avoiding Stuckey’s pecan rolls to finally give one a nibble — and watching the “where-have-you-been-all-my-life” expression spread across their face.

For decades, W.S. Stuckey attempted to personally run virtually every aspect of the company, and that eventually became too much for one man. In the 1960s, he sold Stuckey’s to the people who made PET evaporated milk — and the corporate suits let the Stuckey’s brand languish. High gasoline prices didn’t help: As family road trips dwindled, so did Stuckey’s foot traffic.

Still, many of Stephanie Stuckey’s earliest memories involve stops at her namesake store.

“We’d pull over, like everyone else,” she recalls. “I knew my grandfather had created this fun, special place, but I had no sense of entitlement. I didn’t feel like I could walk up and down the aisles scarfing down pecan rolls and pocketing rubber alligators. It had our name, but it wasn’t ours.”

Stuckey’s strongest memory is of Store Number One, near her hometown of Eastman, Georgia.

“They had a talking myna bird,” she recalls. “It said, ‘My name is Corky and I’m not for sale!’”

The business model allowed franchisees to breathe local flavor into their locations while maintaining the welcoming, familiar Stuckey’s environment. During the 1980s, The Stuckey’s in Yeehaw Junction, Florida, sold actual alligator heads from a barrel. Stephanie Stuckey recalls franchisees who kept beehives on their property and sold the resulting honey.

As the years rolled by, though, those visits to Stuckey’s became less nostalgic for the founder’s granddaughter.

“By the early 2000s, my family’s legacy had become a bunch of shuttered stores on the roadside,” she says. Even worse, more than a few had been turned into porn shops and strip clubs.

“I thought, ‘That’s not my grandfather’s legacy. That’s not how our story ends.”

Stephanie’s father, W.S. Stuckey Jr., had managed to pull some investors together to buy the store from its corporate owners in 1984, but the brand remained a minor holding in a much larger portfolio.

Despite her name, Stephanie Stuckey was an unlikely savior for the company. A former attorney, she represented Dekalb County in the Georgia State Legislature from 1998 to 2013. Deciding not to seek re-election, she became Director of Sustainability for the City of Atlanta, then the city’s Chief Resilience Officer.

Then, one day in 2019, she got a phone call: Would she be interested in buying a failing company that happened to bear her family name?

“I was not the first choice for this,” she says with a laugh. “Other family members passed on it before they got around to me.

“Things were not good. There was no CEO, no leadership. The company was working out of a rented warehouse with a double-wide trailer. We were selling closeout merchandise at 52 licensed locations.

“We were losing money.”

Even the company’s legacy product, the pecan roll, was suffering: Virtually unsupervised manufacturers had for years been cranking them out, making them smaller and loading them up with high fructose corn syrup.

After a bit of soul-searching, Stuckey did what the rest of her family would not: She invested her life savings to buy the company.

“I knew it was a losing proposition,” she says. “But I saw something that was not on the balance sheet, and that was the value of the brand. Besides, I had a cause that was higher than profit: family and legacy.”

The first thing she did was take a road trip.

“Stuckey’s is a road trip brand,” she says. “I always knew it as a road trip brand. And I had this naive vision that I was going to revive the stores.

“In the end, I think my superpower was that I was naive.”

What she found on the road was not encouraging. Pulling into one Stuckey’s parking lot, the woman who, as a little girl, would have been filled with a sense of fun and excitement at the sight of a Stuckey’s sign took one look at the dilapidated building, put her head down, and wept.

“I asked myself, ‘How am I going to turn this around?’”

Forcing herself to get out of the car, Stuckey ventured into the store — where she experienced what she calls “an epiphany.”

“Yeah, the store looked terrible,” she recalls, “but it was full of people, and they were buying stuff. Our stuff!”

Even the undersized, too-sweet version of the Stuckey’s Pecan Roll.

“That was my a-ha moment: I didn’t have the $100 million it would take to revive the stores — but I could invest in reviving the products that people still loved.”

Stuckey found a partner who is a third-generation pecan farmer with manufacturing experience. Together they bought a candy manufacturing plant and re-assumed control of all Stuckey’s branded treats. Besides providing candy for all 13 remaining Stuckey’s stores (“I love those stores!” Stuckey says), the brand is now available at hundreds of retail outlets, including Hobby Lobby, Beal’s, Food Lion, Ace Hardware, and Piggly-Wiggly.

Even more satisfying for Stuckey, you’ll find Stuckey’s Pecan Rolls and other candies at Travel Centers of America and every Florida Wawa — two chains that owe their very existence to W.S. Stuckey, who nearly a century ago first dreamed of a gas-and-eat roadside business.

“In the past two years,” she says, “we’ve gone from $2 million in sales to $14 million.”

Most important to the company’s future, Stuckey says, is to never lose sight of the vision of her grandfather, who always saw pecans as the bedrock of his business.

“In 10 years, I’d like to see us be the go-to brand for pecan snacks in the world,” she says. “Did you know that pecans are the only snack nut native to our country? I think that’s pretty cool.”

Still, now in her mid-50s, Stuckey is well aware that she can’t be the poster woman for Stuckey’s forever.

“Believe it or not, I’d actually like to retire when I’m 65,” she says. “I’d like to think another Stuckey will come along, but we have lots of non-family members who are making this company grow right now.

“But, yeah, I suppose I might end up being the brand ambassador for the rest of my life. Like Colonel Sanders. They’ll roll me out in a wheelchair: ‘Here she is! The Stuckey lady!’”

Bill Newcott is the award-winning film critic for The Saturday Evening Post. For more about the author, visit billnewcott.com.

This article is featured in the January/February 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.