June 11, 2025

Former Alabama Buc-ee’s Employee Files $20 Million Lawsuit Alleging Theft of His Ideas

By Rick McCann
Blue RAM Media/Gulf Coast News

June 11, 2025

LAKE JACKSON Texas.

Almost everyone these days have heard of or visited a Buc-ee’s super convenience store that stocks plenty of snacks, boosts of having 100-bathroom stalls or more, another hundred gas pumps and is building one a network of their stores from coast to coast, is now being sued by a former employee who says, the company has stolen his ideas and work that he did not get paid for.

The former Buc-ee’s employee, John Pedersen of Leeds Alabama has filed a federal lawsuit against the convenience store company for $20 million in damages, claiming the Texas-based company is trying to “steal” work that he did while off the clock.

At issue according to Pedersen in his claim is a proprietary rights agreement he says that he signed when he was hired two years ago, and an expanded one the company gave him earlier this year.

In court documents, Pedersen said he notified the company in February that he had recorded observations as a deli employee at Buc-ee’s in Leeds since June 2023, on “value perception, marketing and service delivery.”

He said he also developed, among other items, a human resources software program (ostensibly for Buc-ee’s), designs for a machine that packages snacks, and a draft of a book on employee attrition issues related to the company.

Pedersen said he notified the company of this work, which he said came from wanting to make himself “valuable and potentially helpful to the Company in ways beyond the daily performance of my assigned tasks.”

Pedersen did not have an oral or written contract for work outside of his normal working hours stated a company representative.

Buc-ee’s has also responded in a letter in March saying that the intellectual property belonged to Buc-ee’s because it related to company business, according to court documents.

It also instructed him to destroy the material he had created and notify the company when he had destroyed it. Among other claims, Pedersen said in the suit that the demand for destruction “constituted not merely moral overreach, but a legally actionable form of private domination – an act akin to involuntary servitude.”

Pedersen said he made several attempts to settle the matter without litigation, even after submitting his two-weeks’ notice in April. The company, he said, has not responded.

Normally, “work product” that is produced while on the employer’s time and the employee is being paid to do such work becomes the property of the employer and this includes songs written by songwriters being paid a salary, wage or hour rate, writers and producers of written material, designers of products and others being paid to produce such materials or work.

Pedersen is no longer employed by Buc-ee’s,” and filed his 14-page court document without an attorney.