Waffle House.
Culver’s.
Steak ‘n Shake.
Buc-ee’s.
One of the things you think about when you’ve been running weird little internet brackets for four straight summers—or maybe this is just how I’ve responded to this unexpected twist in my life’s course—is how more polarizing items perform within those brackets. Example: If 60% of people love California’s state flag more than anything and 40% of people hate it more than anything, California should win every state flag vote 60% to 40% and win the bracket even if it isn’t as widely loved as other flags in the field. I think I just reverse engineered the modern political approach in the United States of America.
Anyway, I think something like this might be happening with Buc-ee’s. Not that it’s hated by the 40%, but that it’s an unknown to a lot of people, located in only seven states (compared to 25, 25, and 21 for its fellow semifinalists) and relatively new in six of those. It earned a 4-seed in the nominating process because fewer people said they loved it or that they knew of someone loving it than In-N-Out, Tim Hortons, and even Skyline Chili. But when vote came to shove, those who loved it showed up, and they were not swayed.
Just a theory. We’ll see how it does against Waffle House.
We’ve reached the semifinals of America’s Backbone, with butterburgers opposing steakburgers and waffles staring down gasoline. Quarterfinal results are available here. Waffle House dominated Fuddruckers, Portillo’s didn’t make it as close with Buc-ee’s as we expected it to be. Now, four chains are left from the 117 or however many it was which initially garnered consideration.
On the burger front, we’ve got a Wisconsin-based chain that’s spread over much of the Midwest and South and a little bit of the West against an Illinois/Indiana-based chain that’s…yeah, similar regions for those. Waffle House started in Georgia and has saturated the South but continues to make inroads in the rest of the country, gradually and incrementally stepping further and further from the land of sweet tea. Buc-ee’s, of course, started right here in Texas but has been slowly building colonies throughout the Southeast.
As always, there are two ways to vote.
The first is our Instagram account, where voting will be live in the stories for the next 24 hours or so.
The second is this Google Form, where votes will be accepted if they’re in prior to Noon EDT tomorrow, Saturday July 22nd.
Bon appétit.
