Abandoned Exprezit! Store (Quincy, Florida)

Can you see the gas station through the weeds? (Picture by author, August 2025)
A few years ago I was delighted to find that someone had taken a picture of an Exprezit gas station and convenience store. It wasn't the same store my family stopped in December 2003 (yes, a week or so before the picture in Marianna was taken by Tod Allen). I'm pretty sure some Exprezit! stores even made to Louisiana (some were planned for South Texas circa 2006) but a few years later they disappeared as quickly as they came, with only a few camped out in their home of North Carolina, despite once having sizable Florida presence (reduced to maybe one store in Florida today).

This Exprezit store escaped being rebranded (many are BP or 76 today) because it closed a while back, not even on the 2006 locator list, nor on a 1999 list (guess it purchased it and closed in that timeframe). It's an old gas station, too, dating to around the 1980s and in 1994 was a Texaco advertising t-shirts and ice cream; however, the convenience store name is too hard to see in that photo. Looking through old Google Earth images no cars appear in it from 2005 on so I would suspect Exprezit kept the 43 Spooner Road location and abandoned it by that time, and it's been shut ever since. The long driveway (no dedicated left turn, even) likely discouraged travelers on I-10. I noticed it when I spotted the distinctive red, blue, and yellow Exprezit insignia and had to check it out, though it was gated off. Only in the last two years was the gas island canopy demolished so there has been some activity of some sort going on; I would guess it was for the early stages of a building renovation that never happened.

As I never got to go inside an Exprezit in their heyday, I have no idea what their draw was especially as they tried to expand west. Their stores were in old, pre-existing locations, tired by even 2002 standards, and didn't supplement them with trendy new restaurant co-brand locations as was in vogue in those days.

Thank you for reading! As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I will try to make a 50-50 mix of Carbon-izer or other legacy content mixed with entirely new content.

UPDATE 09-04-2025: The more I look at this location (2982 Pat Thomas Pkwy.) from the past, it looked like it could be a Stuckey's, between its offerings and logos. Indeed, it does seem to be listed here in a 1992 directory!

Stuckey's (Hattiesburg, Mississippi)

There were a number of things I wanted to see and do on my last trip (the Grandy's was in one fact one of them) and while I couldn't do some of them there were others that I did do, like visiting a Stuckey's gas station.

The goal was a real Stuckey's, not one of these little gas stations that have some Stuckey's branded items inside (I didn't stop here; plus the nearby abandoned gas stations gave the whole corridor a bad vibe).

Pecan candy! They were expensive, though. Instead I ended up visiting the Stuckey's at 6733 Highway 49, Hattiesburg, MS 39402. While I unfortunately didn't see any coffee mugs (I'm sure I didn't look hard enough) they did have quite a selection of pecan candy and some genuine Stuckey's falsa blankets. (No food service, though.) I ended up getting Brisk Blood Orange because it was the closest thing to what I really wanted...orange sweet tea. Brisk isn't really iced tea, but it was still good anyway.

Aforementioned falsa blankets. I couldn't find the history of this one; just that it was in operation since the 1970s. I don't think I got gas there but still with a drink and my bladder emptied, I was soon on my way to Louisiana. I should also note that had I gone a bit to the east I would've come across one of Mississippi's few former Albertsons locations but unfortunately my main reason for wanting to visit the (former) store was to see if it had remnants of a mall connection to the defunct Cloverleaf Mall but it never did. Too bad. (Check out the link anyway.)