As the Fourth of July holiday approaches and Americans head to the beach, mountains, or someplace in between, they’ll more than likely see something that they wouldn’t have seen just a few years ago: the mega-gas station. 

Gas stations have been reinventing themselves for the past decade with food offerings that rival many established grub-only chains. But now they are doing something else: growing in physical size and attracting legions of fans along the way. 

Buc-ee’s is the heavyweight in the growing gas station phenomenon with over 50 locations in 13 states.

Sally McQuinn drove from her home near Roanoke, Virginia, to Dayton, Ohio, to celebrate the opening of the company’s first Ohio location. “I’m a super fan of Bucs for sure,” McQuinn said, using a nickname with the familiarity of an old friend. She added that she got her photo taken with the chain’s owner, who visited the Dayton opening. 

On a recent summer evening at the Dayton Buc-ee’s, almost all of the station’s 120 pumps were occupied, but the real action was happening in the store. There, employees chant “Brisket on the Booooard” every time fresh brisket moves into a carving station. And customers snap up sandwiches of brisket, three-meat sandwiches, and anything else. The largest Buc-ee’s, in Texas, is over 75,000 square feet. For comparison, gas stations like Sheetz and Wawa usually are around 7,000 square feet. A low-end Walmart comes in at around 150,000 square feet. 

“The traditional gas station is rapidly transforming from a transactional stop for fuel into a sprawling, multi-faceted retail and travel destination. This evolution is driven primarily by razor-thin profit margins on gasoline, forcing operators to leverage fuel as a loss leader to draw customers into high-margin convenience stores and food service,” said Sudip Mazumder, senior vice president, retail industry lead, North America at Publicis Sapient, a digital business transformation and marketing consultancy. 

Other factors fueling this growth include changing consumer expectations for cleaner, more experiential stops, the need to accommodate electric vehicles requiring longer charging times, and the long-standing need to cater extensively to professional truckers. 

Gas stations have been growing in size and morphing into all-in-one travel centers for some time. But the arrival of Buc-ee’s supercharged the trend and spawned imitators like Wally’s, which has three 50,000-square-foot locations in the Midwest, with plans for more. The stores, which have a Midwest vibe, have amenities like a popcorn bar and an assortment of jerky to rival Buc-ee’s.   

Whether intentional or not, these stores are tapping into the nostalgia associated with…

From the Dayton, Ohio, suburbs to boardrooms in Dallas, the employees fueling AT&T’s next wave of growth aren’t fresh-faced college graduates with expensive four-year degrees. They’re skilled, blue-collar workers ready to get their hands dirty — and AT&T can’t find enough of them. 

“We need people who know how to actually work with electricity. We need people who understand photonics. We need people who can go into folks’ homes and connect this infrastructure to make it work right,” AT&T CEO John Stankey told CNBC during a recent interview from the company’s Dallas headquarters.

“We find that we’ve got to go out and find them, train them, and incent them to come in,” he said. “It’s not like we’re growing them on trees in the United States.”

AT&T’s dilemma — hunting for blue-collar workers at a time when a record number of college students are projected to graduate this spring — underscores the palpable crisis facing new degree holders as the first wave of the AI revolution hits the U.S. economy. 

For much of the postwar era, the American bargain was clear: Go to college, get a degree and claim your place in the middle class. As factories gave way to offices and the U.S. economy increasingly rewarded credentials over physical labor, a four-year diploma became one of the clearest symbols of upward mobility. But as AI spreads across corporate America and begins to absorb the entry-level work that once gave graduates their start, that promise is beginning to fracture.

While the rapid spread of AI has not yet led to broad layoffs and empty offices, many new graduates, especially those in AI-exposed industries, are learning their degrees may no longer guarantee the opportunities they once did. 

Meanwhile, as AI implementation spreads and CEOs find they can do more with less labor, hiring is slowing. The downturn has hit hardest the workers with little real-world experience and those in industries expected to be most vulnerable to AI replacement, such as marketing, legal, accounting, human resources and IT.

If the trend continues, AI could reorder the U.S. workforce and global economy, redrawing the map of opportunity in ways that even some leading economists and technologists say they are only beginning to understand.

“Is the American Dream going away because of AI?… I think the fears are all very valid,” said May Hu, a 26-year-old tech consultant turned social media influencer who said she was laid off from Deloitte last year for what she described as nonperformance reasons. “I pursued college because… I think [for] most people who want to be working professionals … college is the route,” she continued. “That’s starting to change now.”

Like any technological revolution, the AI boom is expected to create new types of work. But, in a cruel twist for college graduates, many of those jobs will be