READ MORE FROM OUR 2025 KWIK TRIP FEATURE HERE.
The Jauch Family
Between Paul Jauch’s work and his house in Wausau, there are four Kwik Trips. One day, his three observant kids asked him how many Kwik Trips were in town. A quick Google search showed him 13 nearby.
“They always see all these dumb TikTok challenges. And they’re like, ‘Hey, let’s do a Kwik Trip challenge,’” Jauch says. And so one Saturday, he took his kids on a run to all 13 local Kwik Trips … but that just wasn’t impressive enough. “Of course, the logical question came up, ‘Is there any record of how many Kwik Trips somebody has been to in one day?’”
Jauch found a news story about a Kwik Trip brand ambassador visiting 52 in one day in 2021 – and he figured he and the kids could beat that. He found a mapping program used by long-haul truckers and used it to create an optimized route through areas of maximum Kwik Trippage, starting in Wisconsin Dells and ending in Wausau.
After staying overnight in their camper van in the Dells, the Jauch family woke at 7 a.m. on Saturday, June 15 for their first Kwik Trip visit. So began a long and winding journey. At each Kwik Trip, they bought something cheap to collect a receipt. Jauch started the trip with hopes of hitting 100, but that soon proved a bit too ambitious, and he adjusted the route to 70 – a new record.
“When we were done, it was about 10:15 at night, and I was like, ‘OK, kids, we did it. I’m never going to want to go to another Kwik Trip again. And they were like, ‘Wait, aren’t we doing this again next year?’”
Kwik Trip employees are required to say it when a customer leaves as part of the chain’s push to engender loyalty. It’s tied to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” theory. “In the middle of this hierarchy is the need to belong,” says John McHugh, Kwik Trip’s VP of external relations. “We have this human need to know there’s a place where we can go, where we’re always welcome, where people are happy to see us. So what we try to recreate with ‘See you next time’ is that psychological need to know that you’re always welcome at a Kwik Trip.”
Pati Holschbach and James McKenzie-Brown
When James McKenzie-Brown traversed the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind his native England and jetting nine hours to visit his new long-distance girlfriend in Wisconsin, Pati Holschbach knew exactly where to take him.
Kwik Trip.
“Wow, you took me to a gas station on our first date,” he said.
But Holschbach, of the Fox Valley village of Kimberly, is one of Kwik Trip’s true believers, and she thought it was just the Midwest baptism her soon-to-be fiancé needed. “Kwik Trip is like if Fleet Farm was a gas station,” she says. “It has everything, and everybody’s so welcoming. It’s that Midwest mindset of kindness.”
They married after two years of courtship, at the Brown County Courthouse, and swung by the nearest Kwik Trip right after the ceremony, dressed to the nines, for their photo shoot.
“James is very much in love with the Midwest and its culture now,” Holschbach says. “And Kwik Trip fits in so well with that.”
