Sixth and Pennsylvania · since 1978
Not a slogan. It is the reason this building exists and the reason forty people know the door is unlocked before anything else in Lawson is. Here is the whole day, hour by hour.
Prices change on Tuesdays and after a delivery, which is Wednesday most weeks. The board out front is right and this page might be a day behind, so trust the board. Pumps take card twenty-four hours whether the doors are open or not.
The day
A country store is not a set of departments. It is a building where the coffee, the fryer, the propane man and the bait cooler each have their own hours, and everybody who comes in regularly already knows them. Here they are written down.
Coffee has been on since twenty to. The first half hour belongs to the same handful every day: two road crews, the man who feeds cattle out on Highway 69, three drivers running to the terminal in Kansas City. Nobody says much before five.
Coffee is a dollar, any size, and refills in your own cup are seventy-five cents. The urn on the left is the strong one.
Plain glazed and cake, cut and fried in the back, not delivered frozen. Eight dozen is the whole run and there is no second one. On an ordinary weekday they are gone by seven. On the first day of deer season they are gone by half past five, which is not a joke and is why we make twelve dozen that week.
Ninety cents each, or nine dollars a dozen. If you want a dozen for a Saturday morning, ring the day before and they will be behind the counter with your name on the box.
A station sells fuel at a few cents a gallon of margin and a donut at sixty. That arithmetic is the reason this building is still here when three others on this stretch of 69 are not, and it is the reason the doors open at four instead of six.
It also decides the staffing. Somebody has to be in at half past three, so the first shift is a person and not a card reader, which is the part that actually makes the difference to the people who come in.
Two hours of steady traffic and the only two hours of the day when there is a line. Second pot goes on at ten past six and a third around seven. If you need propane or a key cut, this is the worst possible time and half past nine is the best.
Whole pizzas take about fifteen minutes and can be rung ahead. Chicken strips, jojos and corn dogs run from half ten until the kitchen closes. There is no seating and there never has been; there are two picnic tables on the north side that people use from April to October.
Slice $3.25. Whole 16 inch $16. Chicken strip box with jojos $8.50.
Lotto is drawn on the machine at the end of the counter and the same eight people play the same eight numbers. Bait lives in the cooler by the door from the first warm week in March until the middle of October: minnows, nightcrawlers, and wax worms in winter if somebody asks twice.
Money orders, stamps, a key cutter that works on house keys and not on car fobs, and an ATM that charges two dollars and fifty cents, which is stated here because the machine does not say so until you have already put the card in.
Fountain drinks are ninety-nine cents any size all day, which is not a promotion, it has just always been the price. The frozen machine runs from April. Two at the counter at once from three until four, because it is the only way anybody gets served.
Propane exchange any time the doors are open. Bulk fill by the gallon from eight in the morning until six in the evening only, because it needs a certified hand and there is one on until six. Twenty pound exchange $22, bulk fill $3.90 a gallon, which is cheaper than the exchange if your tank is not empty.
Beer and wine to nine o'clock, Missouri hours. Ice is $2.75 for the seven pound bag and $4.50 for the twenty, and the chest is outside so it is available whenever the pumps are.
Last hot food is ten. Doors lock at eleven Sunday through Thursday and at midnight on Friday and Saturday. After that the canopy stays lit and the pumps take card all night, which for a lot of people driving 69 at two in the morning is the entire point of the place.
Also here
Automatic, on the east side, $9 basic and $14 with the undercarriage. Works down to about twenty degrees and gets shut off below that so it does not freeze the door.
Free. The gauge on the hose is honest and there is a tyre pressure chart taped inside the door because nobody remembers what a truck should run at.
Inside, no key, cleaned twice a day. This is stated because on this stretch of road it is a real question and the answer at most places is no.
By the counter. $2.50 fee, which the machine will not tell you until you have committed. Cash back at the register is free up to forty dollars.
March to October. Minnows, nightcrawlers, leeches when we can get them. Wax worms year round on request. Smithville Lake is twenty-five minutes.
All Missouri games, scratchers behind the counter. Winners under six hundred dollars paid out here in cash.
Monthly billing on off-road diesel for accounts in Ray, Clay and Clinton counties. Ask for the paperwork at the counter, it is one page.
Ring the day before for anything over two dozen. Weekday mornings for a shop or a funeral are the usual, and there is no extra charge.
Hours and where
Two blocks off 69 on the Lawson side, opposite the grain elevator. Nine hundred feet of frontage and room to turn a gooseneck around behind the diesel lane, which is the reason a lot of trucks come off the highway here instead of going on to Excelsior Springs.
