A brilliant idea helped make Chickasaw man a billionaire
BOX ELDER— Six miles east of Rapid City at Exit 67, there is a Love’s Travel Shop and Country Store. There is a Hardee’s attached to the Love’s, and what was once an isolated field of roadside grass, is now the busiest spot on any given night in the town of Box Elder.
Most of the people who stop at Love’s have no idea that this enterprise had a modest rags-to-riches beginning, 55 years ago in a small Oklahoma town, and that the man who started it all, 81-year-old Tom Love, is a member of the Chickasaw Nation, and at present, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, has amassed a personal fortune in excess of $5 billion.
You can Google “Richest Native Americans,” and you won’t get Tom Love, or any other person. You will get Indian tribes instead, as if no individual Indian can become rich and incidentally be an Indian, he must bow to the casino wealth of entire tribes. There are wealthy tribes, and there are impressive tribal business empires, but it is odd that society at large does not readily recognize the success of individual people, or that tribes do not generally honor and promote them like they do an Indian athlete, actor, activist or musician.
Long ago, two unrelated Chickasaw families with the same surname, Love, intermarried. Some rose to prominence, built cattle operations, owned businesses, started up banks. But by 1964, Tom Love really had no financial legacy concerning that storied Love past. He had just gotten out of the service, had no job, was not sure where life would take him. But what he had was the love of a good woman, Judy, and they had a couple kids, and both knew they needed to do something to provide for their family. Love borrowed $5,000 from Judy’s parents, and Judy’s parents had no idea their son-in-law, with invaluable assistance from their daughter Judy, over the course of the next five decades, would turn that $5,000 into five billion.
That empire, indeed, started small. It started with an abandoned filling station in Watonga, Oklahoma.
“I leased it on the cheap and that’s how we got started,” Love told American Trucker Magazine. “That location was not a Love’s store. It was just a very low-grade filling station.”
Over the next eight years, Tom and Judy acquired other filling stations, and they were making money, but the business model was not especially innovative. But two things happened in the early 1970’s that would change that. Depending on the source you read, the Loves either came up with the convenience story idea in 1972, two years before the 1974 energy crisis and Arab oil embargo, or as a response to the threat 1974 posed to their business model.
In any event, Tom said, “We had an Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s. It made our model of filling stations very vulnerable. We couldn’t find fuel. It was really nip and tuck. One of the signal entrepreneurship moves that we made in our company history was discovering the small 24-hour food store. Convenience stores at that time didn’t have fuel. So, we came up with an idea that if we married the two together, a small food store with gasoline, it might work. We also introduced self-service gasoline. We knew we’d found something. It was really a Eureka moment.”
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