A former Buc-ee’s employee has filed a federal lawsuit against the convenience store company for $20 million in damages, claiming the Texas-based company is trying to “steal” work he did while off the clock.

John Pedersen of Leeds filed the suit in federal district court for Alabama’s northern district on May 28.

Attempts to contact Buc-ee’s for comment were not immediately successful.

At issue for Pedersen is a proprietary rights agreement he says he signed when he was hired two years ago, and an expanded one he says the company attempted to get him to sign earlier this year.

In court documents, Pedersen said he notified the company in February that he had recorded observations as a deli employee at Buc-ee’s in Leeds since June 2023, on “value perception, marketing and service delivery.”

He said he also developed, among other items, a human resources software program (ostensibly for Buc-ee’s), and a draft of a book on employee attrition issues related to the company.

Pedersen said he notified the company of this work, which he said came from wanting to make himself “valuable and potentially helpful to the Company in ways beyond the daily performance of my assigned tasks.”

“I apologize in advance for the way it is written and for any way it might show a smart ass, preachy, or ostentatious tone, as I am fully capable of coming across in all of these ways,” he wrote when notifying the company.

Buc-ee’s responded in a letter in March saying that the intellectual property belonged to Buc-ee’s because it related to company business, according to court documents.

It also instructed him to destroy the material he had created and notify the company when he had destroyed it.

Pedersen said he made several attempts to settle the matter without litigation, even after submitting his two-weeks’ notice in April. The company, he said, has not responded.

“I no longer work for Buc-ee’s,” Pedersen said in the 14-page court document he filed without an attorney.

“They still claim ownership of my ideas, my voice, my name. This Complaint is not about wages or working conditions. I liked my job and didn’t want to leave. This complaint is about a confiscatory work culture which tramples on the Constitutional rights of those who (literally) belong to it.”