Salute to a Toy Truck

The Hess Truck’s back, and it’s better than ever.

By guest contributor T.R. Hudson.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Great, okay, moving on. In 1964, a small but growing chain of gas stations started selling replicas of their delivery trucks to customers who happened to stop inside. Aside from a few newspaper ads, the trucks were sold by word of mouth, and they sold well, because at the time, a truck that had working lights, a real rubber hose, and a functional tank that could be filled and emptied was rare in the toy world. The Hess Corporation had a hit on its hands, and for the next 60 years, the Hess Toy Truck would become synonymous with the Christmas season.

It’s strange the paths your mind can go down when free from distraction. This morning, I woke up and began listing all the gas stations I could remember from my childhood. New Jersey, as it turns out, is one of the major oil refining hubs in the world. I can only speculate as to why. I imagine being so close to New York City, the capital of the world for good or ill, has something to do with it. The other major reason, as I came to understand, was that one man made it so.

I could go over the list of gas stations, but that’s tedious. Like most things, 20 years ago we had a plethora of choices, but now, that has dwindled down to a handful of players. I didn’t know who Leon Hess was. I didn’t know he started his business in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and that a large reason for New Jersey’s oil refining industry is Hess himself. He then sold his company so that he could purchase the New York Jets, later bringing them from Queens to East Rutherford, New Jersey, where they reside to this day. Look at the Jets’ color scheme, and you’ll see Hess’s green and white. All of this trivia is to say, this man had a large influence on the direction of my home state and, therefore, my life.

The Hess Truck was created as a “thank you” to the loyal Hess customer base. This is the official narrative around the truck. More likely, it was a marketing gimmick to create brand loyalty around Hess. From there, the toy company took on a life of its own. These kinds of births happen more often than you think. You wouldn’t automatically associate Michelin Star Restaurants with the tire brand, but that list of the best restaurants was itself a marketing ploy to get people out on the road. Institutions are seldom planned as such.

I got a Hess Toy Truck every Christmas from the year I was born until about age 10. That doesn’t sound impressive on its face, but that’s a decade of dedication to buying a toy truck. Before the age of shopping online, to get Christmas presents, you had to go to the store or the mall. Insert boomerchad.jpg. The Hess Truck added an extra wrinkle to this formula by only being sold at Hess gas stations. In many areas of the Northeast, you’d have to wait in line on Thanksgiving morning to get a Hess Truck. They’d sell out that day. In 2015, Hess sold its gas stations to Raceway, who that year continued the tradition, but the next year, they set up kiosks in malls to sell the trucks and move most of their sales online, where you can get the trucks today.

I’m of two minds on this setup. When Christmas shopping had to take up a large amount of time and energy, people criticized the commercialization of the holidays, the consumer mindset of gifters and giftees, and a degradation in our culture about what is truly important around Christmas, namely the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ and, secondarily, the now universal and secular values of charity, family togetherness, and good will to man. Waiting in line at a gas station to get a toy truck does scream “CONSUME,” and, in theory, adding a toy truck to your cart and hitting “PURCHASE” on your phone should leave more time for families to spend the holidays together. Reality is not so ideal. There is something to be said about a father waiting in line after line, braving the cold on his day off, to buy a toy truck for his son. Sure, the young boy may not appreciate it at the time and may even grow bored with the truck not long after receiving it, but when he’s older and he himself is a father, he’ll understand what his father went through and want to do the same for his own son. That’s culture. As sad as it sounds, as tenuous as that connection may be, it is a genuine display of love from parent to child that means a little bit more than waiting for the mailman.

You might be asking yourself, “Who cares? It’s a toy truck.” You betray your ignorance, my friend, because this is the best toy truck for its price point. Hess makes a point of innovating what can be done with a toy truck. It’s in their jingle: “The Hess Truck’s back, and it’s better than ever…” Every year, they have to do more. More lights and sounds with the same amount of battery power. More moveable parts, more storage space for extra vehicles. It also has to be durable. One of the selling points of the truck is its quality compared to its price. Anyone can make a piece-of-shit plastic truck, but these toys are built to last. This year’s model is $45.99 plus tax with batteries included — the batteries have always been included — and free shipping. Looking over the years at the truck’s price, that has more to do with inflation and the devaluation of the dollar than a price gouge or markup. If you watch the commercials over the years, you can see the price increase year over year: 2020 saw the truck at $36.99 plus tax; 2001 had the truck at $20.99 plus tax. If the CPI is no longer a good measurement of inflation in this country, perhaps we should be looking at the year-to-year price of a Hess Truck to gauge where our economy stands. I’m only half-kidding.

Speaking of the commercial, the holiday season cannot kick off without hearing that timeless jingle. A children’s chorus welcomes the latest truck (or boat or plane or helicopter) with the same line every year I mentioned before. A computer graphic animation of that year’s truck helping Santa Claus in some way plays out and is cut to children playing with the actual truck, scaling couches, moving between wrapped Christmas presents, parking under the tree. In terms of marketing, Hess has made itself more attached to the Christmas season than maybe even the Coca-Cola polar bears. The culture war has not claimed this toy truck, either. It’s just a truck that boys will enjoy playing with. It won’t try to cut your dick off or convince you that you’re evil incarnate. It’s just a toy truck. Again, it’s not great that the Nativity season and the birth of the Son of God, God made flesh, Jesus Christ, has taken a back seat to a toy commercial. But this is the world we have, warts and all.

Men love this truck. Men love collecting things. We bemoan the Funko Pop Figure collector as a neck-bearded cuckold, but he is doing what men with a disposable income have always done. The trophy hunter brought back his taxidermied prizes and displayed them in his home. Men like Theodore Roosevelt and Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies and insects (and Nabokov discovered a few new species throughout his life). Men of previous generations liked model trains or wooden ducks or model airplanes. It is part of our nature to collect and categorize things. I have a large collection of books, for instance. I know several men obsessed with guns.

While we can groan about the choice of collection — vinyl plastic crap in the shape of superheroes ain’t it, chief — I understand why men collect things. Would we be better men if we took up more “useful” hobbies like woodworking or gunsmithing or working on cars? Yeah, probably. Every man should at least know the basics of those kinds of endeavors in order to make his way in the world. But also, if a man works hard, provides for his family, and spends time being a good role model for his children, his hobbies are none of my business. Hell, we live in an unfortunate age where a man might want to be all of those things, but due to circumstance or fate or inadequacies, he can’t. That’s between each man and his maker. Would I spend $2,500 for the original 1964 Hess delivery truck? That’s a different question entirely.

I thought about going into the psychology of men here. Why do we like trucks and earthmovers and machines? But that’s kind of a bullshit question. We like them because they’re cool. We like them because they’re powerful. We like them because they are built by men and, in turn, help to build civilization. It’s simple. You can try to put a boy in a dress and make him like flowers, but as soon as he sees a truck and some mud, he’s going to be a boy. And thank God for that. This article is not meant to be a toy commercial. I’m not being paid by Hess (or Chevron, who bought the company last year and made sure to let everyone know they’d still be producing the trucks). But for all you fathers out there who are looking for something that your young sons can enjoy this Christmas — something that won’t break the bank and won’t break the day after you get it — the Hess Truck’s back, and it’s better than ever.