Where did Terrible’s get its terrible name?

If you’ve ever filled up your tank in Las Vegas, chances are you’ve gassed up at a Terrible’s at least once.

The gas station and convenience store chain has been serving Las Vegas since 1959, and, sometime in the last 65 years, you’ve probably asked yourself: “Why would a company ever call themselves terrible?”

Terrible’s founder Jerry Herbst told the Review-Journal in 2014 that the name originates from a nickname given to his father, Ed, who opened an oil company in Chicago in 1938.

“Back in Chicago, every time my dad would open a new service station, the competition would say, ‘Here comes that terrible Herbst,’ ” said Jerry Herbst, who died in 2018 at age 80.

The chain’s mustachioed, cowboy mascot — known as Mr. Terrible or simply Bad Guy — is, in part, intended to be a caricature and “beloved representation” of Jerry’s nickname: “the best bad guy (in) the west,” according to the founder’s obituary.

Mr. Terrible debuted in advertising in the mid-1970s. His look came from one of Jerry Herbst’s business partners, Jerry Moffitt, who sketched a cowboy with a handlebar mustache that was “drawing inspiration from the Wild West themes that were deeply ingrained in Las Vegas’ culture,” Kaila Tuvell, Terrible’s director of marketing, said in an email.

The doodle and nickname “sparked the idea of a character who would embody the brand’s western flair and rugged charm,” and also took inspiration from Las Vegas’ Helldorado Days fair, Tuvell said.

Terrible’s once experimented with the slogan “A Whale of a Buy,” often accompanied by a cartoon whale, before the “bad guy” days, but a whale was never used as a mascot and only as a marketing gimic, Tuvell said.

The whale and slogan first made an appearance in the Review-Journal in 1966, according to newspaper archives.

Today, Terrible’s operates more than 180 convenience stores and fuel stations and more than 80 car washes in Nevada, California, Utah and Arizona. It also operates the largest Chevron in the world in Jean.

In January, demolition on the company’s hotel-casino across Interstate 15 from the Chevron station and convenience store began to make way for a new industrial park.

Terrible’s employs more than 2,500 people companywide across its gas station/convenience stores, car washes, gaming and tavern establishments.

Contact Taylor Lane at tlane@reviewjournal.com.