Re: Gas Tank Fill Location All Wrong

I hear you about the low oil thing. Spun bearings have a really bad tendency to ruin your whole day don't they? lol. BTW I live in Iowa so I am nowhere near New Jersey or Oregon.

What about say police officers... or stand alone tank systems say at mills, or construction sites??

Please name a gas station that offers complimentary fluids other than air and water.

I've never seen anything other than air and water complimentary at any full serve gas station anywhere in the US, not anytime since the sixties anyway, maybe before that, but I wasn't a customer then...

I don't know what bazaro world you live in, but I find most people many times more careful with their own cars and their 3 plus dollar per gallon gas than any minimum wage flunkies pumping gas because it's the only job they can get.

Are you serious? If so, your definition of a scam is illogical, to say the least...

Most states have different sales tax rates in different communities.

Credit card companies put a stop to that, they will not let a merchant process credit cards if that merchant charges more for doing so. Just imagine how quick you would go out of business if you could not take plastic...

Huh?

Welfare, last I looked, was paying people for NOT working. A worse disincentive program I cannot imagine.

Paying people minimum wage to pump gas costs the economy a LOT less money, plus it gives the worker some employment history - which a LOT of them are going to need to get a better job. They won't get that from 2 years of welfare payments. And nobody makes a career out of a minimum wage gas pump shit job, just the same as nobody makes a career out of a minimum wage burger-flipping job. But, those jobs are needed to get those who have NO work experience whatsoever a leg up to get into the employment market.

Getting rid of one more set of minimum wage jobs isn't going to make the practically-unemployable people go away. And our society isn't going to allow such people to just starve on the streets. Instead it is going to replace those minimum wage shit jobs with government handouts, and the government has had a long history of not doing things that private industry can do as well as private industry can do them. In the long run we all lose more money than the minor amount that might possibly be saved by eliminating these jobs. And, as I have said, the research has been done in the past and no significant difference in fuel prices has been observed from Oregon and the states around it.

I can drive 20 minutes north into Washington State. And the fuel prices there are more expensive. Why? Because there's a state sales tax there that applies to vehicle fuel. The pump prices might be a penny or two lower - but the total price is higher when sales tax is included. Oregon has no sales tax.

So why you want is for Oregon to make self service legal - which puts a lot of people out of work - which makes them go to the state begging for welfare handouts - which the state then has to get the money for by putting a sales tax on fuel - and where exactly is the savings?

The only savings I see here is the less time the gas station owners have to spend doing payroll for fewer people. Whopdeedo. If the station owners don't like that, they can find another line of work. Plenty of people out there are willing to buy and run gas stations and have no problem with the way things currently are in the state.

For a self-styled Republican you sure seem to like government solutions to societal problems. Probably explains why your party isn't doing so hot right now.

Ted

No it doesen't. Gas pumps have vapor recovery sleeves on the nozzles that do this. If the pump handle is pulled full on the fuel rushes into the tank so fast that air can be trapped in the tank baffles. When the handle cuts off the first time, if time is then given for the trapped air to bubble out, more fuel can be put in the tank. The issue is more prevalent with some car and tank designs.

The law is there because there are some morons who don't understand this and will just keep pulling the handle until they have raw gas spraying back out of the fill hole. THAT is what your probably thinking about with the preventing of pollution. But that isn't a failure of the gas pump, it is a failure of the brains of the people doing the filling to understand any of this.

Ted

You are an idiot. All gas pump spouts have emergency disconnects. What the disconnect is, specifically, is an extremely thin connector joint between the hose and the handle, that is designed to fracture if some moron drives off with the spout still sitting in the gas tank fill hole in their car. This prevents a lot more expensive damage from occurring to the gas pump or hose or spout. Just because the disconnect isn't painted bright orange and playing a tune when you pull the handle out of the pump doesen't mean it's not there.

Ted

You made my entire point, Ted. The money to pay these people (to produce absolutely nothing or to enable others to better produce) *has* to come from somewhere. Pumping gas is not producing wealth - it produces *nothing*. Using your logic, you could pay these people to dig holes and fill them up and that would be a good use of money (heck - have service station owners pay them since they seem to be able to produce money out of thin air). I was just kidding in my other post about telling Hillary about my plan to abolish unemployment by mandating no self-service all across the country. I had no idea that it would actually make sense to anybody. But actually - I'm not surprised.

You don't help a society by make-work jobs as a long-term plan.

My party not doing so well right now? That's certainly b.s. Have you even watched the Democrat party debates? What a joke. They are having trouble making stuff up on the fly - even when they have advance warning

- first Hillary, then Obama. What a joke. Fortunately for Hillary, Blitzer took the cue to watch out what he asked and not to do any follow up with her.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

Huh?

There's still unemployment in OR. And I don't know any minimum wage jobs where the employees get insurance and benefits.

What your missing Bill is that retail gas prices differ from station to station depending on a number of factors OTHER than labor. As a point of fact, the biggest difference is due to pumped volume. The oil companies have rate schedules setup that give significantly lower prices to the higher pumping stations.

About a year ago the local paper interviewed the owner of the 5 highest pumping stations in the Portland Metro area to find out his secret. It was really very simple. The guy had figured out that gas prices were extremely price sensitive and differences of even a penny a gallon would cause dramatic differences in pumped volume. So what the guy would do is he would wake up at 3:00am every morning and drive around to all his stations, then drive past all the other gas stations that were within a few miles of his stations, and he would set his price to be at minimum a penny lower than the lowest price of any of his competitors. He did this every morning, 7 days a week, and as a result he had the highest pumped volume, and therefore was able to buy gas wholesale cheaper than anyone else, and thus, even though his prices were lower than everyone else, he made a profit. He wasn't particularly concerned with explaining all of this because in his words the other station owners were too lazy to get off their asses and look at their competitors prices, so he was not worried about them trying to beat him at his own game. His only regret was that none of his sons or daughters was really that interested in the gas station business, and he figured that when he died, that his kids would sell off the stations and that would be the end of his business.

If you really want to rail against this self-service ban you need to be railing at the oil companies. If they didn't do this fiddle-faddle with the wholesale pricing then all the station owners in a market would be buying fuel at the same cost, and then perhaps labor would become a more significant cost of business and eliminating it would perhaps actually make a difference in pump prices. But, as it is now, the pump prices are set by volume, and pumped volume of a station is not that related to the labor costs.

Ted

Stop trying to read minds. It doesn't work.

Try here:

It depends. In New Jersey and Oregon, it is a way for the gas stations to get free gas out of the filler necks of their costumers.

Jeff

Christ, do you have a clue about any of this? First of all, directly contrary to what you are saying, many people are stuck with life long careers in gas pumping burger flipping "entry level" jobs. Have you ever looked at them, many are not young kids. Where do you think this misguided push for a "living family wage" comes from? It is aimed at all of these people who will never advance out of their minimum wage jobs. There are a lot of them.

How does this cockeyed argument work in the other 48 states that do not outlaw self serve gas?

Ah, but Oregon does have "sales tax" on gas a diesel, they call it "fuel tax" and it is about 25 cents per gallon. And in Washington, the price on the pump is the price you pay, it already includes all the taxes. The sales tax in moat Washington communities is more than a few pennies, try 8 plus.

If you don't have a clue what you are talking about, why are you?

It is painfully obvious you have never owned a business. Your ignorance is embarrassing.

Are you crazy? You are the one advocating government MANDATED jobs...

Probably explains why your party isn't doing so

Maybe where you live, but here in CT we have zone pricing. The same truck delivers gas to three stations but they all sell at a different price because of their location. If they can get more, they do. Near the MA border, prices are lower to compete with the 20¢ less in taxes. In the inner cities where they know the poor will not be traveling around, they get some of the highest prices. Some higher volume stations near the main highways are higher than the little guy up the road a bit.

Notice where I said "When you back out the tax differences"? I'm talking pure pre-tax selling price.

It was not credit card companies, but card holders of Mobile, Exxon, etc. They were charging more for using their own cards with the idea that it put more of the actual cost on the people using them. In reality, it should be that way. I get a 5% discount at my shoe store for paying cash. I like that.

If an attendant to pump gas is a 'make work job' that 'doesn't produce anything' then so is every waitress job because you could carry your own food to the table, every letter carrier because you could pick up your mail at the post office, every newspaper boy because you could pick up your own paper, and on and on. The fact is these are all services and they produce convenience and comfort.

Maybe you came from a wealthy family and didn't need an entry level job when you were a teenager or in college. I think if you check with a couple of good auto techs (on topic) you might find that their first job was pumping gas, changing oil, or busting tires. You might also find that some attendants are actually the owner of the place.

Having an attendant to pump my gas is a service and one I welcome. For all that is wrong with NJ, this is one thing that is right. I've always thought of us as just a bit more civilized than the rest of the country in this one regard.

There's one difference: Waitressing is not mandated by the government. It is something that the free market determines pays its own way. The NJ gas pumpers, on the other hand, are mandated by government - not determined to have worht by a free market economy. Same witgh newspaper carrier - not mandated by government, but found to be worthwhile by a free market economy. Postal worker? That could be done away with and replaced by email or private carriers. No reason for it to exist actually - just like the (state) gov't mandated fuel pumpers.

Understand the difference between a job that the free-market economy finds overall beneficial vs. a gov't-mandated job that, if allowed to be determined by the free market, would rapidly be phased out (as it was in the real world in states that didn't for whatever stupid reason mandate it)?

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

The discussion here is not about needing the job of gas pumper, it is about the state mandating that you can NOT choose to pump your own.

That is nice, but no one is telling you to pump your own, they are telling everyone else that they CANNOT!!!