Re: Gas Tank Fill Location All Wrong

If the only alternative is just paying them directly for doing nothing, then absolutely yes. At least they are aerating the soil.

Gas pumping jobs are not a long term plan for anyone. Do you know anyone who has made a career out of just pumping gas? It's a transition job, the sort of boring low paying job that people get when there is absolutely nothing else they can get, for whatever reason.

There's another difference Bill which your still ignoring. You aren't going to find ex-cons waiting tables. Pumping gas is about the only place for folks like this to get any kind of work. That isn't to say all gas station attendants are ex-cons or that all ex-cons are gas station attendants. But if you look at the work that the ex-cons get as their first job when out of the pen, I think you will find a lot of them start out by pumping gas.

Yes. But, paying for the unemployed and homeless to eat food to survive also appears to be mandated by the government. At least, most of the soup-kitchen programs I've seen have government involvement of some type, grant funding and suchlike. I don't know what you would like but I'd rather pay a tenth of a penny more a gallon to a gas station owner to pay for make work pumping gas, than pay $1 a month more in taxes to support yet more feed-the-homeless money grants.

For the last 200 years or so this country has been grappling with the "poor" issue. What do we do with people who have no money and have no skills they can use to make money? I am not talking about people who have no money and don't want to work, or who are drunks or meth addicts or some such. I'm talking about people who are clean, drug free, want to work, but have no education and no skills. This could be the 15 year old who dropped out of school when she got pregnant and never went back, it could be the guy that dropped out of high school because he got into a bad crowd, and did the drug scene for a few years then finally decided he needed to quit running around and try to make something of himself. The only answer society has some up with is to put them into a soup kitchen line somewhere. Make-work is about the only way to get them started on building a resume. And if you let the government create the make work projects, you get crap like 4 lane highways that go from nowhere to nowhere out in the middle of nowhere.

Most paper carriers are not making a living off it. Why? Because you have to have a car to carry the paper and you cannot make enough money on a paper route to support the infrastructure needed to own a car. Carrying the paper only makes sense for people who already have some kind of income that funds the car, the garage to keep it in, the insurance, the car payments, etc. and the paper route is just their beer money.

You can't send packages through e-mail. And in some places they have contracted with private carriers - mainly rural routes. In some other places where they tried contracting they found the contractor cost more. There's a lot of data about this on the web, why use this weak example? In any case, per law, the USPS must break even so all those postal worker make-workers are living off voluntary purchases by consumers.

Bill you made your point that if gas pumping wern't mandated in NJ or OR that it would disappear as a job. But what you haven't considered is what are the side effects of this kind of job disappearing? I'll tell you - it is a higher rate of unemployment among the least employable members of the society. Unless the society is willing to simply let unemployed people starve to death, those people will still be pulling money out of our pockets - but instead of through a more efficiently-run private-industry gas-pumping make-work gig, it will be some government handout program that will merely encourage them to stay unemployable.

Now, granted, this is small potatoes. I doubt the number of gas station attendant jobs out there is large enough to make any significant difference in any of the numbers that can be measured. That is why when studies have been done on gas pricing they found no measurable difference between self-serve and non-self-serve states. That doesen't mean there is no difference, just that it's so small that it's not measurable. So you could maybe argue that getting rid of those jobs by allowing self-service wouldn't make a measurable addition to the unemployment lines as well. But, once more, just because it's small, doesen't mean it wouldn't exist. If NJ or OR were to allow self-service there would be slightly more unemployed people out there in those states for those state governments to deal with. And if the rest of the country were to make self-service illegal, then there would be slightly fewer unemployed people in those states as well.

For the last 50 years or so there has arguably been a trend in society to elimate those "unnecessary" jobs and replace them with automation. Everything from telephone operators to technical support people to gas station attendants. This has supposedly saved us consumers money. But in reality it's saved big business money. The consumer merely ends up with a slightly lower standard of living, and no real price savings. Sure, the consumer isn't paying for the milkman anymore, they get milk at the grocery store now. But in exchange the milk isn't packed in glass anymore and so it doesen't taste as good, and it's still costing $3 a gallon or so. The laundryman doesen't come around anymore and get your shirts and dry cleaning. It is just a few more minutes of time the consumer has to spend doing things for themselves now, instead of having someone else do it for them.

In short, the big companies have been pulling the pants down on the American consumer for the last 50 years but they have been doing it so gradually that people don't realize today that they are walking around with their asses hanging out, instead they just never feel like they have enough time anymore. Well, the American consumer seems to be happy enough I guess - they are just saying "screw me more, screw me more" Just makes me wonder why the spending power of the American wage earner has gone down so much. Think there's a connection? Nahhhh!

Ted

Correct, because it's recognized by just about everyone with a brain that if you start allowing people to pump their own gas, that the gas station owners will simply put lower prices on the self serve pumps and within a very short order, every gas station will be self serve and there will be no attendants left.

This is in reality a discussion about whether you want to have the job of gas station attendent to exist in the job market or not. Either you do or you don't. There is no such thing as a state that has a significant number of gas station attendant jobs which also allows self-serve.

Ted

Perhaps you don't seem to understand what I am saying. I have said we need to have these minimum wage jobs as an alternative to just giving people money through programs like WIC or whatever politically correct term it is called now. The concept of a living wage for these jobs is completly tangental. For starters, the second you raise the rates of these jobs to a living wage, you will halt the progression of people OUT of these jobs and into better paying ones - as a result, the unemployed people who have no job skills and who you want to move off the street and into the workforce, will find their way blocked by the people in these no-longer-mininum-wage jobs who now aren't leaving them to get a better job. So you wind up right back where you started, with no avenue available to get people off the dole.

Simple. Those other states have a slightly higher number of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything other than pump gas. As to what YOUR state does with those people, I have no clue. Perhaps it makes you feel good to think that YOUR state isn't wasting tax dollars feeding those people and is just letting them starve. But I would bet money that YOUR state is, in fact, NOT doing this, and instead, is in fact taking some of your tax money and giving it to these unemployed people in exchange for merely being unemployed. Either that or more of these unemployed people are resorting to theft and suchlike to get money to eat - which also raises societies costs, costs that you pay every time you purchase any product.

Did you miss the statement

"I can drive 20 minutes north into Washington State. And the fuel prices there are more expensive."

Apparently, you did.

I also find it instructive to examine where places like Home Depot and IKEA are. They aren't on the North side of the Glenn Jackson Bridge in Washington. They are on the SOUTH side of the bridge in Oregon. And all of those stores, IKEA, Home Depot, Best Buy and the rest of that lot are -enormous- far, far larger than needed to supply the Oregon residents. That is because the Washingtonians who you seem to think are so pleased with their superior tax system are all coming over to Oregon to buy their stuff. And I won't even start in with the gigantic number of used car lots that Washington residents frequent. Sure they have to pay a tariff if they register it - but it's lower than the sales tax. And should I mention the number of Washington residents who illegally register vehicles in Oregon and wear Oregon plates? A story that has been repeated several times in the newspaper with lots of documentation?

Oh yes, Washington residents are very pleased with their system.

It is painfully obvious you have absolutely no clue about how money flows in the economy and how costs are passed along. Your ignorance is embarassing.

Ted

A dumbed-down site for people who don't understand how their vehicle works.

I don't know about your car but on both of my Chrysler vans, the evap line comes off the top of the fuel tank, where the access to the fuel pump is. The line is run to the front of the car where the charcoal canister is along with the various vacuum valves that control it. Part of the line is run HIGHER than the fuel filler opening on the side of the van. So fail to see exactly how topping off will make the fuel level in the evap line rise above the level of the gas cap.

Furthermore, the entire evap system is sealed - and the evap recovery system vents into the intake manifold. I highly doubt any liquid gas that gets into the system is going to NOT be burned in the intake manifold.

Except that when Sweden studied that supposition, they found that there was no measuring error in gas dispensing when topping off UNLESS there was splashback from the gas filler pipe. See here:

In other words, if you buy a gallon of fuel unless your topping off causes spashback, the amount of gas that is obtained by the station from recovering your vapors is not enough to reduce that gallon by any measurable amount.

In any case the only time I've been topped off in Oregon is when going to a gas station that only takes cash (ie: Arco) and the pump stops at something like $19.86 and the station attendant wants to make it an even $20 so they don't have to make change. And I don't generally buy gas from those stations, I buy from stations where I can use plastic, and I've never been topped off at one of those.

The real concern, as I ALREADY MENTIONED is morons being so agressive about topping off that they cause splashback. And, if you do the research you will find out that the biggest concern about splashback is the fear that the gas station evap. system will suck liquid fuel back into the vapor recovery system at the gas station, causing it damage. It's pretty clear that the FUD about damaging vehicle vapor recovery systems as a result of topping off is just that - FUD. The gas station owners know that just asking people to refrain from topping off because it might hurt the station equipment isn't going to be an appeal that will get any traction. So instead they invented this bogyman that if you top off your going to damage your car, so don't do it, to appeal to people's self-interest.

Quite obviously, splashback causes a spill, and the pollution from the gas evaporating from the spill is what matters, that and any pollution that might be caused by a gas station evap recovery system that had been damaged by sucking liquid gas - from splashback.

Ted

Well of course we also have zone pricing but it's limited to the lower volume stations. I live within 2 miles of a high volume Astro station at a major intersection - it's prices are always within a few cents of the other high volume stations in the greater metro area. I can count probably about 10 stations like this that are within a mile of the places that I normally drive by when commuting. However, all other stations have much higher prices. There's a total of 3 stations I pass by when going to I84 (part of my commute) that are low-volume. One of these is a cash-only place and because of that they are able to stay within 2 cents higher than the high volume stations. The other 2 are at least 10 cents sometimes higher than any of the high volume stations, one time I saw one at 20 cents higher. One of those was playing the "cash discount" game where they advertised a lower price that was cash-only, and the higher credit card price was in a sign that was almost completely obscured by bushes, until the AG threatened to sue them unless they knocked it off - now they just have 1 price. Although even doing this their cash-only price was still higher than that of a high volume station

1/2 mile away.

In other areas of the metro area the same thing abounds. You can tell the low volume stations by the few number of pumps and the fewer number of cars that are always in them. I don't exactly know why anyone goes to them - but some do. A few of these stations do vehicle repair and obviously they make their living doing that, not selling gas. Some of the others have extensive beer refrigerators and I assume make their money selling that.

But in general, the high volume stations are all within 2-3 cents of each other and this is true just about every day of the year, no matter where the stations are located. But for every one of those stations, there's at least 5 more than are low volume stations which usually are no less than 10-15 cents a gallon higher.

Ted

Good service? Costumer loyalty? Going to a neighborhood store?

Jeff

the average pay for a gas station attendent in my area is $10/hr to start.

yes they are.

yes, i do

no it is not

and neither is gas station attendends.

you better look again, cause you will not find any ex-convicts pumping gas here either. station owners will not hire a thief to handle large amounts of cash.

once again. not in jersey

once again, you are wrong. they are not mandated by government we voted, and said no self serve. it is a choice of the people, not a choice of the government

wow!! you are wrong on almost everything ain't you?? you better not tell the paper delivery people around here they can not make a living by delivering papers.

of the 3 major paper delivery people in this town ,2 drive brand new cars, (less than 3 months old) that the route has paid for, and the third drives a

1 year old car that the route paid for.

i hope your mail man don't see this. all your mail will start being delivered to your garbage can

But that's not what I should base my decision on about whether to have a postal service or not, is it.

Let's face it - the pony express was started by the gov't out of necessity with no other infrastructure to support private delivery service - once a gov't program starts, it's hard to get rid of. It may sound like I'm trying to be funny or clever by saying that, but really that's why we have a postal service today. If we were starting over today, there would be no need for it. It would be handled by private enterprise.

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

Well, many middle age people must be in "in transsion" in Oregon, because there are many older long time gas pumpers in the state.

It's a transition

No wonder the incidence of credit card fraud at Oregon gas stations is so high. Many Oregon stations don't even let their criminal gas pumpers touch the money, the have to employ a cashier too.

No thanks, I would rather NOT be mandated by the state to mix and mingle and hand my money & personal information over to, or worse have my wife forced to mix and mingle with this EX-CON trash, that we would NEVER otherwise associate with in any way shape or forum.

You want to be charitable to the EX-CONs, have at it, My wife and I would rather NOT.

Like I said, if you want to be charitable to the EX-CONs, have at it, My wife and I would rather NOT.

Hum, maybe seal our borders, and they could take the ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT work.

Bullshit, because that is not happening in the other 48 states THAT DO NOT MANDATE WE ASSOCIATE WITH EX-CONS TO FUEL OUR CARS.

It is absolutely measurable, the total cost of each employee is a black and white KNOWN figure. The customer pays that cost, a fact in every business, all costs are ultimately paid by the customer, or the business fails.

So you could

Bullshit.

Yet, somehow you think the STATE MANDATING I do business with and subsidize Ex-Cons helps that???? Totally unrelated.

Yes they will and do, you need to get out a little more. I have had the distinct displeasure of buying gas at stations in Oregon THAT DO NOT TRUST THEIR CRIMINAL gas pumpers enough to let them handle the money. The also have to employ a cashier. So when your pumping is done, the looser gas pumper writes pump number and $ value on a small note pad, hands it to you and you have to leave your car blocking the pump and walk inside to the cashier to pay.

Wrong. Mandated by the government! If I want to allow self service at my gas station, IT IS THE GOVERNMENT that will not allow me to do it.

In two misguided states (with relativly low populations) out of 50, ya right!

And that TED is a FREE MARKET (Business governed by the laws of supply and demand, not restrained by government interference, regulation or subsidy. also called free enterprise) at work in a FREE Country. Stick your big brother interference and social engineering plans up your ass.

"For those of us who have fought for it, FREEDOM has a taste that the protected will never know."

This supposition on your part is pure fantasy, please supply links to some reliable sources that concur with this, I'm sure you cannot. Unemployment is only paid "temporarily" to the "previously employed".

You want unskilled jobs for the otherwise unemployable? STOP the flow of ILLEGAL ALIENS through our borders. There's your source of millions of unskilled jobs.

No I did not, but you can't get there from here. You are trying to compare two prices in two different states that have dozens of variables, and treat them as though the misguided no self service law is the only variable.

Unless you take into account everything, (state fuel tax, property tax, state mandated employment costs, state and local business taxes Portland's are very high, the list is gigantic) your comparison is meaningless.

There are plenty of Home Depots & Best Buys in Washington State, this is irrelevant.

Hello, Washington repealed that years ago, not an issue today.

Your ignorance is simply sad, I suggest you start here:

Basic Economics A Citizen's Guide to the Economy By Thomas Sowell ISBN 0-465-08145-2

You have to compare all the variables, besides, there are absolutly different qualities of gas, and Astro sells one of the lowest...

So the reason my state should outlaw self service is so that ex-cons can have jobs? Sorry - we'll never see eye-to-eye.

Let's see - maybe tell them they need to get some education and skills.

Tell them they should have listened when people tole them not to drop out of school. Pay them to go around giving lectures to kids in school telling them not to do what they did?

Tell them they should have listened to people when they told them not to get pregnant, that actions have consequences. Pay them to go around giving lectures to kids in school telling them not to do what they did?

Tell him the same thing you tell the dropout and the one who got pregnant.

So banning self service gas is the way to create private welfare instead of government welfare? Not sure where you're going with this.

Then I guess they better find another line of work. Not my problem, is it.

Yes - the free market would say that if that's true, then the newspapers will have trouble finding enough cariers, so, if the newspaper wants to stay in business, they better raise the carrier pay scales to get enough carriers so their newspaper can stay in business. If the money taken in from selling newspapers can't pay the carriers *and* keep the newspaper afloat, then the newspaper will go out of business. If the public is not willing to pay enough for the subscriptions to keep the newspaper in business with all of its costs, including paying the carriers a living wage, then it should go out of business. See how the free market works?

Whatever the free market decides. If it costs more, it costs more.

Let it go to private enterprise. Guess where the people who are presently postal carriers could get a job? Should we ban email because it takes jobs away from people who might otherwise have jobs delivering mail?

You must be kidding. Why stop at self-service gas stations. Why not outlaw people shopping in grocery stores. Make the stores hire people to get the groceries from lists that the people would make up and hand them. (If you don't like that example, then choose some other just as silly example of your choosing - makes as much sense as banning self-service gas for the reasons you cite.) After all, paying those people to do that would cost society less than those same people being on welfare. Is that what you're saying? Your argument is ridiculous.

If milk in glass containers is that important to enough people, then they can start their own milk company and use glass containers. If the demand is there for it, they can make a go of it. If not, then they will go out of business. Oh - guess what - they did. Guess people don't care enough about glass milk containers to pay the extra costs involved, or they flat out prefer the paper and plastic cartons for some reason.

The laundryman doesen't

So I guess we ought to ban grocery stores selling milk, and outlaw permanent press and wash-and-wear clothes to keep all those milkmen and dry-cleaners off the welfare doles. That makes as much sense as your reasoning for banning self-service gas.

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

It can be confusing when my LH fills on the right and my wife's Sebring on the left. Two fill pipes would be even more confusing, we wouldn't know which way to go to get back into the drivers seat.

Anyhow the fill hoses do reach around or over our cars.

You must drive a BIG TRUCK.

I drive a full-size van. Left pumps only, no options...

Twin fill necks a good idea, but not practical. The only car that does this is Jaguar, and they can only because the tank is behind the rear seat - and it increases the manufacturing cost of the car by roughly $40 between parts and labor.

On a luxury car people will pay for those fancy details, but you can't give away $40 of decreased profits (or increased retail price) on a mass-produced 'commodity transportation' automobile. The competition has you at a price advantage and they'll eat your lunch.

You can NOT have dual fillers on a car unless it's designed in - Dual fillers on one tank are OK, but you legally can not have dual tanks and a cross-over pipe between them for gasoline fueled vehicles in the USA. They had a few notable incidents with road debris snagging and breaking the crossover line, and a resultant BIG fire.

Dual tanks with separate fillers on each side (and no cross-over) are perfectly legal - but a pain in the ass to live with. I know, that's how my I.H. Scout was built, and the gas stations got very nervous when I slid the hose UNDER the car to hit the other tank. (Didn't want to open both doors and go through the interior.)

If you can't stretch the hose over/across/under the car to the other side, you have to fill one tank, drive around so the other side faces the pump, and fill the other tank. It's only practical when you have both filler necks in the same quadrant of the car.

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