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