More victims of high gas prices

We already have people squeezed between paying bills and going to work (ooh! irony!), truckers paying out the wazoo for fuel, and rate increases for mass transit.  Now we can add mom and pop gas stations to the growing list of people getting directly reamed by the rising gas prices.

Why?  The analog pumps that ~8,500 service stations still use today don't have the numbers and gears to go above $3.99/gallon prices.  In fact, some of the mom'n'pop joints have already shelled out to upgrade their gear after gas went above $2.99/gallon.

Yes there are digital pumps, but they ain't cheap.  The margins on gas are so low, most of these shops have pumps just as a draw to get people to stop in:

"I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have $30,000 to invest in new pumps, and I'm barely skipping by," said Osborne, who owns the Orlean Market and Restaurant, a store dating from 1892 with horse-country views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and miles of rolling Virginia Piedmont.

Osborne said she doesn't make money on fuel sales, but the pumps are a big draw for the hay farmers and cattlemen who gas up their tractors and take their morning coffee in her store. The next-closest service station is a 40-minute round-trip drive to Warrenton, and in Orlean, Osborne's barbecue sandwiches and Amish-baked cherry pie face no competition.

"If people have to go into town to get gas, they'll say, 'Oh, I'll just go to Burger King,' " Osborne said.

Owners have tried some . . . uh . . . creativity:

Osborne has run afoul of the rules in the past. When gas prices went beyond $2.99 a gallon, she posted a printout of the day's gas prices and divided the per-gallon price on the pump display in half, notifying customers that the cost would be doubled at the cash register. Some of the Latino laborers who work on nearby farms had trouble understanding the system at first, she said, but eventually got used to it.

As you can imagine, the Weights and Measures folks didn't like that idea very much.

There is a company working on conversion kits for these old pumps, but the demand is so high there's a backlog.

For a lot of these stations, if the pumps go, so will the customers that actually come in the store and help them turn a profit.  Once those go, the owners will be more victims of the crappy Bush economy.

•  Tips for mom and pop

  Just keep them under $3.99 each, please.

  by Praxxus on Fri May 16, 2008 at 10:58:55 AM PDT

  •  $3.99 and 99/100

    Too bad they can't convert the space it takes for the fraction.

    by MsSpentyouth on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:08:28 AM PDT

  •  I paid $5.72 CDN today

    for a gallon in Canada despite that the gas came from basically right across the road.  But I will say that high gas prices help the environment because people drive less and will buy more fuel efficient cars.

    by Calev on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:29:46 AM PDT

•  Another middle finger to small business

  Courtesy of the Bush administration.

  Yer doin a heckofa job there Georgie!

  by catnap1972 on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:02:25 AM PDT

  •  A-yup.

    The creative ways found for small business owners to get screwed never ceases to amaze me.

    by Praxxus on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:05:13 AM PDT

•  All I can think of

  are oil company CEOs, glancing at the news stories about the costly needed retrofit of service stations with pumps whose displays show the correct decimal values. The connected, well-to-do fat cats just yawn, sigh, and start the next round of golf, or the next porn download. Bastards.

  by karmsy on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:09:44 AM PDT

  •  Delicious irony

    On today's episode of "Card Sharks" (from May 1980) on Game Show Network, one of the questions asked (of 100 oil company executives)..."Is the government being unfair to oil companies?".  Turns out 99 out of the 100 said "yes"

    Almost 30 years later and nuthin's changed...

    by catnap1972 on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:15:23 AM PDT

•  They're going to have to adapt though.

  High gas prices aren't going away.  And if they do, consumption will rise and you've got polution and global warming.

  High energy prices are the only thing that will drive conservation and environmental protection, so we'd better get used to them.

  by Norm in Chicago on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:18:00 AM PDT

•  technical solution for them

  There isn't anything magical about which reel is dollars, which dimes, which cents, and which tenths of a cent.

  It is just the way the "card" in front of the reels is labeled, and how the totals dials are read.

  Yes, Weights and Measures will be upset by "doubling the price" at the register, but there is a simpler way:

  Move the decimal point.

  (Which has the advantage of losing the silly 9/10's of a cent on every gallon of gas sold in the US ;-)

  Set the price at what (used to be) 39.5 cents for (now) $3.95. Then you can go to $39.90/gallon before running into trouble...

  by Robert Ullmann on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:28:30 AM PDT

•  someone in an earlier comment on this

  suggested pricing the gasoline by the liter....

  by route66 on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:36:06 AM PDT

•  Pound sand and tell me how it feels...

  ...these rural "low-information" voters in Virginia voted to keep the oil men/companies in charge of our economy. Tell me this; are they "bitter" about losing their business or just frustrated? Oh but Kerry windsurfed so he wasnt their type of guy...

  by buzz in illinois on Fri May 16, 2008 at 11:36:55 AM PDT

•  sell it by the litre! like in Canada n/t

  by krnewman on Fri May 16, 2008 at 12:20:40 PM PDT