The pit thread about petrol/gas prices got me pondering. A lot of petrol stations are open 24 hours. How and when do they put the price up? Do they close down for a few minutes to adjust the prices? Do they wait and do it while they’re refilling the tanks (I don’t know how this is done either - does the whole petrol station have to close while this is being done?) What happens if you pull in and start pumping and the price goes up part way through?
Come to that, what about 24-hour supermarkets? I know they usually shut for at least part of the week (usually a few hours on Sundays), but they must adjust prices during the time they are open.
Long time ago in a gas (petrol) station far, far away …
We would get a phone call from our supervisor to change the price. Sometimes the change would occur when we closed at midnight. Other times we would have to do it right after the phone call, do it, then call it in that it was done. The memory is fuzzy but I seem to recall we actually changed the big board street sign prices first before actually changing the pump prices. That way, the anger rate from customers was less if we did it the other way around.
Many price adjustments can be made on the fly with no need to shut down. Some supermarkets are set up so when a price error is found while ringing up a customer the database can be corrected in real time.
For gas stations I’ve see it and really not that spectacular. When a price change happens, up or down, they usually have changed the displayed prices to the new ones then from the comfort of the counter changed all the pump prices.
I was at a station where the attendent suggested I start filling now as she was ready to increase the price. So I assume the price you start pumping at is the price you will continue to have till that transaction is over even if higher prices are entered into the system.
There may be some legal requirement also that the actual price can not be higher then the displayed price, so that may dictate the official order as in:
Increasing price,change displayed prices first, then change actual pump charge
Decreasing price, change the actual pump charge first then the displayed price.
The pumps do not have to be shut down for the storage tanks to be filled. The fill holes for the tanks are usually located a short distance away from the pumps so that the tanker truck can park and fill up the storage tanks while customers continue to use the station. Basically you can have customers sucking out gas through the pumps on one side of the tank while the tanker truck is simultaneously shoving gas in on the other side of the tank.
There are usually two storage tanks, one for low octane and one for high octane (I hate to use the words “regular” and “premium” since the octane rating has nothing to do with energy content or quality). The pump produces the middle octane option by mixing the two inside the pump. Some tanker trucks have two compartments, one for each octane type. Otherwise, two separate trucks have to be used.
Actually the pump is located in the storage reservoir. They are submersible units.
Of course some old independent stations might have above ground pumps and some of them will be marked that price on pump must be multiplied by 2.
As for the OP,
I have run across stations that leave the higher priced pumps and suck people in with the Marque price for a couple of lower priced pumps. The Marque will state, 374.9 then in smaller print, (read fine print on a sign) ONLY ON PUMPS 9 & 10.
Just who reads the small print on a Marque?
When I worked in IT for a chain of grocery stores, and for Target stores, changing prices was a matter of us updating the master price database, and committing it to production.
Once that was done, the prices were changed for all the stores in the region. The cash register systems were not shut down at all during this process. If a cashier was ringing up an item whose price was changed, it took the price in effect at the moment it was scanned: either the old price (if the database change hadn’t been committed yet) or the new one. But updates were (nearly) instantaneous, and done from the IT center in Minneapolis, through the computers in Bolder, CO, and affecting cash registers all over the 5-state region.
But they mostly did not have price signs like gas stations. They did have shelf prices which needed to be changed. Normally, they were supposed to have been changed by midnight, which was the usual time for an updated master price database to go live. But we had the ability to update the master price database at any time; though it took permissions from several managers to do this outside the normal schedule. And it wasn’t that unusual to have individual stores where a shelf price had not been changed, but the database had already changes. So it rang up at a different price than was on the shelf. That happened often enough that there was a corporate policy about it: if that was noticed, they were to ring it up at whichever price was lower.
They sometimes had keying errors in entering items in the master price database; that could result in customers (or sharp-eyed employees) getting a bargain. I remember a case where an extension phone at $29.95 got entered as $2.995 (error in decimal point). They sold fast at that price! And it could take a few hours for an updated master price database to be approved for unscheduled promotion into production.
I used to work for a 24 hour service station (yes, a “service station” where the attendant pumped your fuel and checked your oil and water) and… I can’t remember, sorry.