I remember a gas station in the States that advertised its price in liters on the sign out front - my father was quite annoyed…
I remember it as low as 18 cents a gallon around late 60’s, it may have been 1970 or so. During the earlier US oil boom years, oil had fell to as low as 3 cents a BARREL. (not a misprint)
There was a little station on US80 just west of East Fork Rd outside of Dallas in the early 70’s that often had gas for 13.9. I sold the owner a broke down old truck once and he offered ten bucks extra for my dog.
Stations used to sell single cigarettes, too, they were called “loosies.” A guy would walk in and pay for his gas and say, “Gimmee a loosie, too.”
Those were good times.
Ahhh, but do you know what a “ChickenHead” is?
I wonder if he knew that the metric system was the only system of weights and measures that ever had official sanction in the United States–the “law of 1866” (See Wikipedia).
In early 1970 I worked in a gas station. Regular gas was 29.9/ gal, milk was $2./gallon and minimum wage was $1.50/hr.
Today I bought gas for $4.14, mile for $3.99/gallon and minimum wage is $7.50.
seems like gas has gone from about 1/5 of an hour of minimum wage and not quite 1/7 of the cost of a gallon of milk to about the same as a gallon of milk, and 2/3 of an hour at minimum wage.
25 cents a gallon, they pumped the gas, checked the oil, washed the windshield, AND gave away commemorative coins that kids liked.
Those commemorative coins look an awful lot like the modern U.S. presidential dollar coins.
The mint clearly plagiarized the Shell Oil company.
I don’t remember ‘gas wars’, but I remember in the ‘70s hearing about ‘gas war prices’. I think the idea was that older people in their 20s or older would remember the ‘gas wars’, and induce them to buy gas that was ostensibly cheaper than the competitors’ brands.
One thing I remember was possibly from Mad: ‘The Gas Wars. Gas won.’ (This would have been in the early-'70s when I rode around the desert on my Enduro and was saddened that I had to pay 50¢ for a gallon of gas.)
I remember gas wars in the '60s and agree that 50 cents would have been very expensive as a regular price anyway.
I started driving in the early 1970s and like many others became outraged when Opec got blamed for pushing the price up to 50 cents. Outrageous! Unheard of! I even remembering my personal vow that I would never pay more than 50 cents for a gallon of gas, because there were still stations over on the poor side of town selling it for less than that.
$5 was a great weekend of driving and going about with friends if I didn’t get carried away with impressing the girls. ( I thought )
I didn’t read the thread before I posted, and I didn’t notice it is a zombie thread. I basically posted the same thing eight years ago.
At the beginning of the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, when gasoline prices first started going up, my dad said, “If it goes over 35 cents a gallon I’m not driving any more!”
He’s still driving.
There was a country song by Bobby ‘Sofine’ Butler called Cheaper Crude Or No More Food that warned we might end up paying ‘a buck and a half for a gallon of gas’. I think it came out in the late-'70s or early-'80s, when gas was still under $1/gallon.
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I knew this was wrong! Gas passing 49.9 cents a gallon was a big crisis in 1974:
Many meters also allowed a maximum $9.99 for total price. For a while, meters were set to half price (31 cents for 62 cent gas) with signs “Pay double price shown on pump.”
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Pity me in Thailand. 17 years ago I was paying the equivalent of about 45 cents per gallon for (government-subsidized) diesel fuel. (Despite this there was a big smuggling racket to get even cheaper diesel from Malaysia.) Now I’m paying almost $3.50 for the same gallon. (The junta has promised price controls for products including diesel!)