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Welcome to the SDMB, Sneakyguydavid.
The General Questions forum is for questions with factual answers. Questions seeking advice and opinions belong in our IMHO forum.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
If I’m a broke college student and I can only afford $3.10 worth of gas, I’m not going to set the lever. I’m going to stand there and manually squeeze the handle open. That amount of gas only takes a few seconds to pump.
Ever since I worked for Circle K in the mid-80s. And we insisted that customers pre-pay or leave a deposit if they were going to fill their tank. We didn’t take credit in those days and the pumps didn’t have a card reader.
In many jurisdictions you’d be wrong. “Drive-off” theft is usually defined as leaving the gas station with unpaid-for gas in the tank. The variation in state laws seems to come in (a) whether the attendant can be required to pay for the stolen fuel, if the drive-away vehicle is not identified, (b) whether the owner of the drive-away vehicle can be billed for the gas, plus penalty, if the tag number is caught by a camera, and (c) whether a drive-away driver’s license is automatically suspended upon conviction, in addition to the typical petty-theft penalties.
But the attendant is, by definition, responsible for setting the amount in cases where i pay cash.
There is, as others have noted, a mechanism put in place specifically so that i can’t pump more gas than i’ve paid for. It has been put in place by gas stations specifically to ensure that the attendants have control over the amount of gas that is pumped, and to prevent people from taking more than they’ve paid for. Just about everybody knows this, and it is reasonable for customers to act based on this knowledge. There is also a mechanism on the pump itself that allows it to continue pumping, without anyone holding the handle, until either (a) the tank is full, or (b) you reach the pre-set limit determined by the attendant.
If i pay the attendant, and the attendant sets my gas limit, and i then use the gas pump in a manner consistent with its intended operation, why should i then have to buy more gas than i intended, just because the store fucked up?
It’s not simply a matter of wanting something for free. I am, as a general principle, perfectly willing to pay for what i use. And, in fact, when i put gas in my own car, my general practice is simply to fill it all the way up, no matter how many gallons and how many dollars that happens to take.
But if go to a gas station and i only have, say, ten dollars to spend on gas, and the attendant screws up, why should i be forced to buy more gas than i wanted? I guess, in your world, if i go to a butcher, and ask for two pounds of tenderloin, i should be forced to buy three pounds if the butcher accidentally cuts off too much?
But the same principle could easily apply with $10 or $20. With the size of some gas tanks, and the price of gas, you can pay ten or twenty bucks and still end up with far less than half a tank of gas. What if i asked for ten dollars’ worth of gas, and the attendant accidentally hit “10 gallons” on the regulator, and i then used the auto mechanism on the gas pump?
Regardless of whether or not you were in the wrong, Sneakyguydavid, the important thing is that you came immediately to this message board and registered an account just to ask us all what we thought. That makes you a stand-up guy in my book.
The Butcher is poor example, that one would be better, if the attendant was pumping gas… better comparison here is a barrel that has apples in it, $1.00 a piece, you give the man 5 bucks, he says grab them on the way out, and some way you lose count and get 50 apples… yes he could have been there and kept you from getting more, but he left it up to you to get the correct amount.
The few pump controls I have seen only option is dollar amount not gallons, still if you want 10 dollars quit pumping when it hits 10 dollars.
I can’t believe some people are saying it’s the attendants fault.
I mean, if you went like 30 or 40 cents over, sure, that’s the attendants fault.
But going $31 dollars over? That’s deliberate. Or if you’re really that obtuse, I would think it a public safety hazard to have you behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
Maybe the OP was talking to this guy.
It would be a reasonable defense to say you paid in advance for a specified amount of gas, set the pump on automatic, got distracted, and when it shut off, you put the nozzle back on the hook and left.
The downside is that the clerk in the gas station will probably have the difference deducted from her paycheck, and she is probably in a worse financial bind than you are. If that is the case, she is the one you knowingly “stole” from, a fact you will have to either live with or repair.
I would go back (when she is on duty) and explain to her what happened, and if she says “Our fault, don’t worry about it”, then it’s over and done with. But if she gushes her personal thanks for saving her ass, you will sleep well knowing you saved her ass.
There still are believe-it-or-not some gas stations that aren’t 100% pre-pay. You can just turn the pump on and then go inside to pay. More commonly, I run into plenty of gas stations where if I want to pay with cash I go in and say “hey, could you turn on pump 4?” and since I have an honest face (or, more likely, since they can read my plate in the security camera) they just turn the pump on and I go in and pay afterwards.
Even for $10.00 worth of gas, how many people are going to use the auto shut-off mechanism? For even that amount of gas, I stand there and manually squeeze the trigger. I don’t pre-pay, or use cash, though. I use my debit card at the pump, so I have more of an incentive to keep an eye on how much gas I pump so I don’t pump more than I intend to.
The point remains that the OP didn’t buy $10.00 worth of gas and he stood there and squeezed the handle and either through deliberateness or a brain fart ended up filling his tank. He was standing right there, manually pumping his gas, so it was up to him to watch the pump. Your mileage may vary. 
I agree that, in this particular case, the amount of unpaid-for gas taken was not the attendant’s fault. The OP clearly should have stopped pumping as soon as he or she realized that the gas did not cut off at the appropriate point.
But the fact that it was even possible to take too much in the first place IS the attendant’s fault, and if someone takes too much inadvertently by using the mechanism on the pump that allows for unattended gas flow, then i’m not sure it’s fair to blame them.
In 1976 AD I was a high school senior working at one of the few self serve stations in the area. Gas was 55.9 and people bitched about paying that much and having to pump it themselves. Our pumps were not yet auto shut-off. I learned to warn people because some stations had converted to pumps that shut off when you’d pumped your amount.
I am still trying to wrap my head around putting $3.10 worth of gas in a car.
I guess if I were a college student so poor that I bought gas a gallon at a time, I would consider the mistake on the part of the attendant a gift from the gods. I would also never mention it to anyone. It would just be a little secret between me and the gods. At some point in the future, when I could afford it, I would pay it forward.
You’ve never been broke? I don’t make much money and I’m on a shoestring nearly all the time. There are times I can only afford $5.00 of gas at a time. I don’t need that much gas, I only leave the house a couple of times a week and I’m glad that prices are falling so rapidly.
I did similar the other day, when I got enough gas so as to make it to Costco’s cheaper gas (far but probably would’ve made it; being conservative). But I paid outside with card and shut off manually. I have seen guys toss a $5 plenty of times. The $0.10 is weirder than the $3.
Most service stations have lots of cameras. It’s highly likely the OPs license plate was caught on camera.
You should borrow the money and pay up ASAP. Not because it’s the right thing to do (that’s good too), but because if you end up facing charges for this theft it’s going to cost a heck of a lot more money than $28. Even if it is the clerk’s fault, you have to pay an attorney to make that argument to the authorities. That’s gonna cost orders of magnitude more than 28 bucks.
“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.” - George Washington
Not so. He may choose to hire a lawyer, and that might be the smart thing to do, but he doesn’t have to get a lawyer. You can represent yourself in any court in the land.
Cool, I think you’re doing the right thing. Give them a call or stop by and see them asap. You are a pump-n-run you know. They could have taped it. Tell’m what happened and you’ll pay up. Probably it will all turn out okay and both of you can feel like righteous dudes.
Last year we were in Canada and stopped for gas. Went to put in the card and there was no place for it to go. Then I saw a little hand written note saying to pay after pumping. So I start. While waiting a man and woman pull in on separate bikes to get gas. He’s got a big metal open top crate on the back with a black lab in it. The lab has on goggles and a red scarf. Looks really cool so I start talking to him. Ask to take a picture of the dog. He asks about my truck as he’s planning on getting one like it. Get done and take off. About 25 miles down the road I get pulled over. You guessed it, didn’t pay. The cop was real nice about it. He said I had two choices; a) he could put the cuffs on me and take me in for theft or b) I could go back and pay. I opted for b.
I asked him how often he got a drive off and he said that place had a couple a day. I didn’t say anything as I didn’t want to sound like I was trying to make this anyone’s mistake but my own, but I did wonder why they didn’t just change the sign to say come in and pay first.
Morally, I think there’s a difference between suddenly noticing the pump went over the amount as you wash your windshield (“Oh, crap! It hit $10.25!”) and standing there staring at the pump to see just how far it will go. I would still pay if I could, but if I literally didn’t have the money, I wouldn’t feel culpable.
Legally, not sure the OP is liable. At least he wouldn’t have been almost 35 years ago when I worked at a gas station / mini-mart. The owner went to great lengths to explain, only pre-pays after dark, and if you set the wrong amount, you cannot legally make them pay the overage. People couldn’t use credit cards at the pump back then. Maybe that was bullshit and a scare tactic, but occasionally I messed up and was always greatly relieved when the customer (sometimes a pissed-off customer) came in and paid the difference. If they didn’t, the register would be off and I’d be screwed. The rest of the inventory was less precise, but not gas. If $x thousand worth of gas was pumped, there needed to be $x thousand worth of gas rung up, to the penny.