How will this lower gas prices?

Don’t have a cite but just watched a sharp useless looking political type in NJ announce measures to control and reduce gas consumption. One measure is to lower the speed limits to 55. The other was to prohibit self pumping, starting with the interstate service stations.

How will who pumps the gas reduce fuels costs exactly? :confused:

:smack:

I got it backwards. They are eliminating full service stations.

I should never post before the caffein kicks in.

Does it cost extra to have someone pump your fuel in the US?

In Australia, you generally get your own (but a few places offer Forecourt/Driveway service at no extra charge), and in NZ until the late '90s, Forecourt service was de rigeur, at no extra charge.

The rationale behind this was that since they generally needed your keys to get the fuel cap open, you couldn’t drive off without paying for the fuel… and the service was always nice, too.

But yeah, I fail to see how legislating any of that is going to have a meaningful effect on the price of petrol…

Uh, well, you don’t have to pay those employees. Instant cost save. Imagine how much McDonald’s would cost with the overhead of a host and a full waitstaff!

New Jersey prohibited self-service gas, but I doubt there will be much difference at the pumps if that is changed. It already has some of the cheapest gas prices on the east coast; I suspect that’s because there are a lot of refineries there.

The result: gas prices in NJ will stay the same, but gas stations will make greater profits by not having to pay as many employees.

In most of the US, attendant pumping (“full serve”) was normal unti the 1970s oil shocks, then “self serve” was invented as a way to reduce labor costs & shave 10-20 cents of the exhorbitant $1.00 we were paying per US gallon.

Nowadays in most of the US, self serve is universal and full serve is almost unheard of, and carries a 20+cent/gallon premium. There is a Federal law that stations are required (subject to certain limitations) to provide full serve to handicapped drivers at no additional charge.
For some reason New Jersey (NJ) has been in a time warp since the 70’s and prohibits self-serve state-wide. AFAIK it’s the only US state to do so.

So celarly the “thinking” of the politician is that by permitting self-serve, they’ll let the stations lay off all those expensive & unnecessary workers and cut the price a dime or two per gallon.

Makes perfect economic & social sense to me. NOT.

Question: Isn’t Oregon the same way? (requires a “trained techinician” pumping the fuel)?

Yep, the first time I drove through Oregon I got out to pump my gas, and the “trained tech” just about took my head off till he realized I was an ignorant out of stater.

-Otanx

I know this is a semi-highjack (sorry Quicksilver) but has anyone done a study of the *speed * of self-service vs. “trained gas pumper technicians”( :rolleyes: )?

I see some of those lines on the Jersey Turnpike and I have to wonder if are appreciably slower…

It SEEMS as if they couldn’t possibly be, they hop car to car at a relatively reasonable and constant speed as opposed to having Grandma and Johnny Slowpoke mixed in with the average pumper and occasional Speedy Pumper & I know they are handling an incredible volume …

I know one thing on the Turnpike IS slower – Credit Cards at almost every other Pump in the East you insert your card and hang-up when you are done and drive off — on the Turnpike the Technician takes your Card and disappears inside a booth and returns a bit later – is that the reason for the lines? or is it just Volume and the Technicains are Dutch boys with thier fingers in the Dike and gas lines on the Turnpike will now increase?

Anyone aware of a study (and I assume NJ and OR - I didn’t know that until today - have studied this issue to death) that claims that Technicians speed up/slow things down?

Oregon had a law that says the gas station pumps your gas. Almost every station in Washington is self serve.

People are always attempting to do away with the Oregon law saying it will bring down the price of gas but Washington always has higher gas prices than Oregon.

So much for shaving $.10-15 off the cost of each gallon.

Of course most of that price difference is due to Washington having far higher gas taxes.

Maybe the “thinking” of the politician is that people should have a choice as to whether or not they pay for somebody to pump their gas, rather than having the government decide for us.

It seems techically possible that by eliminating a cost of providing gas to consumers (the salary of the attendant) the gas can be sold for cheaper. Speed limit restrictions make sense as a permanent way to use less gas overall, although I would expect this would have to happen universally for it to have much of an effect.

This is far less ridiculous than the boycott on one specific company proposed elsewhere.

I wonder if the number (and/or severity) of drive-offs increase proportionally with gas prices. In the midwest (central Indiana at least) we have one chain of gas stations that offers the option of having the gas pumped for you, usually at $0.02 more per gallon. These stations are generally the cheapest in the area. I always assumed that they were cheaper because of less shrinkage (they also usually only have one attendant and no conveniance store so there is also less overhead). Any ideas where one would look to see if states like Oregon and New Jersey have lower gas prices (or better margins if the price is the same) than states that allow self-serve?

Hear, hear! I asked my mother once why she always paid for “full service” when self serve was cheaper. She explained that it was worth an extra couple of bucks to her not to have to get out in the cold or rain and end up with her hands smelling like gasoline. If she wants that option, then by golly she should have it!

Specifically, all the stations have to do is pump the gas, not perform what used to be called “full service.” When I was a kid, we’d pull into a gas station and the attendant would wash the windshield, check the oil, and check the air pressure in the tires. That kind of service is virtually impossible to find anymore.

The Oregon state gas tax is 24 cents per gallon. The Washington State gas tax is 28 cents per gallon. Yet I often find along the border between the two states that the price of gas is higher in Oregon. When you factor in the tax difference, the folks in Oregon are really getting ripped off.

A friend of mine who used to work in a petrol station says that yes, the more expensive the petrol, the more likely you are to get drive-offs.

Also, the sort of people who drove off typically were either driving big V6 or V8 cars with massive petrol tanks (in the 80-120 litre range), or else they’re students/people fairly low down the socio-economic ladder.

My friend said they were supposed to log them all and call the police, but most of the time they had no idea what had happened until someone came in and said “I didn’t buy $94 worth of petrol on pump number 4!”

Even though they had cameras, it was generally too much hassle to go back through them and find out who’d taken the petrol, but occaisonally they would, just to make an example of someone.

I hate to think what the situation’s like now petrol is $1.30/litre and rising…

See, this is why we should start using the metric system in the States, we’d all feel better paying $1.30/liter than $2.88 per gallon :wink:

Not that we’d save much, that’s about $4.92 per gallon, I don’t know the exchange rate.

But I do like the idea of weighing 124 kilos though.

In an attempt to curb high gas prices, Governor Corzine has proposed a plan to eliminate full service stations in New Jersey.

Does Washington pay sales tax on top of gas tax? WA sales tax is what? 8 cents?

That still doesn’t seem to account for the average .60+ cent difference I noticed last time I drove through WA. Of course these would have been interstate station prices which can be much higher than say the Seattle or Portland average.

I did find this site which is interesting. It builds a chart of historical gas prices for three different states. If those prices are factual it looks like WA and OR averages have really been neck and neck.

A lot of places I go to make you either give a credit card or pay cash in advance, and only unlocks the pump for that amount of gas. That solves the driveoff problem.

When I lived in New Jersey, the gas in PA was a bit more expensive, but probably from taxes. The reason the service station lobby gave for keeping the full serve requirement was that we New Jerseyians just couldn’t be trusted pumping our own gas without blowing up stations left and right. Stupid, stupid law.

Just after self serve came, by the way, a lot of stations used to have one island for full serve and one for self serve. I suppose the full serve ones vanished from lack of use.