Department stores and grocery stores and book stores (don’t know about adult superstores) all have tags n expensive merchandise or people watching the doors - or you. In gas stations, you have your getaway car right with you, and you are closer to the road than any employee.
As for the question, I don’t know of any non-pre-pay stations in the Bay Area. I agree that it is a hassle paying with cash, which is why I use my cashback credit card at all times.
I did the same thing when I was in Canada. I looked at the price, looked at the units (liters) and didn’t care to do the math. I had no idea if the total was going to be $10 or $75, luckily I had a credit card so it didn’t really matter anyways.
You could always just say “Gas gauge is broken, here’s $50, I’ll be back for the change”
5 years in Bay-area Virginia: all pre-pay.
3 years in southern California: all pre-pay.
I cannot even remember the last time I saw a place that didn’t require payment first.
Unless it was maybe when I worked at Circle K, 'cause I do remember a few drive-offs.
Yeah, cops hate those. So does everyone else.
But that was over 15 years ago.
In southern Spain the standard method seems to be paying in advance but inside the store; people like me who fill up sort of toss a wrench into the works, as they can’t charge us until they know how much. I’ve had conversations along the lines of “please open #3” “how much?” “I’m filling up” “so how much?” “think” “:smack: oh! opens pump”. In northern Spain it is more common to pay after you fill (you can set the amount at the pump if you want round figures).
Gas stations which are owned by a supermarket chain use the same method everywhere, of paying as or before you drive off (it depends on the geometry of the cashier’s house). Some of these offer pay at the pump, but it’s the least-common option through Spain.
Whether it’s self-service or the attendant does it varies by station and may vary by time of day.
I can’t wait until peak oil simplifies this. One tank = one handy. Pump jockey indeed.
In reality, I hate swiping my card at the pump, and then heading in and using it again to purchase a single bottle of coke for a dollar something.
Actually, no. I’m sure if I went into my local Tesco/Shell and offered to pay in advance, one of the 17 year old cashiers would look at me like I was utterly mad and say “But I can’t even open the till until a transaction has been entered”.
I’ve never heard of “pre-pay”.
Where I live, I can’t pump my own gas at any station and they’re all post-pay. (Debit/credit card is an option but having never paid that way, I don’t know if it’s pre- or post-.) I never get out of the car unless I want to use the bathroom.
I live in an underdeveloped country.
I don’t recall ever having had to pre-pay here in Germany, except once at a gas station that was unstaffed on the weekend and where I had to insert my bank card to unlock the pump.
BTW I am puzzled how fill-and-dash is supposed to succeed in practice - wouldn’t you have to cover up your license plates before entering the station? On seeing that, the staff would call the cops immediately, wouldn’t they?
Next time your at one of those stores try saying “I’ll be right back to pay for this stuff, I’m just going to go put it in my car first.”
You live in a rural area, right?
No. Sometimes the car can pull in at the pump with the front of the car facing the clerks or attendants. Then they can back out and dart away before the clerk has time to note or even get a good look at the license plate. Other times the clerk is just too busy with other customers or stocking shelves or filling the coffee machine to notice that someone has driven off. A couple of times I’ve been in convenience stores where someone would inform the cleark that a car had just driven off and the clerk wasn’t even aware of it. And nowadays it’s even harder to spot a drive-off, at least for store patrons, because for all they know the driver could have paid at the pump with a credit card.
In some areas, 7-11 stores (well-known convenience stores for those outside the U.S.) have what they call “Fuel First” cards - which are similar in size and appearance to credit cards - that you use at the pump to get gas before going inside to pay. In order to get a Fuel First card, 7-11 clerks enter your name and driver’s license information into their computer. That way they know in the event of a drive-off who to contact to find out what happened. I have one that I use occasionally and I drove off without paying once, and I’d even been in the store and bought other things. I paid for the other things, talked with the clerk for a bit, said goodbye and drove off, never realizing I hadn’t paid for my gas. I found out about this the next time I tried to use the card. It had been deactivated and I had to pay up to get it going again. I don’t know what they do when the customer doesn’t show up again for awhile. They may turn the info over to the police for investigation or they might just blow it off. But I imagine the great majority of drive-offs that happen on Fuel First cards get either get paid on the next visit to the store or a bill shows up in the mail.
Well that’s one difference between the US and here (and I presume Germany too) - front and back licence plates. All you need is one good security cam covering the forecourt and it’s pretty much impossible to get away with that.
In South Africa, all petrol is attendant-dispensed, and they take and process the payments as well.
Here in the U.S. it can vary by state. Some states require front and back plates and others only one in the rear.
The work-around here is that if you go in and ask for “$10 on Pump 2,” they can run the card through for only that amount.
If the staff sees you. Even here in Illinois where we have front and rear plates, it’s not uncommon for large gas stations in to have a dozen (or even more) pumps, not all of them in view of the cashier inside.
I haven’t seen a pump-then-pay station around here (Chicagoland) in years. Probably 10 years.
No. I live in a city on the South Coast of England.
I wouldn’t know how things are on your side of the pond, but in the US, AFAIK, in the big cities they require prepay or credit cards; rural areas, not so much. I live in a rural area, and none of the gas stations in the entire county (and I’ve been to most of them) require pre-pay.
I worked at the last gas station in our city to allow post-pay (only during daylight). We had about 2 drive-offs per month. Everything you posted is true. Unless it was an order day there are only 1 or 2 of us on duty. The pumps were set up so we could see the sides of the cars, but not the licence plates (& Loss Prevention insisted on aiming all cameras at the front of the store :rolleyes:). We couldn’t call local police about drive-offs either (they didn’t care). We had to call a special state hotline, but nothing could ever be done 'cause we almost never had a licence plate number (the only time I was able to get one involved running after a car into the street, after that I decided I wasn’t being paid enought to do that). Finally we switched over to prepay/pay-at-pump only with minimal complaints (mostly from people who didn’t understand they couldn’t just leave their credit/debit cart or DL and have us turn the pump on without ringing a transaction:smack:).
And not all “drive-offs” were deliberate. Sometimes people would pump more gas than they had cash. Or pump $5 and want to pay with a $100 bill (yes, we had signage on the pumps asking not to do this). Or they’d get inside and find out their credit or debit card wouldn’t work (expired, overdrawn, etc). This happened alot with fleet cards. Some people even tried to pay with a check :eek:. Or EBT cash (we only took the Foodstamp part). When that happened we still had to do a drive-off report (internal-only, not hotline) to free up the pump without shorting the register, ask for the customer’s DL, copy it, after we had it in hand inform the customer they wouldn’t be getting it back until they showed up with payment (which pissed alot of people off), etc.
Missed the edit window; I only made people wait in line to put money on the pumps, when I saw that they were done pumping and had change left over I’d do a quick refund inbetween customers so they could collect their change (or credit receipt) without waiting in line again.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed whether I was required to pre pay or not; I pretty much only ever use pay-at-the-pump, and don’t even think about other ways to go about it! If I need something else inside, I’ll move my car away from the pump when I’m done and park closer to the store and go in and make a separate purchase. I think it’s a bit rude to leave your car in front of a pump while you go in and shop (the time to pay for gas and maybe a pack of cigs…sure, I’m ok with that. The time to do a week’s worth of groceries, rent a movie and flip through some magazines? FOAD).