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It's amazingly rare to find gas stations that don't require prepay these days... but about three months ago I pulled off at a rural gas station, pretty remote a
by jcrawfordor 5y ago
It's amazingly rare to find gas stations that don't require prepay these days... but about three months ago I pulled off at a rural gas station, pretty remote area but two fairly new electronic pumps. The pumps seemed like they nominally accepted cards but the reader was taped over like a temporary problem, so I walked inside and put a bill on the counter and told them to put it on number one like you do... The clerk gave me a look like he had no idea what I was doing. Told me to go back outside and pump gas first so there was something to pay for (I think "so there's something to pay for" were his exact words).
I can only assume this is a joke he plays on out-of-towners. Either that or some kind of temporal anomaly has happened and I bought gas in the '90s.
For how commodity gas is it's kind of surprising the number of strange gas station stories I've accumulated over years in the rural southwest, but I suppose that's exactly why. A lot of towns have a gas station because they're a long ways from the next one, not because they actually have a lot of business. The consolidation of gas stations into the modern four-pump-plus with convenience store lead to a lot of older one-pump stations closing, but the ones that held on got stranger. So you end up with oddities like a restaurant that runs a couple pumps in the parking lot on the side, so paying cash requires flagging down a waiter (this was, if memory serves, actually on the outskirts of Silver City and so not even really that remote by regional standards).
- FractalParadigm 5y ago> It's amazingly rare to find gas stations that don't require prepay these days... Interestingly here in Canada I have the opposite experience; it seems like only stations in high-crime and super high-volume locations require it. There's ~10-12 stations I frequent and only one requires pre-payment, and even then only between 11p-5a. Another thing that got me the first time I visited the US, what's the deal with pumps requiring a ZIP code? I know the "trick for Canadians" (the three digits of your postal code followed by 00, i.e. A1B 2C3 becomes a "valid zip code" of 12300) but it seems like a pointless extra step and a potential privacy issue.
- tn1 5y agoThe zip code is needed for credit card validation. Stolen credit cards are often used to pump as much gas as possible before the cardholder notices, which could then be resold or used by the criminals. Requiring the zip code is just a barrier to that
- mbg721 5y agoWhat's the fail-condition for non-US cards? Do they accept any Zip code you enter, reject everything, or expect you to enter something like the postal code digits plus zeroes?
- jcrawfordor 5y agoThe card issuer ultimately decides and I suspect it varies. These things can be pretty annoying internationally though, I've had the opposite problem that Canadian gas pumps won't take my US credit card and I have to pay inside - I think because for whatever reason Canadian credit card terminals want a signature slip every time I use my card, which based on cashier confusion I take it is unusual for Canadian issuers. Mexican credit card terminals don't do this, so there's something more inconsistent than just international transactions, I assume it's an irritating interaction of the network trying to line up the schemes in the various countries. Amusingly debit cards tend to be less of a pain this way since the North American countries are mostly on the same interbank network and the rules have changed less over time.
- mbg721 5y agoI wondered about that the last time I drove to Canada (about ten years ago), and I just kind of held my breath and the gas pumps all worked.