Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Drive Offs & Pre-Pay Pumps
How long will it be before we are pre-paying at the gas pump? Woodman’s has been ‘pre-pay’ but I haven’t seen other stations doing that in our area. I used Woodman’s pre-pay service the day I noted they were about $.30 a gallon under everyone else. I and several scores of others made that decision that day making pump availability very scarce.
The increase in “drive offs”, where a person fills the tank and leaves without paying for the gas, has been increasing at quite a rate given the higher price at the pumps. Ten drive offs were reported in Germantown last week. One report for the past week described a tan extended-cab pick-up truck that filled and drove off leaving the station owner with a $220 loss.
If gas prices drop into the $3.50 to $3.75 per gallon range this summer, will the drive offs slow to the ‘normal’ rate or have we crossed over the line where this increased rate will simply be a part of the life of station owners/operators?
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other but it does seem that using the pre-pay approach probably causes it to require more time to purchase the gas you need. If you prepaid for $50 worth of gas and pumped only $47, for example, that means two trips into the station…one to make the prepayment deposit and the other to collect your change.
As it seems is always the case, a few bad apples can spoil it for the rest of us.
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