The Gas Pump Hustle
How gas stations cash-in on your impatience.
Years ago, I managed a gas station/convenient store where the owner and gas distributor both taught me a neat “trick” to bump up profits totally OFF the books. It was a very simple “tweak” to slow down the pump roll sooner rather than later. To illustrate, when you prepay say, $10.00, most pumps slow to a crawl at about $9.90. Then it goes digit-by-digit to ten. Those last ten cents are slow enough, right? Well, tweak that down to $9.40 and watch people get PISSED! Tick. Tick. Tick. A whole minute to finish. You’d be surprised the number of people who will simply hang up the pump after 10-12 ticks and just leave. Forget about that extra ten or twenty cents, it’s not even worth the walk back in!
Well, those ten and twenty cents add up fast when you’re selling gas at a profit of merely 4 or 5 cents a gallon (if you’re lucky). And that money you “leave” behind, well it’s free money for the store — because once you hang up the nozzle, you’re charged only for what you pumped. The rest is your change that you left behind, and that goes right into the store’s pocket, unreported. On average, no shit, it worked out to be 25-30 people a day, an extra $50-100 a week, $200-400 a month. nearly $8,000 a year. Doesn’t sound like much, but when your profit on all that gas you’re selling is only $135/day, that extra $7 to 15/day is nice — and it’s all gravy! Found money. And it all goes South of the Border. That is, they don’t have to report it.
And it was all totally legal.
I imagine it still is.
So think about this next time you pre-pay for gas and start pumping, only to get anxious those last twenty, nineteen, eighteen cents. Do you just hang it up and drive way only to put more money into the gas station’s pocket, or do you wait it out?
My advice? Pay at the pump — but you run the risk of your card be authorized for way more than you bought and sometimes it takes several days to clear your account — or if you pay inside, don’t pay cash. Charge it inside. If you absolutely must pay cash, then you must wait it out, too. Don’t let them pull one over on you.
By leaving, you’re just making your gas that much more expensive.
— P.
