"Full service" used to mean checking oil and air and other driving essentials during stops. Oregon passed legislation intending to stop the death of "full service" stations but failed to meaningfully define The level of service.
The only excuse for the law being around so long was that it created jobs. Which was lame reasoning. They intentionally kept the gas tax lower in the state so consumers didn't notice the price difference. So effectively these were government subsidized jobs.
Good riddance. Forcing someone to stand in gas fumes all day was clearly not good for their health. And I always avoided filling up in Oregon because waiting for the "service" could sometimes be longer than the fill-up itself.
My first job was pumping gas at a full service station in Ohio in the late ‘90s, where full service stations were rare. We had two islands, with two pumps each. When out-of-towners would pull up and see us approach, they’d often drive to the other island. We’d get a big grin and walk over to them again. We’d get the best tips from them, because they didn’t know what to do.
I’d probably check someone’s oil about once an hour, but we washed windshields by default. It was before “pay at the pump”, so I spent a lot of my time walking credit cards in and out of the store to run them. It was actually a fun summer job for a high school kid.
A few summers later, I got a software internship at that oil company’s headquarters, working on a Visual Basic app for the pricing department to set prices at all of their stations. I’d often complete my week’s work by Monday afternoon and spend the rest of the week in their library, learning about all sorts of new technology. They treated me well and I was fortunate they didn’t offer me a full-time job at the end of my internship, because I likely would’ve taken it.
When I’ve filled up in Oregon, I’ve not seen them do anything but pump gas. During the pandemic, I drove through Oregon many times and learned to get gas before entering the state.
Yeah I don't see this mentioned nearly often enough in this discussion: gasoline fumes are very toxic and carcinogenic, mainly because of the benzene, which is just terrible for you. It's not a huge deal if you pump your own gas, because it's just a couple minutes of exposure at most a few times a week, but when it's your job and so you're getting hours of exposure many times a week, that's a whole different ballgame. We were forcing people into this actually-very-dangerous but nonetheless minimum wage job for literally no benefit. It was fucked up.
Honestly, that excuse is why there was the compromise provision in this bill that mandates half of the pumps must remain full service.
The only reason this passed at all is because of COVID. Gas stations are complaining pretty uniformly and quite loudly that they can't get their labor levels back to pre-COVID levels
Gas stations can get their labor levels back. Make the gas $20 per gallon and pay an attendant $100 per hour.
But that would not be popular, and so the current staffing levels are also not popular, so there is finally sufficient political pressure to somewhat drop the gas station attendant requirement.
Let labor prices keep going up, and soon no gas station attendants will be required because voters will want cheaper gas prices more than they want someone to fill their gas.
Get labor levels back and get labor levels back at below market rate are different.
Market rate changes for jobs and some corporations (and people) seem to think that people should take jobs as offered even when they’re bad. We have record low unemployment, yet companies that complain about labor levels are basically outing themselves as bad employers, for some definitions of bad (pay, safety, comfort, etc).
> Get labor levels back and get labor levels back at below market rate are different.
Businesses complaining about labor levels because they're too cheap to pay labor market rate and businesses complaining about laws which require them to hire employees at rates which the market will not bear are different. It is pretty clear the person I responded to thought the rate which would bring labor levels back up is not something which would be tolerated by the customers.
>>> Let labor prices keep going up, and soon no gas station attendants will be required because voters will want cheaper gas prices more than they want someone to fill their gas.
> yet companies that complain about labor levels are basically outing themselves as bad employers
Are they really bad employers when they are complaining about laws/regulation which require them to hire people for positions their customers won't pay for and do not need? I would imagine most gas stations would prefer to become completely self-serve. I don't see gas stations any place which does not require an employee to pump trying to hire people in any significant capacity to pump gas. I don't believe I've ever seen one. I don't see voters in Oregon tolerating the requirement for much longer if the market rate is above what they are willing to pay. Pushing to change laws to conform to a new reality is not a sign of "bad employers".
> Are they really bad employers when they are complaining about laws/regulation which require them to hire people for positions their customers won't pay for and do not need?
No. But we’re all part of the same set of laws. Maybe some laws should change with time, but lobbying for law changes because you’re a bad business isn’t great either.
They could raise prices in Oregon, or they could lower profit margins. Both are things that may help them pay a market-rate salary. Oil companies had record profits over the last year… so there was ample money to go towards salaries. They made about $1 per gallon in profits (in Oregon)… which is enough that each car fill up can almost pay a full hour of salary.
For context, they made about $0.07 in profits per gallon in Florida… by selling it at a lower cost with a smaller margin. So they could do it and stay in business.
>We have record low unemployment, yet companies that complain about labor levels
These seem intuitively linked? If there's not enough labor to go around, more jobs will be pushed under the 'water level' where the value provided by them is less than the cost of the labor.
This seems like a really easy thing to study and get reliable results. And assuming it is true, I'd expect some kind of class-action suit like we saw for mesothelioma.
You mean like the one where a bunch of stewardesses got cancer from exactly this (due to planes sucking fumes into the HVAC system at the gate), then won a huge class action lawsuit?
The airlines stopped pumping exhaust into passenger compartments for a few years, but then everyone forgot about the whole thing. Now you get that good-old-fashioned jet-fuel eye sting again until you wash your face after the end of the flight.
On the bright side, I don't think there's been many studies showing the old results on studies of stewardesses transfer to today's flight attendants.
> The airlines stopped pumping exhaust into passenger compartments for a few years
This is way off the mark.
All airliners except for the Boeing 787 [0] pressurise the cabin with bleed air. This is not "exhaust"; it's pressurised air extracted upstream from the combustion stage. There are certain situations where the engine may ingest its own exhaust, or the exhaust of an aircraft in front, or there may be an internal leak in the bleed system. All of these are unintended contamination of the bleed air, not a normal mode of operation. In addition, the compressors ahead of the bleed valves must be lubricated and it is possible for this lubricant to get into the air stream if maintenance (including cleaning) is not carried out properly.
There was no period of time where airlines stopped pressurising the cabin with bleed air. It is the only source available on all airliners except the Boeing 787, and pressurisation is not optional.
[0] The Boeing 787 uses electric compressors to provide cabin air. This avoids some of the risks (leaks inside the engine, for example), but does nothing to avoid others (ingestion of exhaust from the same aircraft in certain wind conditions or from the aircraft in front when taxiing, or lubricants from the compressors getting into the air stream). The compressors are located in the wing-to-body fairing so the possibility to ingest external contaminants is quite similar to in traditional bleed air systems. The most noticeable difference on the Boeing 787 is the higher cabin pressure (lower cabin altitude) and higher humidity, both of which are made possible by structural improvements including the use of composites. Similar improvements (lower cabin altitude and higher humidity) are also present on e.g. the Airbus A350 and A380, which nonetheless — like all other airliners except the 787 — use traditional bleed air for pressurisation.
Oil fumes in passenger cabin air is a more common occurrence than everyone likes or wants to believe. I have personally experienced a very bad case of this once.
I agree with you that it's common, and it should get more attention than it does. My parent post is discussing the causes, which do not involve "airlines pumping exhaust into the cabin", and refuting the incorrect idea that they stopped using bleed air "for a few years".
Bleed air is (on any airliner except 787) what you are breathing in the cabin whenever the doors are closed and ground AC equipment is removed, so your post was implicitly about bleed air. It’s the air that is “pumped into the cabin”.
Exhaust and oil fumes both get into cabin air through non-normal situations. They’re not “pumped in by airlines”, and suggesting that they are (or that they stopped for a while and then started again thinking nobody would notice) is sensationalist and incorrect.
The decision of which of the two options (APU/engine bleed versus ground equipment) to use to condition the cabin air at the gate has nothing to do with avoiding fumes. Some airports provide the equipment, some don’t, sometimes it’s not available. By the time engines are being started, ground AC equipment will generally have been disconnected and air will be supplied by bleed from the APU or an engine that was already started.
The patterns of whether and when ground AC is used haven’t really changed industry-wide at any recent time, and certainly not around the pandemic, so I don’t know where the idea of this “period of time” comes from.
Maybe your travel patterns changed, or the ground AC equipment availability/policies changed at your frequently-visited airports. Or maybe the aircraft you are flying on were parked during the pandemic and then the reactivation maintenance (esp. engine washes) was not thorough enough, causing fumes at startup.
The fumes actually make me nauseous basically instantly. My understanding is that modern vehicles can't vent the tank, so when you pump gas in vapor must exit via the same hole that the liquid is going in. So a fillup discharges ~20 gallons of fumes or something.
There is basically always wind where I live. The pumps shut off automatically. So I just turn the pump on and walk over to the curb, upwind from the fumes.
This varies by state, but since we're talking about Oregon, I can tell you that Oregon requires fuel vapor recovery at the pump. Makes the nozzle bulkier and harder to work with, but doesn't discharge a bunch of fumes.
Washington seems more lax about it, in my experience.
oh yeah I stopped somewhere once that required this and banned the latching handle mechanism. It wouldn't actually allow me to put the nozzle into my truck so I inverted the weird rubber thing and shoved a water bottle into the handle so I didn't have to stand there while it filled the truck.
It irritates me because we don't have those latches in the UK as it's illegal to pump petrol unattended - I believe this extends to the EU as its an EU law we've retained.
I do not, I just thought I read it somewhere years ago that it was an EU regulation... as you're saying it's allowed in parts of the EU I guess it can't be!
I'm not sure if this was exaggerated on our side of the straight, but here we read quite a lot about Brexit politicians (including Boris Johnson) complaining about made up EU regulations they'd have to follow (a famous example was the ban on curved bananas)
people shoving things into the handle is what got laws banning the latching thing repealled in some places. since it's safer to use something designed for the purpose.
I think this only holds for the urban areas (or where you have to take your car to the DEQ). Drive out to Hood River and no such thing exists. Maybe the state has allowed the rural areas to update on a longer schedule.
In my state auto-pump nozzles are illegal. Have to sit there and hold down the trigger breathing in the fumes the whole time. Really sucks if you're filling up a vehicle with a big tank.
They don't vent into the atmosphere, but the fumes go into an activated carbon canister that then gets sucked into the engine when it's running. It's been like that since the early 70s:
There could have been regulations requiring workers to wear respirators.
If these fumes really are so dangerous then I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of class action lawsuit filed for workplace health and safety violations.
> There could have been regulations requiring workers to wear respirators.
It's already absurd on its face that everywhere else in the country - or hell, in the _world_ - just lets people pump their own gas. Having gas station attendants in respirators in Oregon would just take it to a whole new level.
Sample of countries that don't permit self-service gas: ~Belgium~ (maybe not, see below), Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay. See https://itif.org/publications/2019/07/29/self-service-gas-in...
As an inhabitant from Belgium: self-service gas is permitted. In fact, I can't think of any gas station where you don't self-service. I wouldn't trust that article too much.
E.g. here is a random photo of a gas station. No room for an attendant:
In Brazil, self-service gas stations have been illegal since 2000 [1]. I remember that in the 90s some gas stations tried to implement this model, and I think it didn’t gain traction because of a mix of unions being against it and the general public just not liking it.
I'm not sure about not permitting, but I remember getting gas for a rental car in Paris, from one of these sidewalk places (looks nothing like a gas station; parisians, hopefully you know what I mean), and I sure was happy when the attendant came out to pump it for me. I wouldn't have known what to do at all.
I have been living in Japan for almost 5 years, and I usually pump my own gas. It depends on the gas station though, many (usually the small ones) are still full-service only.
It depends. A lot of stations off the expressway have full service where they fill your gas and offer to clean your windshields. Also depends on where, I still find a lot of full-service stations in Hokkaido.
Have you been to one of these stations in Oregon, especially anywhere rural (which is most of the state)? I can guarantee you these folks will not want to wear any kind of “mask.”
Just because you're a covid truther doesn't mean that you will refuse to wear protective gear in general. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people in the US at this very moment who are wearing protective gear for their jobs are covid truthers to some extent, because anti-maskers are pretty numerous among people who work with their hands and backs.
I’d wager that it’s about doing something different than has been done with clear risk. No one wears respirators pumping gas, and if the gov starts mandating it I don’t think it’s a huge leap to assume push back.
If you got gas at one of those stations it is because it was open.
being open cost an employee even when no one show up which in a sparsely populated area is usually. The only rational response is to limit hours.
now you have a condition where people over a wide area are being blocked from being able to buy gas when ever they want like the people in the city who are preventing them just take for granted.
These paper cuts accumulate add in some divisive propaganda and here we are.
I once worked in a hospital laundry. We were supposed to wear hazmat suits as ppe, but no one actually provided them, and honestly, we probably would not have worn them due to the heat. I doubt anyone working at a gas station would actually follow the correct safety procedures.
class action lawsuits don't benefit the victims, who have cancer bills to pay for. They give up the right to sue for a proper amount by not realizing they had to opt out of something they didn't even know existed
I don't think it's quite so bad compared to many other things, and the amount of benzene and other aromatics in gasoline is deliberately regulated to a low level due to its toxicity:
There have been many automotive enthusiasts who lived past median life expectancy and died of something other than cancer, and those are people who have likely been exposed to far more other solvents than the rest of the population.
People will tell you not to get back in the car, because it's dangerous. What's really dangerous is that potential static buildup getting in and out, which can discharge when you touch the nozzle.
If you do get in and back out, make sure to ground yourself by touching the bare metal of the pump itself before you grab the nozzle. It's not perfect, but it's much safer than not taking the time to ground at all.
Is there data on this? I have never heard of this happening and I imagine there are millions of gas pumping events per day (or at least hundreds of thousands) where a person sets the nozzle, sits in the car, then comes back out.
Compared to all the other risks of cars and gasoline, the relative risk seems miniscule.
from back in 2008 "the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a trade group, found that there were at least 170 static electricity fires at gas stations from 1992 to 2006. Considering that the American Petroleum Institute estimates that there are 11 billion refuelings in the United States a year, the problem probably isn’t a big one." from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/automobiles/27STATIC.html
I'll note that in the state I live (MN) it's technically illegal to get back in your car while pumping (you have to be " in close attendance to the dispenser nozzle").
I know for certain I've discharged static electricity by touching metal of my car after getting in/out, or cleaning out trash, etc while the pump runs.
Would that little spark be enough to ignite the vapors? I have no earthly idea.
A few years back Richard Hammond (the short former Top Gear UK) presenter did an experiment with this on another British show of his called Braniac (a sort of light entertainment popular science show) where he filled a caravan with petrol and fumes and attempted to get it to ignite through static electricity (they did lots of different ways of generating it).
They couldn't do it and even when for the laughs they decided to blow it up with a match it still didn't ignite.
The fuel air density has to be a certain ratio. This is why you have complicated systems to inject just the right amount of air and gasoline into the pistons. I would guess that since it is much harder to combust liquid gasoline is would be much harder to combust a very heavy gas/air combo.
Probably best to not use entertainment shows as a metric for safety.
You're supposed to stand by the pump so in case it doesn't shut off you can shut it off manually. You're responsible for spills, so you don't want to be sitting in your car while gallons of gasoline pour out and run under and around it.
> The only excuse for the law being around so long was that it created jobs.
That may have been one excuse, but as a long time Oregonian my recollection is that the real reason is voters have rejected it when it did come up for a vote. People liked the idea of citing in their car and letting someone else do the work.
> They intentionally kept the gas tax lower in the state so consumers didn't notice the price difference
I recall once reading that the cost of insurance on a self-service station isn't far off the cost of staff, and it's mostly a wash overall.
> waiting for the "service" could sometimes be longer than the fill-up itself.
These days, Costco runs a massively efficient assembly line fill-up procedure, and self-service might well be slower. At quieter stations that may not be true. Even then, it depends on if you can navigate around the cars that are just parked in front of a pump while they are shopping inside the convenience store.
Maybe if they hire them at minimum wage it’s a wash? But the problem now is very few people are willing to work for minimum wage, so they are closing down pumps because they can’t staff them.
I never saw a gas station attendant in 3+ decades all across the United States except in New Jersey and Oregon, so that is not true either. 99.9999% of gas stations have been self serve for a long time unless there are laws requiring them to not be.
> That may have been one excuse, but as a long time Oregonian my recollection is that the real reason is voters have rejected it when it did come up for a vote. People liked the idea of citing in their car and letting someone else do the work.
About once a year or so, I get a person at the pump behind me that is FURIOUS that I am pumping my own fuel, and start yelling at me. They ignore what I say, until the station employees confirm with them that yes, it is legal to pump your own Diesel in Oregon, just not gasoline, since gasoline is flambile. (the existing law is governed by the state fire marshall). They are usually grateful, since they are always down at least one attendent, and busy as heck.
> People liked the idea of citing in their car and letting someone else do the work.
I like that idea too. But I don't like the idea of forcing a human to do the work. I like the idea of legislating for standardized interfaces between gas pumps and gas doors on cars, such that it becomes possible to build "full service" robot gas stations.
I think the only reason this hasn't been pushed for, is that the automotive-sector companies with the robotics expertise are all electric-car companies. (Or hydrogen-fuel-cell car companies — lotta robotics people in that space.)
Pumping gas is already 95% automated. A human is only in the loop to make the connection between the pump and the vehicle. It's not that much more work for a person driving in to a station to also connect the pump to the car.
I wonder how much any of those "driving essentials" could matter at this point. Tire pressure sensors are mandatory. Oil pressure sensors won't tell you until it's too late, but cars are now built better and are no longer assume to leak oil after a few tens of thousands of miles.
It might be nice to have somebody wash the windows and check the washer fluid level, but it's hardly essential.
We don't even need them to run the credit cards any more. It's so weird going to a station in New Jersey, handing the attendant your card, and having them slide it right on the pump, just as you would. (And yeah, I've avoided filling up in New Jersey for the same reason: it takes longer.)
Maybe this served a goal at some point, but technology seems to have vaporized whatever it could have ever served.
They don't wash the windshields or check the washer fluid in any part of Oregon I've been at so far. Granted I'm a recent move in, but this never happens, at least not at the Fred Meyer or Costco gas stations I go to.
More often than not, its just a bunch of people standing around using their phones as they wait for fill ups to end and they meander between the cars. Its really poor service, honestly.
I don't even have a dipstick in my car at this point - the computer will warn you when the oil level is low, otherwise you're to assume it's fine. It also warns me when the windshield wiper fluid reservoir is low so that I can fill it before running out.
Not that gas stations in Oregon were doing any of this anyway, they were pumping gas and nothing else.
My car has both the in-cab oil indicator, and the dipstick. The indicator comes on late, like, it is bone dry and well below the L mark on the dipstick.
But, I mean, every model is different.
(I know this because this is how we started to learn we were losing oil, somewhere. … and unlike the parent poster's suggestion that old cars did this after 10k miles … this was around 130k miles. This is but one car, though, I suppose.)
“Creating jobs” only makes sense if funding those jobs provide actual value that wouldn’t exist otherwise. You can “create jobs” by making people dig holes and fill them up, but you’re just wasting your population’s productive time - you would be better off by just giving those people money for nothing, some of them might just do something useful in the newly created free time.
I’d argue that pumping gas overall provides very low value.
One good thing about declining birth rates is that you can't waste people on bullshit jobs.
Fully automated gas stations has been a thing in my country for thirty years. And they can be up to 20 cents cheaper so it was adopted by consumers very quickly.
> So effectively these were government subsidized jobs.
Hey now, without government-subsidized jobs we'd have millions out of work if you take into account not only government agencies but also the US military.
While I think this specific version of government-subsidized jobs (pumping gas) feels forced, I think the government creating jobs is a great thing on the whole. The New Deal was a great example of this, created 20-something million new jobs for a decade or so and pulled us out of the great depression.
Now if we want to talk about truly bad government-subsidized labor it revolves around private companies abusing our welfare systems by paying their workers starvation wages cough Wal-mart cough.
“While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.”
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
Usually these kinds of regulations are about keeping existing jobs rather than creating new jobs. I certainly understand the impulse, even when misguided, to slow down the rate of “progress”. There are always winners and losers, even if society as a whole would be better off in the long run.
There is a pretty good chance this quote is inappropriately attributed to Milton Friedman though if he did say anything like this, it was likely about a Canal rather than building roads[0]
Feels like something he would say though, that's for sure. The ethos is right.
> Oregon passed legislation intending to stop the death of "full service" stations
This is 110% conjecture on my part, but I always wondered if this law wasn’t originally a covert way to impede travel for certain groups of people by empowering service stations with final say on who was allowed to buy gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Oregon
For all the tax dollars the state collects, there's not much to show for it, generally speaking. Seems like it all goes to PERS obligations and administration, rather than improving communities.
Not to mention, they have the auto refund of the surplus, which is kinda silly, because what you'd want the state to do is setup a rainy day fund that can be safely invested for future endeavors, but no, the legislative body of 1979 made it so that if the state runs a surplus they allow everyone to get a tax "kicker"[0] instead, which is pretty short sighted IMO. Not to mention, the amount after being spread out across all of Oregons tax paying base, is really small and makes hardly a difference for the average person.
I mostly agree, though I think creating slush funds from personal taxation is straight up wrong. The state should not become rich on the backs of it's citizens. Instead, we could follow Norway in using the profits of industrial sectors to fuel those slush funds. The amount of Oregonians that think infinitely taxing individuals is okay is vexing.
The bigger problem in Oregon government is the fact that our municipalities fail to do basic planning for their initiatives, so there'll be a surplus in one category and a deficit in another. This, I imagine, is where their slush fund could come in handy.
Lastly, we have a lot of corruption in this state which should be a higher priority to deal with. I was shocked in the Fagan case when I learned that we don't have anti-corruption laws to charge something as brazen as what she did.
These are the small things that make life better! Wonderful news!
Living in California and driving semi-regularly to Washington I've always had to deal with the Oregon problem of gas stations. I always carry a couple of fuel jugs to fill up so I can avoid Oregon gas stations with their insane service rules. I'm glad that's over, finally.
>So effectively these were government subsidized jobs.
Is that so bad? Plenty of other countries use tax dollars to pay the poor to do busywork. And Oregon is an extremely rural state outside the Portland metro, with very little agriculture or industry other than logging and fishing, so gas stations are most likely one of the few decent options available.
> And I always avoided filling up in Oregon because waiting for the "service" could sometimes be longer than the fill-up itself.
Also because they would look at you with sheepy eyes expecting tips. I avoid valet parking for the same reason. I can fill up my own gas and park my own car, I don't need the service in the first place.
As an Oregonian, I wish they'd tax me the same (or more, arguably gas shouldn't be this cheap), skip the pointless attendant jobs, and just give those displaced workers a UBI so they can pursue more useful jobs or educations can instead.
It's fine with me to use my tax dollars to subsidize someone else's income when they have no better alternative. I just wish it wouldn't waste everyone's time while doing so. If you're gonna redistribute wealth at least do it efficiently, lol.
We need better regulation on electronic indicators, though. Governments happily use them to track vehicle movements unbeknownst to most motorist. (And not at toll booths.) License plate readers (which are also used in some toll systems) share the same abuses.
(That, and some regulation around rental car companies charging a 2500% "convenience" junk fee for handling tolls.)
Also motorcycles and boats as well Can pump their own fuel?
It’s funny to make small talk with the attendants while pumping diesel, they really want to do something like clean a windshield in my experience
I bike toured with a liquid fuel camping stove some years back. Few things will confuse a gas station attendant quite like sliding a quarter across the counter and telling them "pump #3, please". And then they look out there and see a loaded touring bike.
In Oregon, though, not only were they not confused, the attendants managed to fill the fuel bottle without making a mess. That's a trick I still haven't quite mastered. Going reeeeeaaaalllly slowly seems to be part of it, but I still spill about half the time.
The gas seems to come out aerated, and foams over before settling down. It's a bit like pouring a carbonated beverage, but you can't see how full the glass is.
The most common camp stoves do use pressurized gases like you're mentioning. However, this is a relatively modern invention -- historically (pre-1980?) most camp stoves operated on liquid fuels ... in the 1950's to 1970's this was "white gas" due to being particularly clean burning. Before that, kerosene was popular.
MSR is a top-tier camping gear manufacturer and they specialize in making stoves which can be fueled using damn near any fuel[0] (gas AND liquid!).
These can burn:
- The pressurized canister gas you're talking about (any proportion blends of propane, isobutane, n-butane)
- White gas ("Naphtha", "Coleman liquid camping fuel", C5 to C12)
- Kerosene ("Paraffin oil", "Lamp Oil", C10 to C16)
- Unleaded gasoline (C7 to C12, nominally)
- Diesel (C12 to C16, nominally)
- Aviation gasoline ("Avgas" or 100LL)
- Jet Fuel (JP-A, JP-4, JP-8)
- Mineral spirits (C9 to C12)
- Alcohols (Typically ethanol but in a pinch isopropyl or methanol would probably "work" as well but should be considered to bring safety issues)
And they might, sometimes, also work with biodiesels and plant oils (e.g. vegetable oil, olive oil), though they are not rated for this.
Serious adventurers across the undeveloped world rely on these types of stoves because you can never be sure what kind of fuel you'll be able to get.
As a general rule, it's not safe to burn leaded fuel at all. that's why MSR specified "unleaded". Though in the U. S. it's moot as you'd have to go out of your way to find leaded gasoline.
I also view the fuels other than white gas to be a matter of necessity. IOW, no white gas, so I guess we'll use the kerosene that's more readily available. But last time I saw a multi-fuel stove in such a scenario, it involved changing the jet, and the stove didn't seem to burn quite as cleanly. That might have changed in the last 20 years, but I just stick with white gas.
The avgas is leaded and marketing materials “encourage” using it, FWIW.
But yes the efficiency and heat output definitely differ based on the fuel used, some will work better than others for a given stove design. You should be able to combust most of the hydrocarbons regardless of fuel source by adjusting the air intake but any non-hydrocarbon additives will produce strange byproducts which will seem like it’s not burning “cleanly”. e.g. SOx, NOx.
Burning _anything_ isn't safe. Even wood fires are really bad for the health of everyone in the general area. When you camp you just shrug and move on.
There are both, and they have their trade offs. Canister stoves use propane or a propane-butane mix. The stoves tend to be less expensive, and the fuel more expensive. Canister stoves also range in weight from very little to nearly nothing. You'll also find integrated cooking systems with a pot that matches a stove. Those claim higher efficiency at the expense of increased weight.
(Edited to add) Liquid fuel stoves have better cold weather performance, and are popular in mountaineering for that reason. I am not a mountaineer and rarely camp cold enough that I need the cold weather performance. Canisters will do down to 20F/-6C with even minimal care.
Liquid fuel stoves burn a variety of fuels, but white gas is a common one. Pump gas burns a little dirtier than white gas, but the upside of a stove that'll safely burn pump gas is that the fuel is available everywhere. Canisters and white gas often require a camping store, or at least a well-stocked Walmart.
If you're outside of areas with a lot of demand for canister fuel, a stove that burns pump gas is a godsend.
The canister situation has gotten enormously easier with the near-universal adoption of EN 417[1] canisters by manufacturers. Prior to that, there were a lot of incompatible standards.
We never grilled over our white gas stoves, we just used them to heat a pot. The flame is pretty hot, and isn't benzene pretty flammable? There probably isn't a lot left floating around.
I’ve got an MSR Whisperlight stove that does kerosene/diesel and white gas/gasoline using different nozzles. It’s a heck of a lot more lighter that lugging a propane cooktop around.
I did a double-take when I read that you can use gasoline.
Point of order for anyone wanting to buy a stove: I believe the parent poster has the Whisperlite International. The regular Whisperlite is only rated to burn white gas and does not have interchangeable jets for kerosene.
The international simmers a little more poorly than the regular in my limited experience. I have a Dragonfly which is a whole 'nother animal entirely. It simmers brilliantly, but it's comparatively bulky and takes a different pump from every other stove MSR makes. And it's loud as hell.
plenty of benzene in white gas/naphtha. The stoves burn very hot and should theoretically limit exposure if you're decently ventilated. White gas is $20/gal, gasoline is a bit less
Not in my recollection. A white gas stove burns very hot. Even during warm up when the flame is comparatively cold, I don't remember much odor. Maybe if you spilled it out of the bowl before lighting it. Which I may have done once or twice as a young child learning how to light a stove without setting everything around me on fire...
We also used actual white gas, though, not auto pump gasoline.
Butane and propane are not liquid fuels at standard temperature/pressure; they're pressurized gases. You would not be able to fill them at a gas station pump. GP is talking about an old "white gas" stove (white gas is just gasoline without additives) which were popular before propane stoves dominated over the last 20 years.
I’ll add that, my guess, the reason people don’t use white gas as much is because the stoves are more difficult to use. You have to pump them, go through a warmup stage, and keep them level. I don’t know the exact terminology for the parts, I just know the process, since I always used a white gas stove.
I imagine compressed gas stoves are more common now, is that the companies make more off of selling those little bottles of fuel, also maintenance is easier.
The advantage a white gas stove has is that it will work in freezing weather and it is easier to store.
Right, I've used white gas stoves in the past. Propane cans sized for camping may have also became easier or cheaper to buy over time, although that's pure speculation.
Small propane tanks have been widely-available for car camping for a long time but the tanks are fairly heavy for backpacking or bike touring. Pre-LED lamps you also saw them used a lot in lanterns.
What has happened in the US is that other gas cylinder stoves have become more common (and maybe more standardized per another comment).
They also have a higher potential to spill, and the gas doesn’t go away into the atmosphere very quickly so you can end up setting your picnic bench on fire.
Have you seen this happen? It is surprisingly difficult—not impossible, just difficult—to light a small gas spill on fire.
The reason that gas stoves are difficult to work with is because the flame so easily goes out. Under the right circumstances, gasoline will ignite, and the gas stove is designed to make that just barely possible. The picnic bench is a less ideal environment for lighting gasoline on fire. The movies make it look like you can just drop a match or lighter onto some spilled gasoline and get a raging inferno, but if you actually try to do this yourself (safely!) you may see that dropping a lit match into gasoline often extinguishes it.
Depending on the ambient environment—the wind, temperature, how much gasoline, etc.
I have seen it happen, because I did it as a young scout. The spill was ignited by a nearby lit stove. You are right that it’s nothing like the movies. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous situation or anything, I just looked and felt like a fool.
IIRC One of the problems they brought up at Philmont was that the old peak stoves had pressure and leak issues where you'd pump it up and it's start squirting pressurized gas out of the cap, pump, or some other orifice that may have been created recently during pumping or by rust. Which means you've got a nice atomized mist of fuel / air going on and a super soaker filled with white gas situation. I think most of those cleared up. I like the MSR ones a lot better because the fuel is seperate from the stove (not built into it) and you can basically shut it of or QD it from the tank. I figured out how to prime it after trying 2 times. Then it ran like a champ and the amount of white fuel you can get into those bottles is great. I barely touched my 20oz bottle in a 5 day backpack trip up on mount hood and the stove weights literally nothing.
In high school, I knew someone who was badly burned in the Sierra Nevada just from removing the cap on his MSR fuel bottle. The bottle was pressurized from elevation gain and sprayed all over before igniting due to another nearby stove.
I still used my stove for many years after, but the knowledge of that made me handle it with extreme care each time. Like one step below a Japanese nuclear technician who is calling his shots and pointing before each action...
Good call. I've never used one where there are other fires present, just for backpacking which rarely allows campfires up here in the pnw when it's dry. I keep the MSR pump in my main bottle which has a QD for the stove. I've always walked away from camp when swapping the bottles. But I'll keep it in mind thanks!
They do that for trains too but I noticed them doing it in "The Days", tho they still blew up the reactor.
Well, we don't know if the plant architects remembered to call and point while they were placing the flood-sensitive generators underground and the drought-sensitive spent-fuel pools up in the rafters!
I used this gasoline stove when I drove Alaska-Argentina, around Africa and around Australia [1] - Gasoline is everywhere, other sources are not.
Plenty of countries also has their own propane bottle fittings, so getting a bottle filled from what ever country you bought it in while touring can be a nightmare. I've met people who carry a bag with 15 adapters, and I still watched propane flow out onto the ground in Argentina after visiting 6 stations with them.
I have a Coleman duel fuel camping stove. It can run on gasoline. It has a small reservoir. The screw on cap doubles as a hand pump to pressurize it. Fairly common style for backpacking where size and weight are critical and you don’t want to carry a separate gas cylinder (as a personal preference).
There are liquid fuel camp stoves. White gas is the usual but there are models that will burn pretty much anything. Propane/butane also don't work very well in cold weather although some fuel mixes are better.
There's plenty of liquid fuel stoves around, although butane/propane is probably more common. I like them because the fuel is cheaper and more available, and you can reuse the containers. The downside is they must be "primed" by preheating the with a bit of liquid fuel, so that the fuel comes out vaporized. I prefer kerosene/diesel over white gas/gasoline because it runs a bit hotter and is safer (at the cost of more difficult priming).
Liquid fuel stoves can also be run in very cold temperatures, where butane mixtures or propane stop working.
When I was in Boy Scouts the stoves were all white gas, similar to gasoline from the gas station but burns a bit cleaner because it's more refined and without any additives. Less generically also called "Coleman fuel." But the stoves will happily burn regular gasoline if you have to.
It was not about warming quickly, it was because Beetles have an air cooled engine. The engine's waste heat is thus difficultly recyclable compared to a liquid cooled engine which allows circulating the coolant through a heat exchanger to heat up the cabin's air. Also the Beetle's engine is rear-mounted so even if you could heat up the air with fins on the engine block, bringing heat to the front of the cabin would require much piping making it impractical and ineffective. Hence the gasoline heater.
Similarly, electric cars don't produce waste heat and so the heater also gets its power from the same power source as the engine, the battery.
Just to be clear, they're not talking about filling up his vehicle, they're talking about topping off their <1L camp stove, which they may have only used 20% of but want it to be full for the upcoming nights of camping. It's feasible they both only needed $0.25 of fuel to top it off, and also that the extra $0.25 of fuel could make the difference over a 4-6 night stay.
As for sliding a quarter, often gas stations have a barrier between the customer and the proprietor, necessitating one party or the other to do some sliding of coins at some point during the transaction. GP could have placed the quarter near the slot without sliding, but the clerk would still have to reach past the slot and slide it towards them.
20% of a liter is $0.25 -- There are cases when you're traveling/camping that you may have used 20% of your 1L can but need to refill it for the next leg of camping.
If I was buying $0.25 of gasoline I'd be slightly weird about it too, at least to acknowledge / show awareness that the situation is indeed strange. Doing it in the same non-plussed manner as I buy $20 of gas would seem more awkward to me than adding in a touch of bashfulness. Adding additional social cues that something is unique about the transaction can also head off clerical errors like processing my request as "oh he clearly meant $25, not 25 cents".
My family drove to Crater Lake in Oregon last summer. We stopped for gas in a tiny one road town near the park. Due to it being tourist season, we needed to wait around 20 minutes to get ‘service’ at the gas pump. The station only had one person pumping gas. This person was completely overwhelmed. I gave her my credit card and she started to fill up our tank.
5 minutes after driving away from the station I realized the fuel gauge was still indicating close to empty. I turned around and waited another 15 minutes just to tell her she had apparently forgotten to fill my tank. She was incredibly embarrassed (rightly so!). She then told me to LEAVE MY CAR RUNNING while she pumped gas so I could watch the gauge move “just to make sure it was working”. LOL! I still smdh thinking about this experience.
AFAIR it was a problem almost a century ago, not now. It's still a thing I can't get comfortable with, but there is no chance of going wrong of a car just running while it's being fueled up.
Some fuel systems are pressurized these days, running cars with such a system opened up to the air will cause warnings to be displayed on the dash. Probably fine but may cause confusion/unneeded mechanic visits.
I personally will continue to religiously minimize spark and heat sources while fueling. I've seen damaged spark plugs complete their circuit by sparking through the air (and apparently keep running the engine just fine). Best to eliminate a class of problems entirely.
It's an engine and the brakes are friction. Parts of it get very hot. The whole thing is a huge heat source. Cars get hot enough to light dried grass on fire. The risk is inherent in the platform.
Outside of not fueling near an open flame, the more moderate strategy is to always plan your exits and know where that fire suppression button is relative to where you are.
Outside of not fueling near an open flame, the more moderate strategy is to always plan your exits and know where that fire suppression button is relative to where you are.
My car doesn't have a "fire suppression button", nor does my gas station, the closest they have is an emergency fuel cutoff switch that stops the pumps, but it doesn't do any active fire suppression.
Then your state almost certainly requires them to have extinguishers, or they have an automatically activating system. Not all states require an automatic system, but there is definitely fire specific equipment at the place where you are fueling your vehicle.
Familiarity with your surroundings is far more valuable than superstitious behavior.
In my state, there's no requirement for an automatic system, and no requirement for a fire extinguisher at the pumps, just that they have to have an approved 20BC extinguisher no more than 75 feet from the pumps.
My mother-in-law once attempted to turn on the ignition while my father-in-law was pumping gas. She was hot and wanted the A/C back on.
My wife and I were in the back seat and not pleased by that action. I would think a modern car can handle that without exploding but why risk it? Just deal with the heat for, oh, another 30 seconds. We were filling up a Honda Accord, not some camper van with a giant tank.
It was already conditionally legal in rural parts of the state since 2017.
> Oregon drivers that would prefer to save time by simply pulling up to an empty pump rather than waiting in line for a forced full-service pump.
Anecdata n=1, but this hasn't been the problem, at least in east Portland. The article describes stations where "half the pumps" are closed because they can't staff, but as a daily driver for 10 years and especially since 2021 I haven't seen a pump closed due to staffing — the one or two attendants for the pumps just take longer to get to everyone. Go to smaller stations with 4-8 pumps and it usually moves faster.
The more pertinent shift I've seen is shorter operating hours, which is the biggest benefit of allowing self-service. Having self-service pumps means stations can more feasibly open earlier and stay open later, especially those already attached to convenience stores that are already staffed.
Also this is going to be great for out-of-staters already familiar with pumping gas, but based on road-trip experience there are some native/lifelong urban Oregonians who have no fucking idea what do at or with a gas pump.
> Having self-service pumps means stations can more feasibly open earlier and stay open later,
This was a common problem before the rules on rural stations loosened up. Driving through Oregon during the night could be pretty risky - there were very few 24/7 stations.
Back in the day membership to a card-lock station chain (Pacific Pride, CFN) was the best option, it was an end-run around the law since membership supposedly ensured you were 'competent' to safely pump your own gas, and the stations were 24/7 since they were unstaffed. No attendants to wait on, no lines, no stressing about having to park up next to a gas station and wait for it to open in the morning.
I think this is less common in Portland because of those smaller stations with the pumps closer in proximity to each other. Out in Beaverton you'll notice the larger stations tend to block off half the pumps and the pumps have huge spaces between them. The Chevron Extra Mile station off Scholls Ferry for example had half the station coned off two weekends ago. The Walker Rd stations tend to do this regularly as well.
The Fred Meyer off Walker Rd nearest the Nike campus is the worst offender of this. Always terribly understaffed in my experience, and even when you can get in at a decent hour when it appears not to be too busy the attendants are very slow to move through things. Its not great service.
Honestly I know this is about gas stations, but service jobs in general in the PNW I've noticed have very very poor service, very kurt employees up here, seems very common. I moved in from California, and one thing I'll say is having lived in California for 13 years (around Sacramento, though went to the Bay Area plenty of times) they at least acknowledge your presence and just seem friendlier.
I want better working conditions for everyone in these jobs, thats for sure, but this seems to be a cultural thing in the Pacific Northwest. My casual interactions around here just seem to leave alot to be desired. I'm not huge on small talk, but there's just little cues and things people do that make things more welcoming that people just don't do here.
I was born and raised just north of Seattle and, while I know you're in the Portland metro area (as am I now, near that Fred's), I'd recommend looking up something called the "Seattle freeze", which sounds like what you're referring to.
I had a very interesting experience in 2010, when I moved to Atlanta for a few years, kind of the opposite of what you're experiencing. Being from the PNW, the sort of attitude you described was ingrained in me, and I hated the forced outward politeness of "Southern hospitality". It was such a shock; I could never get used to it and quickly realized that it was a bullshit veneer that people put on in spite of whatever mood they might be feeling. That's not to say that, perhaps to your point, there's not a happy medium to be found, but I digress.
I bring that up because in the first apartment complex I moved to in Atlanta, there was an older gentleman a few units down who had an Oregon license plate and looked stereotypically Oregonian. The highlight of my days would be my interactions with him as we passed by in the common area - they literally were only ever a quick head nod to one another with nary a word said between us. Never knew his name, never held a conversation, maybe only uttered the word, "Hi," once, but for someone who preferred those kinds of interactions and couldn't get used to that aspect of Southern culture I really, really cherished those moments.
I pulled into the 76 on Walker Road & 185th a few weeks back at around 7PM on a weeknight. Every single pump was locked up, and as I looked around, a kid hollered from right next to the car wash, "Sorry, we're closed! Not enough staff!".
First and only time I've encountered a full station closed, but it blew my mind, having grown up in Washington and never having an issue pumping gas because an attendant wasn't there. Really happy it looks like I'll be able to start pumping my own again.
I drive an electric car, but my wife has had a difficult time getting gas sometimes in Portland due to the operating hours, like you said. There have been days where she couldn’t fill up because there was no one at the pump. She’s excited for the change.
One thing I don't look forward to about this is that (I assume) this will inevitably result in our pumps having those awful video ads that I see all over the place in other states. Gas stations won't be held back from playing those, now that their attendants aren't around.
For those who might not know, one of the (unlabeled) buttons next to the screen will mute the audio at least. Just push them one by one until it mutes.
A little while back I came across one of those Biden "I did that" gas stickers on an Electric charging station. It was amusing to see a sticker that was intended to be a dig on a politician to be repurposed into praise.
I wouldn't trust politicians at all with this. They purposefully stalemate laws that are needed to use a bargaining chips or attach irrelevant but self-serving amendments. The midnight vote to keep murder a crime will also fund a nuclear waste plant in Ohio and a pig jacuzzi in Kentucky!
It would be better to vote for better politicians who work together to enact sensible, reasonable and evidence based policies but that'll never happen, because humans.
We could use more compromise in our legislatures. The current system of ramming through your party’s agenda before the next election takes away your majority is terrible.
I've heard of something called sunset clause which can be included in laws that make them expire if some condition is (not) met.
For example, if the goal of the law is to lower incidence of crime X and if crime X has not decreased by 10% by Jan 1st, 2026 the law automatically is voided.
The Oregon legislature only meets for 6 months in odd numbered years and a month and a half in even years.
In that time they barely have time to address pressing issues of the day, do we really need them to be rubber stamping a bunch of laws for weeks every time?
i just read the wiki and apparently it's considered a Citizen Legislature and is a part time job, with corresponding pay and most people have another job
i imagine the original goal was to have "regular people" vs "career politicians"
Has it made it so "regular people" can afford to run for office though?
In practice I don't think it works the way its being presented like this. You still need to be wealthy enough to kick off a campaign, raise awareness for running for office etc.
I don't think this has meaningfully made the Oregon legislature more representative of the "average" person
The even numbered year session was added relatively recently (i.e. within the last 20 years.) And the minority party still complains when major when major work is done during that period of time, because “that’s not what it is for”.
> Assuming you’re a programmer, why don’t you just write fewer lines of code?
Oh I'm working very hard on that. Code is liability.
> Maybe we should just have every line of code automatically delete itself after a specified period of time.
I actually proposed that. We should just try to randomly delete lines of code and if it doesn't break any tests just commit it. And I was only half joking.
I mean, I think everyone kinda agrees that in general having less code is better. That said, a better analogy would be to imagine a world in which every program you ever push to prod, every docker container, every EC2 box, all by default were around forever. Making them automatically stop themselves is a way to keep system complexity down and make sure each component is actually, you know, doing something useful.
The law is a monolith. It doesn't work like docker containers. It works like a codebase.
If anything it works like a series of patches. Imagine a codebase where each commit has an expiration date. If some patches are left to expire, I think we can would be in agreement that at the very least we would have no expectation that patch application would still be successful - leaving us with textual issues.
At the very worst, we have no guarantee that the resulting body of law would be consistent, or result in a consistent society. We already have potential loopholes when folks are careful with drafting laws. This is asking for exploits. There is no static analysis for political economy.
I definitely agree that having a simplified legal code is a good thing.
What I don’t agree with is the idea that you should just slash away at it with a machete rather than cut away with a scalpel.
Making changes to laws is extremely politically fraught and challenging, the real world is messy, and we need laws.
For as much flak as people like to give our political system, America has succeeded for having fairly effective and good government, not in spite of it.
Linux kernel maintainers remove code when convinced it is a good idea. Legislators remove code when convinced it is a good idea. Linux kernel code does not expire. Laws should not expire if the analogy is great.
I don't know about Oregon's legislature. But other legislatures sometimes have trouble getting any work done, even the easy work.
Most likely, they'd just resort to blanket renewing everything, in order to get to the real work, if it were a year that work was doable. And in years where there's no appetite for getting things done, it will probably take the whole session to get the renewals done.
In my experience, many issues have been caused by removing code based on assumptions it isn't used/has no effect/has been superseded, while there aren't many issues caused by letting dead code hang around a bit.
Then amend the constitution. Maybe it made sense when representatives had to travel to the capital by horse and buggy, but it's 2023 now. There's no reason to have such a restriction.
Hell if I know. Work will fill whatever's allotted to it.
Is 6/1.5/6/1.5... "enough" for what they should be doing now or "enough" to do what they should be doing in a world where all laws sunset? How would I know from looking at the number of months they're in session?
If they only met 1.5 months every year, would it be obvious to you that they didn't have enough time to "address pressing issues of the day"?
If they met 6 months every year, would it seem to you like they must be spinning their wheels a bit?
Take some time and learn what it takes to conduct legislative activities.
This comment reads similar to people saying “why does it take so long to add a button to a website! It seems so simple to me I don’t know why you’re just wasting your time! What do we even pay you for?”
I didn't say that it seemed like too much time, I questioned that it was clearly the exact right right amount of time, saying equally as much about the potential of needing more time than less.
Set the laws to expire in ten years, offset in tranches two years apart, so the legislature only needs to renew 1/5 of the laws every other year. If that isn't manageable, maybe there are too many laws!
The idea is to reduce complexity by stopping the tendency of laws to accumulate. If 10 year sunsets are too aggressive, maybe try 20 year sunsets instead. Most legislation is amendment and revision of existing law anyway, so it wouldn’t necessarily hurt to make the legislature consciously review existing law on a regular cadence. And if someone gets a bug up their ass about legalizing self-serve gasoline, that would just reset the sunset clause on the gas station laws and not have to worry about it again for a decade or two.
I like the spirit of this idea – to remove outdated and unenforceable laws from the books – but I think this is unpractical at most levels of government. I also think legislative bodies would adopt work arounds that would nullify the desired effect.
I’ve thought there should be a period of time - maybe 30 years or so, where every law needs to be renewed or thrown out. I’d assume a committee would take years to do this.
I’m sure most would just be put right back through, but politicians would probably be wary of effectively signing on to the worst stuff again.
ORS 811.315 Failure of slow driver to drive on right
A person commits the offense of failure of a slow driver to drive on the right if the person is operating a vehicle upon a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing and the person fails to drive:
---
So, when does this law expire and need to be renewed? If it was to expire and needed to be renewed, would it get a meaningful review as part of the renewal process?
If some individuals were protesting big government and refused to show up to establish quorum in a timely manner, would that result in there being no laws for the road? ... and would that be seen as a good thing?
Ah you're thinking too small, if both major parties filibuster each other's law renewals then in a short while there will be no laws at all after they all expire. The libertarian dream I guess.
I'm wondering about how this line works out:
"Oregon’s bill crucially prevents stations from charging more for a full-service pump than a self-service, which will effectively eliminate full-service pumps."
I'm not sure the effect of this is so obvious. Clearly full-serve will have higher costs and lower margins - but then again, since it's all the same price customers might prefer full-serve and go to those stations that offer it. Will full-service have lower margins but make it up in volume? Or be some kind of loss-leader for selling snacks at the store?
I don't know - it just seems really strange? Like why not just allow them to charge more for full-service? What's the downside to the public of allowing this to just be another option?
We have both options in CA, and while full-service is somewhat rare, in most areas you can find it if you want it and are willing to pay more for it.
The article says the law mandates each station must still staff half its pumps.
So obviously this means full service isn’t going away (it’s still legally required), but if it’s very popular, there might be a line for the full service pumps. Personally, I doubt it.
Not sure how the writer drew such a clearly wrong conclusion.
Edit: text from the bill
> SECTION 2. (1) A filling station, service station, garage or other dispensary where Class 1 flammable liquids are dispensed at retail may not designate more than the same number of fuel dispensing devices for self-service use by customers as are designated for attended service by an owner, operator or employee of the dispensary of Class 1 flammable liquids.
> A filling station, service station, garage or other dispensary where Class 1 flammable liquids are dispensed at retail
So many words to say "gas stations".
> may not designate more than the same number of fuel dispensing devices for self-service use by customers as are designated for attended service by an owner, operator or employee of the dispensary of Class 1 flammable liquids.
So many words to say "may not have more self-service pumps than full-service pumps".
Dammit, I hate legalese. Unfortunately, it's a requirement because some lawyer would nitpick what a "gas station" is, or what defines a "full-service" pump.
Even the term "fuel dispensing device" is ridiculous, but I know if the law said "pump", then a lawyer would argue that "pump" could refer to the actual device that pumps the fuel from the underground tank, and that one pump could go to multiple dispensers, so a g̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ filling station, service station, garage or other dispensary where Class 1 flammable liquids are dispensed at retail could have two pumps, but one goes to 8 full-service dispensers, and the other goes to only 4 self-service dispensers, and not be in violation of the law because they have an equal number of pumps.
If they said "pump", you know the gas stations would immediately find a way to put tanks above the level of the cars so that they could operate on gravity instead.
> why not just allow them to charge more for full-service
Because they would, and this is the main reason voters have rejected self-service in the past in Oregon. It's not like they would lower the price for self-service, they'd just raise it for full service. So of course people tend to vote to keep full service prices the same.
This chain of reasoning is crazy. If gas stations had that much pricing power, why would they not charge $20 per gallon?
Believe it or not, gas stations do compete on price. Exceptionally located gas stations might have some ability to set their own price, but otherwise, if you have two gas stations next to each other, and one priced gas lower than the other, then the other will have to match it.
Which means either the gas price will go down by the cost of the labor for gas stations that are no longer needed, or every gas station owner is in collusion to maintain the same price (obviously false).
Maybe. I think the big problem is that people don’t want to tip the gas pumper guy, who usually only accepts cash. Or interact with them really. It’s very dumb and uncomfortable for a lot of people to engage in this kind of social ritual if they’re used to pumping their own gas.
I wouldn't beat yourself up over it - in states where full service isn't mandated by law it is expected that you tip your attendant when you go to a full service station.
I worked at one in PA growing up and most of my wages were from tips, sort of like being a server.
> We have both options in CA, and while full-service is somewhat rare, in most areas you can find it if you want it and are willing to pay more for it.
I haven't seen a full service lane at a gas station in years.
> Like why not just allow them to charge more for full-service? What's the downside to the public of allowing this to just be another option?
If gas stations charged more for full service, that would lead to an eventual decline in full service availability and use.
You would have a cycle where customers shift to self-service to save money, making full service even more expensive, meaning more shift to self-service, etc, etc
That probably is what would happen. That's certainly the way it's played out in CA - it's a relatively rare (but still findable), meaningfully more expensive service for those who want it.
Why is that a bad outcome though? Few people want/need it, and it's certainly more expensive to provide, so this seems like a pretty reasonable outcome to me.
And so ends my joke that Oregonians are so stupid they legally can't be trusted to pump their own gas. Now only New Jersey stands as the dumbest state in the Union ;)
I lived in New Jersey for about 4 years. When I first moved there I thought it was the dumbest thing that we couldn't pump our own gas. Now that I've left, it's one of the few things I miss from NJ. Standing out at a gas pump when it's like 10 degrees and windy outside is miserable.
That sounds like a very one-sided argument. If you want a functioning government you're going to need money to pay for it, and if you don't have sales tax it means you have to get it elsewhere; it doesn't "make it go away".
If the argument was supposed to be 'a smarter, well-functioning tax system that pays for government facilities' then say that. But such a statement would need some references to back it up.
It only does so if the sales tax itself is regressive. The entire point of excise taxes is to be avoidable through conscious consumption. Heavy sales taxes on luxury goods are better than income taxes because it ensures anyone can avoid them by not spending but also ensures luxury good consumption merits disproportionate societal funding.
It isn't all or nothing. Imagine the government we could have if we all paid 90% in taxes - except I don't want that. I don't even want the kind of government that needs a budget of 40% of my income.
If you live in a rural area, the government needs a budget to repair infra and run a few programs, it doesn't need the budget of NYC. Likewise, a government that lacks a sales tax mechanism doesn't "need to get the money elsewhere", it can simply go without and adjust it's services accordingly.
Well my county raised it's property taxes and now can't spend the money so is offering opt in discounts to those in the know (i.e. the well connected). Completely perverse misappropriation of funds
Sales tax is an abomination. I walk into the store, pick something off the the shelf that says it costs $9.99, but I can't actually buy it for that. Argh.
That has nothing to do with the existence of a sales tax.
That has to do with the merchant not wanting to show a price label inclusive of all taxes.
There could be a law requiring merchants to display a final price, but I have yet to see a jurisdiction in the US with a law like that so I presume it is not a politically popular enough of an issue.
I have never heard of that. The argument is usually if merchant A advertises prices excluding taxes, and merchant B advertises prices including taxes, then merchant B will risk losing out on some customers who go to merchant A because they think buying from merchant A will cost less.
On the internet, taxes are based on shipping address, so there I think it would be impossible for a merchant to show tax inclusive price unless the buyer enters a shipping address first.
The POS figures it out because it likely has a subscription to a sales tax calculation service like Avalara. US sales taxes are frightfully complicated and change constantly, compliance is not optional, and ignorance is no excuse.
Local/state politicians can raise or lower taxes on all sorts of products with conditions attached for fun / electability.
I understand in some places in Europe (for instance) the price on the shelf is the price including tax. This is not a hard problem to solve.
I think Sales tax for most things is probably the fairest means of taxation. It can be applied equally between the wealthy and the poor. It is applied when you choose to get something, rather than arbitrarily before or after. It tends to be applied evenly whether you're buying a box of chocolates or a flatscreen TV.
Meh, you could lower taxes on inferior goods and increase them on luxury goods to compensate. Income taxes are pure evil as they are unavoidable and maximally painful. As an Oregonian, federal+state income tax means I don't make any money I get to keep until late April. I think about killing myself every year because of it.
In 1991, a 10% federal luxury tax went into effect. Result: rich people stopped buying yachts and planes. Revenue raised was a rounding error (less than $13 million in a year and a half), luxury industries were decimated, and the tax was repealed 2 years later.
Yachts and luxury boats yes[0] however it was effective on cars until 2002[1] however they still managed to collect $3.94 billion off the luxury tax by 2000[3]
One could argue that if they had the stones to keep the tax in place, eventually people relent and start purchasing high ticket items again, and it could have compounded to make a significant difference by now
So the lesson learned here that very wealthy people are more interested in not paying taxes than they are in owning their own planes and yachts?
I understand that $2.2 million is more than $2 million, but I find it kind of baffling that people spending that kind of money on that kind of thing are price sensitive.
More importantly, sales tax is equally applied to foreign companies. I'm theoretically a fan of sales tax since it's very fair tax, but very unpopular for other reason (bad for economy). I think average people (no way to avoid tax) should support sales tax for fairness. Negative income tax for equality.
The EU has a thing called the clear pricing directive, which mandates all normal taxes be included. (doesn't vibe with laws in 'invitation to treat' countries, but has the same effect)
Still seen pfand deposits charged extra in Germany though.
No sales tax is awful! Instead of only getting taxed on purchases (WA), you pay 10% of your entire income to the state. It is tragic! And it also means any unreported wages are never taxed. It's pretty much the worst system possible.
Raising state income tax to 10% is not enough to exceed what I pay in sales tax in my state, so such a move would be a net positive for me.
If I were a millionaire, it would be a very different story, and I would end up paying more in taxes. But if I were that rich, a relatively small change in my tax burden wouldn't have any real impact on my lifestyle, so who cares?
I think sales taxes are generally regressive. They disproportionately impact the poor and middle class, who spend a greater percentage of their income on taxable goods and services than the wealthy.
I'm solidly middle class, and the 10% burden is really painful. Remember that is also counts against the $10k salt deduction federally. As it is, I pay well over the salt threshold in income alone, making all property tax unwriteoffable.
The other thing income tax disallows is tax avoidance through nonconsumption. I have to pay it all regardless of how much I consume, which I try to keep low.
It also means that my adjusted wages per hour are lower. Spent 70 hours a week on a pressing project? Congrats, you don't get paid OT so not only is your hourly wage lower, but your taxes per hour are disproportionately higher.
10% appears to be the tax rate for the upper classes. I make $110,000/year and my tax rate would only be 7%, barely up from the 5% I pay in my current state. But I end up paying 8.5% sales tax on just about everything I buy, so at worst it's a wash.
The marginal rate is 9% starting at your dollars above $8,900 single or $17,800 married. Yes, I rounded to 10% in my statements. Even low income earners relative to the median are taxed astronomically in Oregon. It is simply not a progressive policy. It is a painful policy at best.
That’s unbelievable to me. If you make around 75000 as a single filer, you’d send about 5800 in income tax in Oregon. Let’s assume we’d have a wildly high sales tax of 10% instead of an income tax: you’d end up having to spend literally all of your take-home earnings on taxable purchases. In other words spending nothing on groceries, rent, or other bills. Just shopping.
Oregon has the highest effective income tax for people earning $75k[1].
10% was state only. The Federal gov will take another progressive rate that will make my all-in around 33%.
Oregon and WA are exceptions in the US. Most states have both sales and income tax. WA has sales only, and OR has income only. Both have real estate taxes too.
The biggest difference comes down to income. It varies a little year-by-year, but in general Oregon has the least regressive tax regime in the US, while Washington has the most regressive. If you make a lot of money, living in Vancouver can make a real difference.
We don't have sales tax here in Montana either, but I'm not sure how "smart" it is, since it basically means richer people pay less and less rich people pay more.
Generally it's the other way around -- sales tax is strongly regressive. In fact, Oregon is usually just about the least regressive tax state in the US, and Washington is just about the most regressive. All because of sales tax vs progressive income tax.
I understand sales tax is in theory regressive, but this seems wrong/naive upon scrutiny because you would assume higher earners consume more than low earners, thus contribute more sales tax in absolute terms, if not quite in relative terms.
Yep, the state still has to have some kind of tax base. Oregon ranks right in the middle, usually 24-26th amongst all 50 states in terms of total tax burden. But we are usually the least regressive (or close). As opposed to Washington, right across the river, who is frequently most regressive.
If you have travelled through the NJ portion of I-95, and stopped at any service stations, you quickly realize how stupid this law is. A single attendant trying to fill gas for 10 cars. Drivers just waiting in line for 20 minutes to fill their gas!
On the flip side, while on road trips, I've seen start the pump, then go into the store for 10 minutes to use the bathroom and buy a snack, hogging the pump spot for 8 extra minutes unnecessarily
I swear, I was the only person who would fill their tank and THEN park and go into the store.
There's a company called Yoshi that does this, only they come out to you with a pump on a van. One of my neighbors uses them. I guess it works, though I never go the appeal, not to mention I'm not 100% sure how it'd work with my car, since it auto locks the fuel cap unless the fob is nearby.
When I was working at Microsoft one of the parking garages had an auto detailing place in it so you could park your car and come back to it washed, waxed, cleaned, etc.
Was a nice perk and convenient since I was going to park my car there anyway.
I remember stopping in Portland for a fill-up around 2 AM on my drive from Seattle. It was pouring that night and the gas station clerk was standing in the doorway and watching me with the door closed. I thought it was weird and then I found out the next day that pumping your own gas is not allowed in Oregon and the guy from last night just didn't feel like getting wet. I spent the next few days spent in queues trying to get gas because there was not enough attendants serving everyone during busy hours.
Not that it matters now, but the best trick is just going to Costco. Assuming you have a membership. The lines can seem fairly long, but they have lots of lanes, all staffed, and they run cars through each lane three at a time. The only time I've seen self-service be faster is at a relatively empty station where I could slot myself in to an open pump.
You need a membership? LOL. I stopped at a few of these driving back from SF to BC and nobody ever asked me for a membership card. But then maybe they saw the BC plate and decided not to bother?
At least at all the Costcos I've been to in California, you need to first scan your membership card before your payment card. So without a membership card you can't even start the process. The attendants can override this I think, but lately they've started really cracking down on this and not allowing it.
I used to fill up in Camden on my way back from New York into Philadelphia, and never with my usual credit card - I had one specific for gas and automotive costs (which got me free Amtrak rides, basically), and about a decade ago, that card was regularly cloned by New Jersey gas station attendants. It never really affected me, I'd get a new card in the mail in short notice, but I was always struck by how they'd just go to Wal Mart or a convenience store, and never actually blow that much.
This is probably what was happening. Once it gets noticed, the purchases are deemed fraudulent and the cards are closed. I had my credit card information stolen in a similar scenario. They spent $500 at Walmart and I noticed :)
I don't think it's legal, but a lot of places allow it. My friend never had any issue filling up his motorcycle by himself, but it could be that the attendants didn't want a confrontation. I'm pretty sure motorcycles would be under the statutes listed here: https://www.nj.gov/labor/safetyandhealth/resources-support/l...
As dumb as this law was, I think it will make road trips a little less magical as a Washingtonian. It was like driving into this strange land with these strange customs. That little anxiety where you pull up to what would be a routine gas fill up and have to wonder, what exactly is the protocol here? How do I not offend the locals?
My experience with the gas filling in the region was:
- pull up to station in Oregon unaware, exit the vehicle and approach the pump. An attendant runs up to me yelling "You can't do that!! That's DANGEROUS!!"
- pull up to station in Washington, sit there. Didn't realize I was in Washington and nobody was coming to pump my gas.
- not knowing whether I am supposed to tip the attendants in Oregon. Different people told me varying things.
- feeling relieved to be in Washington and being able to simply pump my own gas without talking to anyone
Some Oregonians told me they enjoyed not having to get out of their car and thought the system was great. Also many had never pumped gas in their entire lives and weren't comfortable doing it when in other states. If this system existed in very cold places I've lived like Northern Minnesota I would have been quite happy about it - I don't mind a little wind and rain, but getting out to pump gas when it's -20 with a 30 degree wind chill is not comfortable.
That sounds so weird. Washingtonians and Oregonians are frightfully similar as it is. For better or worse :). I can't imagine it being any more magical than an Oregonian wondering what the protocol is for self-service when they go across the river.
East-coaster, now in Seattle for almost three decades.
Yeah, Oregonians and Washingtonians share some strange behaviors, but there are many things pretty alien between the two.
Handling of minor riots, drunkenness (on your own property, or not -- ok, sleeping on your front lawn), tipping, public transit (in populated areas), shopping, strip clubs, ... Wow.
That's an interesting perspective, in my experience on basically all of those issues I don't see a notable difference in attitude between Oregon & Washington. There's a pretty big shift in mindset going to the east side of either state, but west of the Cascades it might as well be the same state.
We're almost identical, which is one reason why the gas thing is so weird: these seemingly identical people have an entire set of unknown customs around an everyday activity. I wouldn't call it magical. I would call it uncomfortable. Glad to see the end of it.
The interesting bit is yet to come. Show me the YouTube compilation of Oregon drivers using a fuel pump for the very first time. I bet you 90% will be issues with payment and not the physical act of refueling the tank.
Yeah this is definitely an interesting situation. I remember another state started allowing it a few years ago and there were quite a few issues. I can't blame them though, imagine having never done something before and now you have to start. Probably tricky the first time.
Growing up pumping your own gas for you parents while they run into the gas station store or something makes you forget that not everyone knows it.
> Oh jeez. Most people in Oregon live in Portland, across the river from Washington, and have pumped their own gas many times.
I've never compared gas prices in Portland and Washington, but I'd expect them to be higher in Washington.
1. Washington has sales tax. Oregon does not. Washington will return that tax if the Oregonian keeps their receipt and files for a refund with the Washington Department of Revenue (it used to be that they could show Oregon ID at the time of purchase and the retailer would not collect the tax, but that changed in 2020.
2. Washington gas taxes are $0.11/gallon higher than Oregon gas taxes.
I'd thus expect Oregonians to try to avoid gassing up in Washington, and generally only do so when they are going to be going somewhere in Washington far enough from Oregon that they have to gas up there.
Use the Costco app to compare real time gas prices all over the country. Tue are Costco’s on both sides of the Columbia River. Note that WA started a carbon tax on oil producers or sellers Jan 1 however that should have increased gas prices.
> 1. Washington has sales tax. Oregon does not. Washington will return that tax if the Oregonian keeps their receipt and files for a refund with the Washington Department of Revenue
How does this work in the case of gas, because one of the stipulations is:
> Purchases are for eligible items that will only be used outside of Washington state.
>Purchases are for tangible property/goods, digital products, or digital codes. Common examples include home appliances and electronics,
household goods, and clothes.
I live in Washington, well north of the Oregon state line, and I've helped sheepish Oregonians pump their gas once or twice. I doubt it'll be hard to find confused people of all ages.
> Growing up pumping your own gas for you parents while they run into the gas station store or something makes you forget that not everyone knows it.
How will those rental car drivers from NYC ever manage!
But honestly, in states where you can pump your gas just drive around for an 1 hour with your eyes open. You'll pass by several other cars whose gas lids aren't actually closed ...
I asked my brother and SIL how they feel about this. Both of them immediately said it will be a shitshow because no one knows how to pump their own gas. My brother lives in one of the rural areas where self-serve has been legal since 2017. He says he helps someone pump for the first time at least once a week.
Last week he tried to help an older man who just gave up and left.
I think you overestimate how many people have ever pumped for themselves or are willing to learn.
We've had several periods over the past few years where gas stations were outright refusing to pump, and customers had to self service. Mostly covid and heat driven, but I'd venture to say that most Oregonians have pumped their own gas a nonzero number of times.
Now the logistics at the pump may be another beast entirely...
Not likely to be a big problem for the Portland metro due to Vancouver, WA being right across the river and more or less part of the greater metro area.
I doubt this will happen. How many drivers have stayed in one state their entire lives? Especially when the vast majority of Oregonians live a few miles from the Washington border?
But I was shocked to learn that the wife of a friend of mine had grown up in Oregon City (15 miles south of Portland) and she had only ever traveled to Washington state and had never pumped her own gas.
I have personally seen this happen, albeit to a young person from Oregon. Still, I suspect there are far more people that do little traveling in Oregon than y’all expect
When I had a gas car up until two years ago, and I mostly got gas at CostCo. I did live in Virginia for three years. And I would say getting gas at CostCo in Oregon was 80% of the time faster than waiting for Virginians to pump their own gas at CostCo.
I'd rather not pump my own gas, and will miss the service. As will most people I know here.
Although states have laws no longer requiring it, some states still allow towns to overrule this by towns passing laws banning self-service before state self-service laws were created.
Also in Massachusetts is Milford, Upton and I believe Arlington. Huntington, NY is the other holdout I'm aware of.
What was funny about Oregon is self-service wasn't allowed based on county size (counties > 40,000 people). However, three counties allowed motorists to still pump their own gas at night (7PM and later I believe), just not during daytime.
Last time I went to Weymouth and tried to pump my own fuel, I was SCREAMED AT by the attendant to not pump my fuel.
I left to my friend's house and fueled elsewhere.
Friend informed me that it's law. However not every fueling station enforces it. The one right by his apartment complex did (and his family won't go to it).
Arlington is another case where it's rare that an attendant will give you hell or stop you, but some will, because the law is on the books.
--
In the case of Weymouth specifically, they passed a law before Massachusetts passed a state law. Until Weymouth repeals it (it's attempted periodically), it remains on the books.
Even under the hypothetical scenario that pumping your own gas is dangerous, the prohibition would still do more harm than good: instead of learning to pump your gas as a matter of course, Oregonians would not learn it growing up and then suddenly have to do it when they take an out-of-state trip.
You know you’re an Oregonian when you’re out-of-state trying to figure out how to put gas in your rental car and the clerk at the gas station starts yelling “What are you doing??” over the P.A.
I was so confused when one day at a gas station in Vegas a group of college aged girls flagged me over and asked if I could help them fill their car. They never had before as they were from Jersey and couldnt figure out how to open the gas door. I mean in all honesty it was a push door style where you pushed and it popped open so thats a little tricky but I was amused i still had to walk them through the entire process.
Seriously. The POS walks you through each step. There's a button to call an attendant for help, if you don't want to walk inside and ask how to pump your gas. Or you could stand there and watch other customers do it.
I'm having a memory of trying to pump the gas for my dad when I was a kid. I got confused about what to do, so after completely filling up, I ended up swiping the credit card again after finishing the purchase, leaving the machine open to being charged again. My dad stood there and yelled at me, and the whole time I thought, I don't know what I did, so when he's done yelling I'll just gonna go ask the attendant.
I haven't used a pump like that in years. All of the ones I've used recently have just one handle that you grab and start pumping after selecting the fuel you want.
> Close-up of unrecognizable white man purchasing gas at pump.
The caption isn’t wrong but it seems… kinda weird, no? At least for an article that’s focused on pumping your own gas. Is this a machine-generated caption?
I was always under the impression New Jersey had this law because of some sort of mafia influence. But I probably watched too much of The Sopranos, though.
In the 80s a lot of gas stations in California still had a full service line alongside a self serve line. Full service cost more for the gas. They would come to your car with the credit card slider (carbon paper), check your oil, wash your windows. It was also expected to tip.
An attendant at a gas station in Oregon actually washed my window the other day while the gas was pumping. First time I tipped a station attendant in years.
From what I hear, locals don't tip. Not a surprise given they don't have a choice (and a lot of Oregon has historically been poor, up until the recent flood of Californians).
I mean, waiting for someone to pump my gas in Oregon is ridiculous. I'm already subsidizing the guy's paycheck, and it's a complete waste of my time to wait for him to handle six other people. I'm not inclined to tip. The reason I tipped the kid at the 76 in Wilsonville was because he was the first human being I saw in recent memory who gave a shit about his job. It doesn't take much, but it's vanishingly rare. I think that's what tipping was supposed to be for originally.
There is/was full service at a gas station in Menlo Park on Sand Hill Rd - That is the only full service gas station I recall ever seeing in California
Frankly, this sucks. We pay less for gas than surrounding states, but don’t have to get out of our cars to pump gas. That is awesome in the winter. And less anyone say I don’t know how to pump my own gas, I grew up outside of Oregon, so I know very well how to do it, I just don’t want to do it anymore.
Well that fucking sucks. Now I have to get out of my car, in the sweltering heat or bitter cold, stand there while it fills, or get in and back out, and have my hand smell like gas until I can find a sink to wash, which sure as Hell isn't going to be in the bathroom at the service station.
I'm born and raised in Oregon, and know how pump gas, but certainly don't like it.
You folks all got Stockholm Syndrome. It has been great just pulling up, giving your credit card, and having a friendly chat. Now get to be like everywhere else where cat litter is sprinkled all over the ground from people who can't be bothered to fill correctly and doing stupid shit like driving away while still attached.
It is? It sure seems like the handles of the pumps end up smelling like gas. Maybe where you live it's better, but when I've driven elsewhere this was most certainly the case. Or maybe my sense of smell is too sensitive. ;^)
Also, grew up on a farm with its own gas pump for the vehicles. Pumped a lot of gas.
Eh, you shouldn't regularly get gasoline on your hand, for sure, but it is a legitimate point that pump handles do frequently have some smell. Not that it's ever bothered me, but I like the smell of gasoline so I'm probably not the best to ask.
The law requires stations to still have full-service pumps. In fact, half of their pumps must remain full-service.
> SECTION 2. (1) A filling station, service station, garage or other dispensary where Class 1 flammable liquids are dispensed at retail may not designate more than the same number of fuel dispensing devices for self-service use by customers as are designated for attended service by an owner, operator or employee of the dispensary of Class 1 flammable liquids.
[0] EDIT: I should probably clarify that my frustration at the beginning of this comment is not directed at you, but how this information is being widely missed.
Full service isn't so fun when you're in rural areas outside of working hours. I've been in a couple of dicey situations in Eastern Oregon due to closed gas stations.
No, I just can't remember the last time my hand smelled like gasoline. I mean generally the gas goes out of the nozzle into the tank. Seems like there might be some weird acrobatics involved to actually get it on the handle. Hell, most handles have a boot on them to further prevent that sort of thing.
I can see that you're emotional about this, but as someone who doesn't exactly love pumping gas it's nowhere near as apocalyptic as you seem to think it is.
We got our first electric car four years ago and it's been great. It's actually my preferred road trip car (Model 3 LR) these days. Even the Bolt my wife drove for a few years was mostly just fine, as long as we were staying within Oregon & Washington.
I haven't been to a gas station in months, and maybe longer than a year. And IIRC that wasn't even to get gasoline, just to refill a propane tank. We have one remaining ICE vehicle (a pickup, which tows our travel trailer) and my wife takes care of that when she goes to Costco. Even then, it only gets driven a thousand miles a year or so, so she doesn't have to do it too often. Plugging in at home and starting every day with a full battery is really nice.
Marie Antoinette would be proud of you. (I am aware she didn't say Let them eat cake or even Qu’ils mangent de la brioche but that doesn't change the metaphor.)
Wow thanks so much for posting a defense - I had no idea people thought like this. I’ve literally never once noticed my hands smelling like gas, but I’m assuming you’re just a sensitive person on that front.
In general/more substantively, I feel this is a place where the free market is an appropriate tool. If there are people like you, there should still be some full-service gas station attendants.
I think the law being repealed is great for one big reason: can you imagine having to work a job that you know for a fact is useless and unwanted by (almost) all of your clientele? That’s soul crushing shit right there
I'm with you. Moved up from California half a decade ago and I don't think I've ever self pumped gas into my current car and I thoroughly enjoy that fact. The only time I've encountered lines is once in a blue moon, the station just happens to be busy (less often than California) or at Costco...
Also grew up in Oregon. The comments on this are surreal in their misconceptions about what it's like.
1. Smelly hands is an issue. That's the thing I hate most about dealing with self-serve.
2. There is no tipping of gas station attendants.
3. The main bottleneck in throughput is the number of pumps, not the number of attendants. I can't recall ever being in a situation where the problem was shortage of staff.
4. All the stories I've heard about dealing with terrible staff were from Portland. I haven't been there enough to comment on that.
I live in Oregon, and a couple years back it was 47C here at my house. The year before that, we had an ice storm that covered everything with 1.5 inches of ice and knocked down a half dozen poles within a quarter mile of my house, and countless trees.
So... yes?
Edit: Ha, those two events were actually the same year.
I've lived in places (Tracy, CA, Sacramento, Ca) where it's over 120 for 2 weeks straight in the summer, every summer. Not just that one time.
I've also lived in places (New York, Colorado) where storms like that knocking out critical infrastructure is again, a yearly occurrence.
It's true, Oregon has way more extreme temperatures than I personally thought before this interaction, but it's still milder than many other places in the country I suppose.
Oregon is more than just Portland, but even Portland summers reach the 90s on a regular basis, and we've gone over 100 degrees several times in the summer. Winter usually hovers around 30-40 degrees, but sometimes dips to the 20s, and we've definitely had 10-20 degree cold snaps.
Go outside of Portland, and you'll easily find deserts that reach 100+ degrees on a regular basis, and highlands that go below zero.
Wait, there are people paid to actually fill the car for you? How does that work economically? The staff cost must be enormous. Here most stations are self service with a machine that accept credit cards. Is it common in many countries?
How does that work economically? The staff cost must be enormous.
I'm not defending this but it seems to work pretty well economically.
According to quick Googling the average markup on a gallon of gas $0.15 so the break-even point, so the break even point for gas station attendant making $14/hour (minimum wage here in NJ) is 94 gallons of gas or perhaps ~10 fill-ups.
However, I'm not sure many gas stations even make money on the gas itself. The popular model seems to be large gas & convenience store hybrids like WaWa, Sheetz, Royal Farms, etc. I think they just sort of break even-ish on the gas and make most or all of their profit selling snacks and drinks.
Despite that, NJ gas is still cheaper than neighboring states thanks to low gas tax. So that's another way things work economically... folks don't realize the true cost of full service since they are not paying it directly anyway.
As for my personal opinion: I did not grow up in NJ! This system seems bizarre to me. But I'll say two positive things about it.
1. It is very nice for the elderly or disabled. They don't have to pay more or wait extra time relative to everybody else.
2. There's a safety benefit. In other states, if you have to gas up your car in a sketchy area, that is a VERY popular time for people to harass you for money. Robberies happen this way too. Had a guy try some crap with me and my elderly dad just the other week at a gas station in a nearby non-NJ city.
Well, if I do the calculation here, gas cost 1.8 per liter, wage for this level of work is about 30/h, average car have let's say 30l of topup, and takes 5 minutes to do, so that's 12 fill per hour or 360l, which is 5% of the cost. You are right, it's not as "bad" as I thought.
I heard that the gas station owners say things like: "it will not change anything, as we had to close half of the pumps anyway due to lack of employees".
No, you're just not paying them enough to do this job.
In theory gas pumping is a dangerous thing that should be left to professionals. If you pump your own gas, do you ever read the long list of safety requirements posted on the pumps? They say all number of things including: You must be electrically grounded. You must watch the pump at all times. You must not open car doors while pumping. You must not spill gas onto the ground. You must not leave the pump attached when you drive away. And so on for lists of hundreds of safety requirements, all of which are based on real (explosive) problems.
There are so many failure cases, and most people that regularly pump their own gas are naive/blase about them. (Watching people at gas stations fill gas tanks while understanding that massive list of safety requirements, being very aware that all mistakes involve an explosive substance, and counting all the violations you can spot is one "fun" way to lose a lot of faith in humanity.)
Thankfully, there's a lot of regularly inspected safety equipment compensating for how blase so many people are. Modern pumps have all sorts of auto-shut-off sensors and require all sorts of (literal) firewalls and conscious designs. These have mostly eliminated a lot of the errors from being fatal in practice, allowing so many of naive and/or blase to live another day.
In practice in places like Oregon (and Japan) this was a jobs protection thing. It saved some low wage jobs from companies that had every incentive to eliminate those jobs to scrimp and save money. It was more useful to Oregon to keep those jobs than to let them disappear.
(Arguably Oregon is allowing them to disappear only just a few years in advance of them disappearing naturally because gas pumps are likely to start disappearing altogether as EVs become more prominent. They can't protect those jobs in the EV present.)
Relatedly and further off-topic, I still love how the now often thrown around term "range anxiety" shows up in early literature too but it was originally reversed to how people brandish it about today: early EVs had a reliable range that you knew before you set out and could be charged just about anywhere. Internal combustion was rife with inefficiencies (fuel lossage among them) and available range wasn't always obvious and early fuel gages weren't always reliable and finding sources of fuel relied on lucking into the right sorts of pharmacists/chemists. One of the original reasons for the founding of the AAA (American Automobile Assocation) was "combatting range anxiety" by getting fuel to cars stopped on the side of a road.
At some point we could return to the original meaning, as gas stations become less profitable and less prevalent. It's far easier to have an EV with no public charging than it is to have a gas vehicle with no public filling stations.
I agree and have gotten into some interesting debates for suggesting that not only do I think it likely, that I think it will probably snowball a lot faster (and wilder) than a lot of people expect. (Gas pumps are already weird margin "loss leaders" for other businesses such as convenience stores or supermarkets. Expecting a closure snowball seems reasonable once demand starts to really shift in favor of EVs.)
I think really just non-urban places will be in trouble.
There is no way gas stations on highways are going to close down in the next decade. But if your highway wasn't popular enough to currently have service stations at their rest areas then I don't have much hope your gas stations outside those areas.
Of course this does mean that you might have to drive ~40mins roundtrip to fillup your gas.
The gas stations I went to in the Middle East (I'm not from there) all offered full-service. These were very busy locations, and the attendants generally got things moving faster than I could have. The hard part wasn't pumping the gas, but directing traffic efficiently.
There are some gas stations where I live that could use this kind of help, our drivers do not coordinate very well.
I really enjoy not having to get out of the car to pump gas in New Jersey, and it's nice not taking the chance of getting my hands all smelling like gasoline. It doesn't usually take much longer than pumping it yourself, unless you're at a very busy gas station with only one worker.
I had forgotten this particular peculiarity of Oregon as the last 2 times I passed through, it was in an EV. Not that the EV transition is going to happen overnight, but one way or another, the future of gas station attendants is looking limited.
>> The Northwest Grocery Association, an advocate for retail and food suppliers, claims that jobs won’t be lost because half of gas pumps are already closed due to understaffing.
Not sure why they needed to say anthung, but the logic here is comically wrong.
Comparison to modern-day IT trends: only allowing a "Platform/Ops/IT Team" to do certain things for users. Wait for someone else to do something you could have done yourself if it wasn't for bureaucracy and a jobs program.
How much gas was wasted in Oregon, waiting in line at understaffed stations? According to the article, many stations could only open some of their pumps due to not having enough employees, so long lines would form.
Weird. I just drove through Oregon last week. I didn't know about this law and everywhere I went, I just pumped my own gas. No one seemed to care. Maybe they were anticipating the change.
I used to live in Oregon. I never tipped, and they never asked. I think one time I saw someone hand a cash tip through the window, but that's it.
Honestly not having to get out of my car was really nice in some weather. Other times there's just no one there, and you and a few other drivers are out of your cars looking around wondering if you should just do it yourself.
Good, it’s insane to have to wait at the pump because there is one guy there and a line of cars. I think any adult who drives understands how to pump gas.
It was certainly "both". It preserved jobs. It increased safety. Whether or not you agree that the marginal safety improvement was worth the marginal "efficiency and economy" lost.
Reread my last sentence? It is entirely orthogonal to my point. I don't think a citation is needed because think it should be obvious that gatekeeping operations involving flammable liquids to people paid to do it (with some modicum of safety training) is at least marginally an increase in safety. Again, it doesn't matter how much you think it increased safety nor if you agree that it's maybe subtle/slight shift in safety was "warranted", it can still be for safety reasons that the regulations were adopted.
You claim it increased safety. You repeat this claim in your last sentence, qualifying it with "marginal." It seems central to your point, not orthogonal.
> I think it should be obvious that [Oregon mandatory gas attendants law] ... is at least marginally an increase in safety.
I don't agree that it's obvious and doesn't need substantiation. Note that I am not disagreeing with your claim, just asking for substantiation.
I included relevant information to why I felt it "obvious": incentives (wages), training. That's the entire extent of what I feel relevant to discuss with regards to my wider argument. It's not my job or intent to defend how much increased safety it applies, or to save you from googling whatever supporting information you are actually looking for. I'm only arguing that Oregon given information they had at the time believed it to be in part a safety measure. Again, the correctness of that belief (especially at the time) is "obvious", and the actual "magnitude" of safety gained is irrelevant to any claim I am making and starts to move the debate out of context.
There were a lot of gas station explosions in early internal combustion engine history. It's a massive testament to technology and design (both car and pump adaptations over the decades) that these aren't so regularly occurring as they once were. But all the compensating technologies and designs don't necessarily mean that the original lessons weren't valid or that gas itself, an incredibly flammable substance, is ever truly "safe".
How is that relevant? The benchmark for Oregon in 1951 was the safety past prior to 1951. Oregon wasn't building regulations based on future data they couldn't possibly have.
The benchmark for the experiment is the control group. The control group is comprised of states without this law, over the relevant time period (when the law was in effect).
The context is "regulations are written in blood", not a multi-decade scientific experiment. Oregon doesn't know or care about the "control group" in defining its own laws. How well the "control group" fared following the passing of the law is irrelevant to the spirit behind the law and why the law was passed (the "blood" of the past).
(You can easily Google to find out that of course there have been gas station explosions since 1951 in "the control group". Would some portion of them have been prevented by similar laws to Oregon's? Who knows; Oregon probably doesn't know, it was never Oregon's intent to run their regulations as a science experiment. It was Oregon's intent to deal with issues they saw in the past safety record of gas stations as they saw fit.)
Gasoline is a dangerous and volatile substance. There are numerous incidents of people being harmed by incorrect use - not just the operator but also bystanders - and millions of dollars in facility damage occurring due to insufficient training. There is a reason why Oregon requires Class C UST Operators and above have training regarding emergencies. We should require more training, not less.
Industrial substances need high standards. Within this calendar year we have been reminded of this repeatedly: train fires and derailment, the OceanGate submarine, the recent train bridge collapse carrying hazardous materials.
It's important that we treat this substance with respect. Licensed operators should be the only ones handling it routinely. But of course, there's no surprise that Big Oil would like to socialize the risks and privatize the profits, speaking nothing of the job losses this will cause.
Big Oil interests are in increasing customer demand, while socializing the costs of uncertified, untrained, and unlicensed UST operators posing as self-service customers. Dangerous substances require training.
There are, but it depends on where you are or the type. For instance, out in rural Oregon there are a few stations where you can pump your own gas. Also some commercial stations allow you to pump your own gas.
Briefly during the pandemic, people could pump their own gas.
As an Oregonian, I welcome the change. The change will mostly mean not waiting for an attendant to come over.
In most cases it's just regular gas pumps, with nothing specifically to prevent you from serving yourself. Usually there's someone standing there as you pull up, but if it's cold, or if it's not super busy they may be inside. If you forget the rule and start pumping your own gas, someone runs out with a slightly panicked look and says "this is Oregon, this is Oregon!"
In addition the those given in the other answers so far, there are also gas stations on Native American reservations in Oregon and they are usually self-service.
Correct. Self-service has only been an option in rural counties (with a populated threshold), and only overnight, and even that is only relatively recent.
It was fully illegal for fuel businesses to operate self-serve stations from 1951 until very recently (like, 2017, when limited hours rural only self-serve was legalized).
This seems like a step backwards to me. If AI will make like every job obsolete then we will have to add more fake jobs like this instead of remove them. The purpose of these jobs will be to filter which people are deserving of health care and other nice things compared to the ones who aren't willing to do the fake jobs and navigate bureaucracies whose only purpose will become to filter out ones who aren't willing to persevere through them. It's how we can allocate resources in the future when capitalism is only for business-to-business purposes between AI-run corporations and everything for humans becomes similar to how 'medical devices' are currently priced and allocated, including housing, food, clothing, etc.
Yeah that's the thing for me -- I've always wanted self-service to be legal in Oregon, so I should be happy. But I haven't put gas in a car in quite a while, so I feel pretty ambivalent about this. I've been pumping my own electrons for several years.
The only excuse for the law being around so long was that it created jobs. Which was lame reasoning. They intentionally kept the gas tax lower in the state so consumers didn't notice the price difference. So effectively these were government subsidized jobs.
Good riddance. Forcing someone to stand in gas fumes all day was clearly not good for their health. And I always avoided filling up in Oregon because waiting for the "service" could sometimes be longer than the fill-up itself.