Many old gas pumps can't record gas prices higher than $3.99 a gallon or a total greater than $99.99. [Link]Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can’t register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.It's Y2K for gas.The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.
Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.
As many as 8,500 of the nation’s 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.
1 comment:
One would think, that the record windfall profits recorded Big Oil, they'd be willing to throw a few crumbs to the stations owners to get newer pumps. These stations are, after all, selling their gasoline.
C'mon, whaddaya say, Shell, BP, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron? Wanna pony up .00000000001% of your enormous windfall profits and help out the people who are just barely eking out a living peddling your product?
This is insane. I'ts kind of like having to take a job at McDonalds and being forced to buy your own uniform.
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