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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 sport utility vehicles, vans, trucks and other gas-guzzlers to fill their tanks all the way…
“If gas is the profit driver and you are one of those guys with the old pumps, you’re either evolving or getting out.”
The local filling station owner continues to go the way of the passenger pigeon.
If this issue doesn’t make clear to you what a pyramid scheme is, nothing will.
How hard would it be to modify the old pumps to calculate the price based on half-gallons? It would at least solve the 3.99 maximum per unit price.
Sheesh. I thought they solved this problem 30 years ago when gas first went over $0.99/gallon. And wtf kind of mechanical pump would have a spinning dial that only goes up to 3? The one in the picture has plenty of 9s in it.
#3 – It’s only 4 digits moran.
Just think, if they removed the 9/10 part of the price. Thats OK, now they sell cheaper gas if you pay cash. Guess gas stations are better robbery targets than banks for bundles of small bills eh! Lets just abandon the world here and move over to the sand in Dubai.. You could continue to drive that pick up, but the 15 year old sweetie has to go.
You lot should try living over here in the UK where gas prices have reached £5 per gallon or in your language about $10 a gallon. I know our gallons are slightly bigger than yours (1 us gallon equals about 1.2 uk gallons, but hey, the price difference between the two countries is enormous. We would love to be paying what you pay for gas!!!
>>It’s only 4 digits moran.
Start making sense, you watery soup of shit.
what’s a passenger pigeon?
Last time around the old pumps wouldn’t go past $2.99. The small stations placed a sign on each pump stating that the cost was twice the what the pump showed.
Back then people could mutiply by two.
Answer,look it up your online for gods sake.
Do these folks still use a rotary phone?
Survival of the fittest will take care of the problem.
ROFLMAO!! Could this be another new inducement to better fuel efficiency?
#8 – the answer,
The sky was once filled with them. The would appear in flocks large enough to blot out the sky like a huge cloud.
People shot them for fun and to eat them.
They found it amusing to watch as the birds, who paired for life, would try in vain to hold up their lovers who’d been shot.
Estimates of their former numbers are in the billions.
Don’t worry, you’ll never be asked to identify that bird. It’s extinct. We overate and overkilled them for a variety of reasons and were unsuccessful at rescuing them once we realized our stupidity.
Damn homo sapiens ruin everything.
#3 – Mister Mustard,
Without the snark, if you look at the photo, you’ll notice that the gallons and price displays each have a full range of decimal digits for each position. This means that the total sale can go up to $99.99 or 999.9 gallons.
However, the price per gallon is the little numbers at the bottom. It appears that the initial digit on that display does not have the full range of decimal digits.
Even digital gas pumps may have some of these issues depending on the number of digits in the display. Though, it seems unlikely that they’d have a smaller range for the first digit of the price.
From this photo, it looks like the digital pump will have trouble with a price above 9.999/gallon. The total sale number looks unlikely to be a problem for a while. I can’t really tell how many digits fit on the screen though.
http://tinyurl.com/5cg9dh
Just cut the price in half and set the pump to a half gallon or cut in half and put a ” x 2″ sign next to the price. Problem solved.
Looks to me the fuel counter down at the fuel pump needs a 10 to 1 reduction gear and the $ display one number wheel replaced, then move the decimal point to the right on the face plate. That easy. We had one pump with clock display (from 1954) in use up till 1994, many people could not believe what they saw. It never ran out of numbers, but we had to keep on eye at how many 200 liter barrels were filled.
Funny that back in the 1970s when we (the US) was actually moving toward the metric system, gas first went over $1 a gallon, and some stations began to sell by the liter. (I didn’t say we could spell the metric system!)
Apparently, this was an easier conversion for the old dial pumps that were virtually universal at that time than modifying the dials.
Well, it backfired.
Why?
Because at the time, gasoline prices were going up fast, and having to stop and do the calculation to see how much you were being ripped off just lead folks to buy from other stations pricing by the gallon.
I don’t know this to be true, but I also suspect that the gas by the liter episode spooked many Americans on the metric system, and we live with the consequences today.
So, although pricing by the liter might be a cheap technical fix for these stations, the time to do it is NOT when prices are rising dramatically. Unless, of course you are the only station in town :).
Better buy an Electric Car – Your electric meter can spin forever without running out of digits – or GET A BIKE !!!
#17 – JimD,
Bicycles are a great idea whose time has really come. For many people, the commute is too far by bike though. And, there may not be a train station near either end of their commute.
Now there’s an answer. I bought one of these just for the reduced space at home and the ability to keep it under my desk at work.
However, for the train crowd with bad train options, you can ride one of these to the station, fold it, take it with you, unfold it, ride to the office, fold it and put it under your desk. It folds in about a minute.
http://tinyurl.com/3st543
What really amazes me though is not that they make bikes that fold. What amazes me is that when you unfold them, you have a bike you’d actually want to ride!
I love mine. I’m faster than about 90% of the riders in Manhattan’s west side bike path along the river. And, at 44 years old, that feels pretty cool. The little old guy on the folding bike does OK.
On the bottom the first wheel has a 0,1,2, and 3 on it. The price is changed by moving the wheel to one of the digits. The other two wheels have the integers 0-9 on them so they aren’t a problem.