Old Gas Pumps Can’t Handle Ever-Rising Prices
May 13th, 2008Via: AP:
REARDAN, Wash. (AP) — 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.
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.
At Chip Colville’s Chevron station in this eastern Washington town, where men in the family have pumped gas since 1919, three stubby, gray pumps were installed when gas was less than $1 a gallon. They top out at $3.999, only 30 cents above the price of regular gas at Colville’s station.
“In small towns, where you don’t have the volume, there’s no way you can afford to pay for the replacements for these old pumps,” Colville said. “It’s just not economically feasible.”
The problem is worse in extremely rural areas, where “this might be the only pump in town that people can access,” said Mike Rud, director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.
Demand for replacements has caused a months-long backlog for companies that make or rebuild the mechanical meters — and that’s just for stations that can afford the upgrade.
For many station owners — who, because of relatively small profit margin on gas, aren’t raking in money even though gas prices are marching higher — replacing the pumps altogether with electronic ones is just not an option.
“The new ones run between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece,” Colville said. “It’s an expense that’s not worth it.”
Mechanical meters can be retrofitted with higher numbers when pump prices climb another dollar. The last time that happened was in late 2005, when gas went over $3 a gallon, and owners of the older pumps installed kits that went to $3.999.
This time around, owners of the old pumps will need to install another kit that can handle prices up to $4.999, and possibly higher. Industry experts say those changes could cost as much as $650 per pump.
Glad you brought this issue up, Kevin, because it is going to be harder for rural and remote country store gas pumps to be upgraded than even this article suggests. Our community store just got a “new” (actually, about ten years old) set of gas pumps (one diesel, one regular) late 2007 after trying to get them for about four years. But the store lucked out when a store in town went out of business and sold them their pumps for about a thousand each, which, of course, had to be recalibrated anyway. As for recalibration, that is problematic even for rural pump owners who do have newer pumps, because if the pumps are too far out into the country, it might take months for some caibrater from the city to come out there!
I suspect that rural remoter pump owners who can’t get newer or recalibrated pumps will have to use the solution the community store used (until the old pumps simply wore out, about 2 years before we got the new ones): tell customers that they’ll have to bring their own 5 gallon gas cans (or 2 gallon or whatever) to fill, and that way they know pretty much how much gas was pumped, and price accordingly. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Surely the pumps still measure the volume correctly. They could then do a manual calculation. Even easier if the price on the pump is the actual price divided by 10, just multiply the final pump price by 10 to get the actual price.
That solution relies on the assumption people in USALAND still know how to do math.
I think there may be a printing calculator boom
if this is applied.
Looks like we are going to get a test of the coming gas shortages or its just more market manipulation,by the unseen hand.
Multiple pipeline ruptures in SF BAY 10% of their gas comes there this way sources inform me.