New gas price signs are electronic - Why??

So there I was putting $8,976 worth of gas into the Girl Jalopy the other day, it was when I noticed that the street sign the station had out front had been changed.  Not the pricing mind you but the mechanism itself.  In days of old the signs were a pretty manual operation, with plastic or metal numbers that were arranged in the correct order to let us know the price per gallon.  Some employee would wander out there every once in a blue moon and rearrange the numbers with a pole that had a suction cup on the end of it when the price of gas went up, all of them but that 9/10ths of a cent (I will talk about that later).

I was talking to the manager of the Gate station where I stop for gas most times, and she told me that she has changed the price on her street sign up to 5 times in one day.  I was completely shocked by this – 5 times in one day, REALLY???  That had more to do with competition with a neighboring Hess station than the anything to do with the cost of a barrel of oil.  So out she went, five times with her pole suction cup and pulled all the numbers off the regular, mid-grade and high test prices, on both sides of the sign and changed them.  She explained that she was not tremendously happy with Corporate that on that day.  Those types of signs are all I really remember, I am 46 but I bet there was some other method before that, or maybe you just drove in and the attendant told you what the cost was before filling the tank and cleaning your windows.  I do remember that and I do remember liking it when someone did clean the windows, I hate cleaning the windows.

I will swing out on a tangential course for a second and talk about the barrel of oil.  Back in the early days of oil production up in Pennsylvania they had nothing to store the oil in so they started using old whiskey barrels, which at that time were either 40 gallons or 45 gallons.  Cheap free barrels that were a left over from some other industry, those early Americans were an ingenious lot that gives a whole new meaning to the going green.   The origins of the 42-gallon oil barrel that is used today for measuring oil are somewhat obscure.  Best I can tell it happened around 1866 when the oil producers were trying to eliminate confusion by standardizing the size of the barrels.  The agreed that a standard 40 gallon allotment would be what a barrel of oil held.  To be fair they added 2 gallons to ensure that any measurement errors would always be in the buyer's favor as an additional way of assuring buyer confidence, apparently on the same principle as is behind the bakers dozen.  By 1872 the standard oil barrel was firmly established as 42 US gallons.  I suppose when talking about the oil spill in the gulf it was easier to say we spilled 430,000 barrels instead of using a unit of measure we can all understand, like 18,060,000 gallons, over 18 million gallons.

So back to the electronic gas pump signs.  When the street sign was a manual apparatus they also had to change the electronics for the pump itself, a two-step operation.  Change the sign, and then change the pumps “brains” to start actually charging the new price.  Back in the day to change the price on the pump it was a manual operation that required someone with some tools to open the pump up and change a set of gears, they were strictly mechanical.   So they would change out the gears and that change in gear ratio would cause the cost numbers on the pump to match up with the gallons pumped using the new price.  Can you imagine a clerk from your gas station actually going out to the pump and changing the gear ratio on the dials – makes me laugh to even consider it. 

So back to that 9/10ths, I could not find out a lot about when this started, it seems that the practice originated at least as far back as the 1920s or 1930s.  That was about the time Henry Ford started pumping out tin lizzies, the venerable model T and the price was an impossible to believe 290 bucks, even using todays numbers that is only 3,800 bucks, he pumped out over 15 million of those cars.  Anyway, some say that the fractional pricing was introduced in response to federal gasoline taxes, others say that tiny price changes of a tenth of a cent were more significant back when a gallon of gasoline didn't cost much more than a dime. For whatever the reason we are still stuck with it and for no real reason I could find.  I would like to think that that extra 9/10ths of a cent is put into a fund to combat oil spills, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico recently. 

So now we have the electronic gas station sign out by the street, allowing them to change the price at the pump with nothing more than a few keyboard pecks and a click of the mouse.  The pumps are now tied to the sign at the street, when the sign is changed, the price at the pump is changed.  I am still not sure how but they must not be able to do that while someone is pumping gas, that would send me into a tirade.  Start pumping at 3.49 a gallon and by the time I am done be paying $3.55 a gallon.  I suspect that the pump only changes after the current user has completed his transaction.   Not sure what the world has come to, I mean we live in a world where it is important to be able to change the price of gas as many times as we wish in any specific day.  When you think about that for a while it will make you just sit in dumbfounded amazement, or at least it did me. 

So before filling up the tank, look at the price and verify it has not changed by the time you complete pumping operations.