Standard Mischief

This is just some hints from a consumer to all you discount gas sellers, you know who you are, you self-serving, fuel loss-leaders, who also sell sodas, snacks and sandwiches.

Look, I’m no dummy, normally I like going to your stations. I like paying at the pump, but I’m not fooled for one second when your pumps run out of receipt paper.

Far too many times I’ve ended up swiping, filling, replacing the nozzle, and requesting a receipt, only to then be informed by the pump of a “printer error — please see attendant”. The station I stopped by today had the two people, besides myself, in front of me both needing a receipt handcraftly printed out by a busy sales-droid. While I was inside delayed, waiting for a receipt, I was also parked outside blocking a fuel pump.

I’m not asking you to change the message to something like “our attendant is too lazy to refill the printer paper, you are gonna have to go inside, sucka!”. I was just thinking perhaps you could inform your customer beforehand, instead of after step 4.

Here’s an idea that I’d like to pass on for free. How about adding a lamp, visible from inside the customers car, that shows the status of the pump? Green means go, yellow for out of paper, and flashing red for out-of-order. I’d like to assure you that most drivers are at least somewhat familiar with what these colors mean. Even if the message was lost on the driver, you could also use that status LCD panel to convey messages like “ready, press cash or credit” or “press cash or credit, receipt given inside” or “sorry, out of service”.

That’s an idea that, if you happen to be a mega-global petroleum refining, distributing, and retailing corporation, might even be worth patenting. Hey, I’ve seen sillier patents out there. (Too bad this little blog probably counts as prior art.)

Another idea: have one multicolor light for each flavor of fuel your pumps dispense. That way, your customers can see from the comfort of their vehicles that you happen to be all out (in all your pumps) of regular, and will have to either pick the medium or well done flavors. Just think, all the time your sales-droids save from not having to cobble up homemade out-of-order illegible signs could be productively used to clean the restrooms, or ring up that busy commuter that much faster, or even to refill the receipt printer on your gas pumps.

And speaking of fuel stations, here’s an idea that won’t fly if I have anything to say about it.

[RFID reader, found at (trying to keep this clean, here) Excrementz. Similar to the Speedpass system, but embedded in a credit card instead of a keyfob]

You guys call it a “contact-less smart card reader”. I call it a promiscuous tracking RFID tag. I’m more than willing to use the gold contact type of smart card, and that type is already an order of magnitude more reliable than the magnetic strip. The contact type smart card won’t betray itself until I’ve placed it in the card reader. The promiscuous tracking RFID smart card will sound off whenever asked, unbeknownst to me.

[contact type of smart card, from Wikipedia]

Look, I know you’re so interested in me, and you want to place my whole retail history away in some data center somewhere just in case you ever feel the need to find out exactly how many bottles of coca-corrosive I buy during the weeks of daylight saving time - whether or not I pay with cash, or how well that new flavor of sour cream and salsa pork rinds is doing in my particular demographic, but your (complete lack of any) data retention policy unnerves me.

Most of the time I totally trust the multi-national amoral corporation thingys with all my most personal data, especially if they have a multi-million dollar ad campaign where they pay actors to pretend that they are regular people just like me, only better looking, expressing their heartfelt opinion that their preferred brand of fuel depot is a good neighbor. That impresses me a lot.

But I tend to go with my gut feeling here, and my gut feeling is that I want you to sell gas on the open market as cheaply as possible, provide me with the types of amenities a person like me needs, like clean restrooms and tire air machines that actually work, get me in and out quickly, if that’s what I want, and leave me and the minutia of my daily life the hell alone.