Old Gas Pumps Roll Over and Die as Gas Hits $4 a Gallon

Old fashioned gas pumps with rolling mechanical dials are throwing in the towel. As gas rises to $4 a gallon and beyond, these dinosaurs are admitting defeat – they only go up to $3.999 per gallon and can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale. That’s leaving owners of old gas stations out of luck, since upgrading them to new pumps isn’t an option for most of them.

From MSNBC:

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.

The companies that make or rebuild the parts needed to update the pumps are backlogged with orders right now from stations that have enough money to retrofit their existing pumps. New pumps cost as much as $10,000 to $15,000 each, an expense that most gas station owners can’t afford considering they barely make a profit on gas despite high gas prices.

To deal with the problem, some states are allowing gas stations to charge by the half gallon and settle up the price with a calculator. Other stations will have to temporarily close down and many will likely go out of business.

All of this just contributes to the perception (and hopefully fact) that oil is on its way out. These mechanical gas pumps represent an old way that just doesn’t work anymore. Time to move on!  It’s sad for the owners of these gas stations, though - hopefully they’ll find a way to land on their feet.

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Flickr user Mykl Roventine

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