Fill 'er up...

By Libby

Ah, the beauty of the free market. A careless keystroke by an employee of a Kangaroo convenience store allowed drivers to pay 35 cents a gallon for premium gas for a whole day. At 9:00am an employee inadvertently set the bargain rate at the pump. The beauty of the story is that no one at the store figured it out until 6:00pm when word of mouth sent hundreds flocking to the station to take advantage of the bargain rate.

I find it hilarious that it took the store ten hours to figure it out and fix it. A direct result of the corporatization of the convenience stores I'd guess. It's rare to find a privately owned one anymore. They join conglomerates in order to survive in a 'free market' that favors corporate buying power.

Whoever made the mistake was probably a close to minimum wage employee and it took a long time to fix because the store had to get permission from the regional manager to change the price. One expects that's because there is some kind of blocking system that prevents them from changing it more than once a day to prevent inside theft. In any event, one of the clerks is blaming the public for the long duration of the mistaken price.

“People had been coming in all day stiffing us, not telling us nothing,” Weller said. “They knew something was wrong because regular gas was still $3-something a gallon, and when have you ever known premium gas to be lower than regular?”

You might also have thought that the clerks would notice a lot of people suddenly buying ten bucks worth of gas instead of thirty or more when it still took just as long to fill up but leaving that aside, what would do if you suddenly discovered 35 cent gas? Would you tell the clerk or tell your friends?

Comments

[Rainbow Demon]

This is hilarious, Libby. Thanks for a great laugh.

Man, that just took me back to when I used to be a gas-jockey. It really was 35 cents a gallon then.

Peace,
=RD=

[Libby]

I remember too RD. In fact I crossposted the link to The Impolitic and put up my remininscences about the great gas war of 71 there.