<p>I was in on travel in Jersey today and went to the gas station. As I always do I got out of the car, got out my credit card and went to start refueling my car. I was then abruptly stopped by a station attendant and told to step away from the gas pump as I’d be breaking the law if I tried to refuel my own car. I was just like, “um, excuse me?” </p>
<p>The attendant then told me that in New Jersey it’s illegal for anyone other than trained station employees to use any equipment for dispensing fuel. So I then said “So you’re telling me that the New Jersey government thinks it’s citizens are too stupid to safely operate a gas pump.” and he said “Basically, yes… that’s the way it’s always been here.”</p>
<p>He then proceeded to take my credit card and swipe it in the pump (apparently I wasn’t even allowed to do that… just incase I pushed the wrong button and blew up the gas station) and then filled up my car. These pumps were of course exactly the same as any pumps at any other gas station in the country.</p>
<p>I’ve never encountered anything so dumb before. Does any other state have such a silly law? I’d actually say the refueling process in this case was less safe since one guy was manning several pumps… he just left it on autofill so if something went wrong nobody was there to sort it out (vs doing it yourself where you can just stand by the pump and watch it). </p>
<p>There have been isolated freak accidents with static electricity igniting spilt gas in stations, but apart from dousing yourself with gas and then lighting a match it’s quite hard to really cause any sort of major safety issues whilst refuelling.</p>
<p>I know people in the Northeast like to bust on Jersey but with silly nonsense like this can you really blame them? ;-)</p>
<p>Oregon and the city of Huntington, New York, disallow self-service, too.</p>
<p>In the case of New Jersey and Oregon, yes, the reason is out of fear that “customers will handle gasoline improperly.” Huntington, New York, banned self-service to create more jobs.</p>
<p>Wow, I 've never heard of not being allowed to pump gas. I’ve been pumping my own gas since I got my license at 16. I live in a big southern suburb. I can’t think of any gas stations in our town that even offer “full service”.<br>
I thought it was a thing of the past.</p>
<p>I’m sure there’s a ‘job protection’ component behind this.</p>
<p>rocketman - I had the same reaction one time in Oregon when I tried to pump the gas and was informed I wasn’t allowed to. I actually found it laughable at the time but really, it’s inconvenient and I’m not the most patient person in the world.</p>
<p>Hey, I’m in Oregon, and I LIKE our law. It rains a lot in Oregon, and it can be pretty miserable having to get out and pump your own gas in the rain. Plus, this provides jobs, and senior citizens and the disabled don’t have to pay extra to have someone pump for them. Parents with small children don’t have to leave them untended. Every few years someone tries to pass a law allowing self-service in Oregon, and it always gets voted down. Those who want self-service say we will save money, but we look at the states around us with self service, and their gas isn’t any cheaper than ours, so we don’t bite. You may think it strange, but most Oregonians are quite happy with things the way they are.</p>
<p>Mixed emotions on this. As a New Jersey resident, I find it kind of nice on a freezing winter night to just crack the window and tell the attendant to fill it up. However, when traveling to other states, I do enjoy the speed of pumping it myself. However, most New Jersey drivers (not to be sexist, but particularly the women) would not be caught dead pumping their own gas. So, while the formal rationale is safety, the actual rationales are twofold:</p>
<ul>
<li>the residents don’t want to pump their own</li>
<li>the small station owners claim that they can’t afford extra equipment (not sure if this is actually legit, or not)</li>
</ul>
<p>I think it is mostly the fact that the residents don’t want it.</p>
<p>Economic protectionism is rarely a good thing.</p>
<p>Allocative efficiency anyone??</p>
<p>I mean, if the teenage labour (or whatever labour gets assigned to attendants) doesn’t even do anything productive, it’s more efficient to allocate it somewhere else.</p>
<p>when I am in Oregon half the time I forget about the law and jump out and pump my own anyway.
I think it is dumb, because the other half of the time I do everything but actually touch the nozzle & I have to wait for the attendant to punch the button or flip the switch.</p>
<p>Pumping your gas is a good opportunity to check your oil, your tires, clean off the windshield , none of which the attendants do.</p>
<p>The trade off of getting to sit on my a$$ in the car- ( which obviously because I was driving, I was already doing ), and " getting" to wait my turn to be waited on, isn’t worth it to me.</p>
<p>Yeah, I live in Jersey. And we aren’t allowed to pump our own gas. But we do have some of the cheapest in the nation - $ 3.72/gallon for regular.</p>
<p>But the best part is when I drive out of state…and just sit there at the pump, waiting for someone to fill it up !! It takes a few minutes before I remember where I am, and I do it myself. </p>
<p>BTW, who here still slips and asks for unleaded, instead of regular ??</p>
<p>well, if its the cheapest gas prices in the nation plus someone else is pumping it for you, I would venture to say that perhaps the New Jerseyites are a tad smarter than the rest :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Here’s one of my favorites along the same lines…</p>
<p>You drive through the Mass Pike and I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t matter where you get on, but a machine will give you your ticket.</p>
<p>Cross state lines into New York State and a real live person has to take the ticket out of the machine and hand it to you. Apparently the driver of the car isn’t capable of pulling the ticket out of the machine by himself in New York State. </p>
Yeah, Jersey has much lower gas tax than the surrounding states that accounts for the price difference… but hey if you didn’t have this silly system it’d be even cheaper! ;-)</p>
<p>
I didn’t realize the United Jersey Union of Gas Pumpers was so strong ;-). </p>
<p>Seriously though, I’m sure that’s an argument that’s used but it’s nonsense. It’s quite hard to argue that we should be forced into paying people to do a job that anyone who drives a car could easily do for themselves (and do in 48 of the 50 states). I’d expect to see this sort of thing in some socialist European countries but not here in the good old US of A. </p>
<p>
I have an exciting proposal to create jobs… We could pass a law saying that it’s illegal to put your own stamp on a letter and then pay additional staff to sit in the post office just to put stamps on letters (we certainly wouldn’t want a citizen to get a paper cut handling stamps)… an equally totally unskilled and unnecessary job. To pay for all these additional mandatory staff we’d raise the price of postage. It would create jobs, but ultimately wouldn’t really help the economy. </p>
<p>
I’d be for the passing of a law saying that a disabled individual is entitled to assistance at no additional charge (this may already be covered by the ADA or just common courtesy of gas station employees) but it’s not really justification to force everyone to pay extra for, what is everywhere else, a premium service that some people might not want to pay extra for. </p>
<p>
Just about every self-service pump I’ve used these days lets you pay at the pump so you never have to be more than a few feet from your children.</p>
<p>If you reason that this gas law will “create” jobs, you are completely disregarding the jobs destroyed as a result. If Congress passed a law making it illegal to eat at home (probably citing recent cases of food poisoning at home or some other ridiculous reason), would we be better off? No, the restaurant business (in this case gas attendants) would have a job, but people on a whole would have less money to allocate to better uses. And thus a job is destroyed (e.g. a tailor).</p>
<p>It very well may occur that hiring a gas attendant would increase marginal productivity more than marginal costs, but I doubt it is possible because of:
Gas stations making slim profits (the stations are privately owned and operated; they are not the one’s making “record profits”)
Minimum wage laws make it impossible to hire people for low skill uses</p>
<p>You can count me as one of the NJ drivers who likes the “no customer gas pumping” law. Your hands stay clean and in the winter you stay warm. The first time I had to pump my own was in Maine and a friend accompanied me to the station to teach me how. The next time I had to do so my S in NY accompanied me. I finally got the hang of it in CA. I have never understood why our fuel prices are conspicuously lower in NJ when it is the attendant who is doing the work.</p>
<p>BTW, who was the genius who designed every thruway rest stop in NYS (those that I have visited anyway) so that you cannot get to the restrooms to wash your hands after you have personally filled the fuel tank?</p>
<p>As a Jersey girl born and bred (with a masters degree), I will say that in my day, those gas pumping jobs were the best ones to be had if you were working one (or MORE) jobs to get through school. And the person who posted that we wouldn’t want to pump our gas ourselves, well…let’s just say that this Jersey girl knew how to pump gas, change oil, and I did change a prep school frat boy college classmate’s tire for him on the Garden State Parkway once since he didn’t know how…</p>
<p>Another NJ resident that happlily does not pump her on gas here.
Stupid or not, it IS the law and the attendant was doing his job.
Lucky for the OP he paid even less for the gas he purchased in NJ and did not have to pump it himself:)</p>
<p>On my way down to Virginia though, I’ll remind my mother to make the gas stop in Jersey.</p>
<p>I believe the price is only higher in Maine because of gas taxes (we have an inflation-adjusted tax on gas, and it’s about 50-70 cents, I believe…)</p>
), and " getting" to wait my turn to be waited on, isn’t worth it to me.</p>