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Numbers' End: Old gas pumps can't handle modern prices
AP Photo
Chip Colville, whose family service station has pumped gas since 1919, shows his pump meter, which can go only as high as $3.99.
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Published: May 13, 2008
REARDAN, Wash.
Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline heads toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps cannot register more than $3.99 on their mechanical dials.
The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are scraping by.
Many of the same pumps can count only up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.
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, the 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, the director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.
Demand for replacements has caused a months-long backlog for companies that make or rebuild the mechanical meters -- and that is just for stations that can afford the upgrade.
For many station owners -- who, because of relatively small profit margin on gas, are not raking in money even though gas prices are rising -- replacing the pumps altogether with electronic ones is just not an option.
"The new ones run between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece," Colville said. "It's an expense that's not worth it."
Mechanical meters can be retrofitted with higher numbers when pump prices climb another dollar. The last time that happened was in late 2005, when gas went over $3 a gallon, and owners of the older pumps installed kits that went to $3.999.
This time around, owners of the old pumps will need to install another kit that can handle prices up to $4.999, and possibly higher. Industry experts say those changes could cost as much as $650 a pump.
The price of fixing the meters rose sharply over the past three years because old pumps are being phased out for electronic pumps and demand for refurbished meters is down, said Al Eichorn, the vice president of PMP Corp., which makes the mechanical meters.
The company, in Avon, Conn., has hired extra employees who are working overtime but still has a 14-week backlog of orders, Eichorn said.
To deal with the problem, some state regulators are allowing half-pricing -- displaying the price for a half-gallon of gas, then doubling the price shown on the meter.
In North Dakota, regulators recently told service stations that their mechanical pumps could use half-pricing, provided they use signs to alert costumers and find a permanent solution by April 2009.
South Dakota is preparing similar rules, officials say. In Minnesota, rural service-station owners cover up the incorrect price and calculate the total price based on the gallons dispensed.
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