For some reason I always think of this commercial when I am pumping gas, and how outdated it is. I feel like most people pay using a card now, and those that don’t usually have to pre-pay now, so the gas would shut off when they hit their amount anyway.
I do remember trying to hit round numbers pumping gas when I was younger, though.
Years ago—late nineties—long after almost all pumps had CC readers in them, at least in Miami where I lived at the time, and those that didn't were at least electronically connected to the attendant booth, I pulled off at a station in rural Georgia.
Old-style pumps with a mechanical display. You didn't have to pay first. I filled my tank, then went inside to pay.
The attendant asked me how much I'd pumped. I hadn't thought to remember the amount.
I said something like "oh, let me go check for you."
He replies "no need", then pulls out a pair of binoculars and reads the amount off the pump.
Recently, I get annoyed by a pump in NY that wouldn't accept any of my cards or my iPhone. It made me miss those days of mechanical pumps.
I can only assume this is a joke he plays on out-of-towners. Either that or some kind of temporal anomaly has happened and I bought gas in the '90s.
For how commodity gas is it's kind of surprising the number of strange gas station stories I've accumulated over years in the rural southwest, but I suppose that's exactly why. A lot of towns have a gas station because they're a long ways from the next one, not because they actually have a lot of business. The consolidation of gas stations into the modern four-pump-plus with convenience store lead to a lot of older one-pump stations closing, but the ones that held on got stranger. So you end up with oddities like a restaurant that runs a couple pumps in the parking lot on the side, so paying cash requires flagging down a waiter (this was, if memory serves, actually on the outskirts of Silver City and so not even really that remote by regional standards).
Interestingly here in Canada I have the opposite experience; it seems like only stations in high-crime and super high-volume locations require it. There's ~10-12 stations I frequent and only one requires pre-payment, and even then only between 11p-5a.
Another thing that got me the first time I visited the US, what's the deal with pumps requiring a ZIP code? I know the "trick for Canadians" (the three digits of your postal code followed by 00, i.e. A1B 2C3 becomes a "valid zip code" of 12300) but it seems like a pointless extra step and a potential privacy issue.
Requiring the zip code is just a barrier to that
Amusingly debit cards tend to be less of a pain this way since the North American countries are mostly on the same interbank network and the rules have changed less over time.
don't you mean how prescient it was? it was literally making the point that credit cards were the new way to pay, and as you point out, it came to pass
By the time I started driving, the law required pay-before at all gas stations. So I don't really get what the problem is. How does having the card make things different for Jerry? If he didn't have it, wouldn't he just give the clerk 37 cents and be just as well off?
At the gas pump, you could control how much you spent precisely. So many folks would slow down their pumps as they approached $10 or $20 or whatever amount they needed and then stop on the even number.
In the commercial, pay-at-the-pump is a new and novel feature, so Jerry can fill his tank up to the top without worrying about dealing with the nickels and dimes.
Also, if you break a dollar bill and get change, that change will likely end up in a change jar, which keeps it out of circulation for you and also takes time to wrap into rolls to trade in (they didn't have coinstar back then)
Never did.
But after trying to hit $20 I’d just go back to letting it fill my tank.