It's amazingly rare to find gas stations that don't require prepay these days... but about three months ago I pulled off at a rural gas station, pretty remote area but two fairly new electronic pumps. The pumps seemed like they nominally accepted cards but the reader was taped over like a temporary problem, so I walked inside and put a bill on the counter and told them to put it on number one like you do... The clerk gave me a look like he had no idea what I was doing. Told me to go back outside and pump gas first so there was something to pay for (I think "so there's something to pay for" were his exact words).

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).