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notduncansmith

Are you allowed to charge your own electric vehicle in Oregon, or are attendants required as they are at gas stations?

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Oh you.

In all seriousness, charging a car is far safer than filling it with gas; no attendants needed!

* so long as you believe the premise of the law

It’s a valid question — I was wondering the same.

The premise of the law is a jobs program, is it not?

No one could reasonably look at the other 48.5 states and conclude that self-service fueling is dangerous. They could reasonably say “we want to structure fueling to protect bullshit jobs.”

I think if you look at insurance costs, you could find the answer to whether or not self-service fueling is more dangerous or not.

Or you could answer whether insurance is rent seeking that's parasitic on society. I don't know the details so could be wrong, but if insurance is mandated by government and supplied by an oligopoly, it's fees don't necessarily reflect the actual risk involved. It's easy to see comparisons of different health/car insurance costs across jurisdictions to see that.

Well, yes, I think if that's how you feel about insurance and the supposed lack of a functioning free market, you have to resolve that question first before using it as an indication of actual risk.

The premise of the law is safety, or at least it was when it was enacted generations ago. It’s function is as a jobs program though.

The first time I filled up in Oregon after moving into the state, the attendant pulled the nozzle out of my truck while it was still filling up. Gas all over my truck and the ground. The manager came up and apologized, saying it was his first day on the job. The kid was probably still in high school, and the first day he ever had to fill a car up.

And there I was sitting in my truck realizing I had about over 25 years "job" experience for what this kid was doing, and I had never done that.

I hear these stories all the time from people, and don’t doubt this happened to you but I have lived in Oregon almost my whole life and this has never happened to me or anyone I personally know.

Of course it would never happen to you. You grew up in OR, so you never tried to pump your own gas. That situation only happens to people from out of state who come to OR and start pumping their own gas, not knowing the law against it.

Yeah its a bit ironic. I remember being a young kid and my dad showing me how to pump gas. I assume that's normal for everyone outside Oregon and (New Jersey?). It's funny that such a common thing is somehow a rare piece of knowledge in some places. Reminds me of the story of Newton (or some other deep thinking mathematician) going somewhere and realizing he didn't know how to butter toast.

Edit: I looked it up, the toast story is Erdős

http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/erdos.html

Makes me wonder: Is fuel in Oregon more expensive than surrounding states because of this (after accounting for diffential fuel taxes and labor costs)?

Or does the cost just get absorbed into the supplier chain and cost consumers nothing while creating a few jobs in the process?

> Is fuel in Oregon more expensive than surrounding states

Nope. From what I hear, the increased cost of insurance for self-service is in the same ballpark as hiring a few attendants. So it's a wash.

The insurance cost being lower such that it offsets labor costs is obviously not true.

If it were true, then there would be a business opportunity in the other 48 states for a gas station to sell full service gas at the same price as others are selling self service at. But it never, ever occurs, so it is trivial to prove the labor costs are material and would result in higher gas prices that people are not willing to pay for.

If it's a wash economically, then self-service is still the better choice because it eliminates the other less-insurable risks that come with having employees.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to tell, because in the other 48 states, full service is considered a premium service and they charge extra for it because a certain segment of consumers will pay for it. That doesn't mean it's actually more expensive.

>full service is considered a premium service and they charge extra for it because a certain segment of consumers will pay for it.

This is disproven by the fact that in my 3+ decades of travel around many US states, I have never seen a gas station attendant outside of NJ and OR. No one is willing to pay the premium necessary to employ attendants, and so they will reward the gas station owner selling self serve for cheaper.

There certainly exists a population of people who would like to have others pump their gas for them. If gas station attendant labor costs made no effect on bottom line gas prices, then gas station owners would try to court these people by selling full service gas at the same price as self service.

Since it does not happen, the premise of negligible labor costs must be false.

> From what I hear, the increased cost of insurance for self-service is in the same ballpark as hiring a few attendants. So it's a wash.

Possible hypotheses:

1) Every single gas station in the US not in Oregon or New Jersey is run by complete idiots who can't figure out a way to make full service gas profitable despite the fact that "it's a wash."

2) What you heard is not correct.

Not sure I'm following you here. We're talking about the costs of doing business and how that might reflect in the retail price of gasoline. At this moment the price of gasoline in Washington is less than one penny different from Oregon. This whole discussion is hypothetical, of course, because there is a lot more that goes into the cost & price of gasoline than just employee wages and liability insurance. But to the original question of "is gas more expensive in Oregon?" the answer is "No."

> Not sure I'm following you here.

What I'm pointing out is that the issue is not that insurance and labor costs wash each other out, or the rest of the country would have more than zero full-service stations.

Here is a recent academic paper that models the cost of labor: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4064061

The price of gas in Oregon is more expensive than in neighboring states, except California, due to increase taxes on fuel in that state. In general, taxes probably explain much more of the difference in gas costs than insurance does. I'm not an expert, but it's not clear to me why insurance would cost more for a self-service station than for a full service station, so if you have a source that explains this, I'd appreciate reading it.

I grew up in Oregon, and my real first job was as a gas station attendant. In my experience, fuel was more expensive in Washington, Idaho, and California (all the surrounding states). So while it doesn’t make the fuel more expensive, it does make running a gas station more labor intensive. Of course we know how corporations feel about having to put up with labor!

I am looking at the Costco app and gas prices are $0.25 per gallon cheaper in Vancouver, WA compared to all the gas stations in and around Portland in Oregon.

Oregon gas tax is ~$0.38 per gallon ($0.10 extra in Portland). Washington is $0.494 per gallon.

The claim that labor costs for full service gas are not reflected in prices at the pump that customers pay for a low margin fungible good like gas is ridiculous to me. Even more trivial is the proof by way of 48 other states having no full service gas stations, with the only possible reason being that people do not want to pay the extra cost for someone else to fill their gas.

Or people would rather pump their own gas.

I live in Oregon, and usually I'd rather pump my own than wait for the attendant to start pumping, then wait again for them when pumping is done. I appreciate being able to do it myself on trips out of state (or in rural Oregon, where in some places self-service is now legal).