No cameras 20-30 years ago.
Yes, there were video surveillance cameras in the 1980s, hooked into VCRs for playback. And many places used them, including stores and gas stations. That's how gas stations could track down people who filled up and ran. Toll booths had them too.
Even before VCRs were cheap enough, there were film-based surveillance cameras. https://archive.org/details/armedrobberyoffe0000macd/page/22... from 1975 gives examples, including at a donut store.
(And it mentions a bank where they pressed the button to film a robbery, then after developing the film found it had taken pictures of the Christmas party months before, when the button was pressed by accident.)
I mean, we had webcams by the mid 1990s. It's not like Exxon couldn't afford something better for their stations.
I mean, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 I remember seeing many video clips of the vehicle making its way to the building. Checking now, https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-oklahoma-city-... says "A 1999 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by investigative journalist David Hoffman revealed that the FBI had twenty-two video surveillance recordings of the Murrah building and surrounding area stored at the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office." Its Wikipedia entry links to https://web.archive.org/web/20170510090822/http://newsok.com... saying "Agents also examined more than 900 security videotapes".
If most cameras 'very frequently didn't work' then that means there were huge amounts of non-working cameras in the area. Which seems like an expensive waste of money.
I can well believe that some cameras didn't work - I already mentioned the bank robbery where the cameras had run out film months previously.
In any case, the original claim "No cameras 20-30 years ago" is simply not true.
But a gas station for a major chain seems exactly the place that would have working cameras, because you're going to get people who fill up and drive away without paying.
It's really hard to know if my memory is faulty, so I looked for images of gas stations from the 1990s.
Zoom in on this picture from a Citgo in 1998 and you'll see four cameras hung from the ceiling - one pointing each direction, for each of the pumping islands. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-citgo-stat...
On the other hand, the five or so other US stations I found, from the same time frame, don't have an apparent camera. (Which doesn't mean they weren't there, though that seems unlikely.)
So .. I don't know. But I can say that at least some gas stations had video cameras going, and I don't place much weight in your argument that they "very frequently didn't work".
In the mid-1990s someone had a fender bender with a co-worker's car in the parking lot. The building had roof cameras, and he was able to get security to review the video the next day. However, it didn't have the detail for that purpose. So my anecdotal evidence is that it wasn't all that hard to have a working system 20+ years ago.
After all, it wasn't all that expensive for Jennicam to get started at that time, with automatic image capture and uploads.
Still, this picture of a Citgo from 1998 shows four exterior cameras at a gas station, at each end of both islands. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-citgo-stat... .
I'm therefore not willing to accept "No cameras 20-30 years ago" as an unconditionally true statement.