why do I still go here?

[Big IV]

I rode away asking myself, "why do I still stop here?"

I whipped out of the Lynn's Stop & Shop with my blood boiling and my Valk still nearly dry and thirsty.

I know why I started shopping here. Lynn was a sweet older woman that ran the store with her boyfriend. After Hurricane Andrew and Floyd and some other hurricanes she would find a stage and sponsor blue grass jam sessions to raise money for the hurricane victims. I always thought it was cool that she was giving to charity and helping others. So I started stopping there for gas occasionally.

She was sweet. She was very grandmotherly.  She was not a young woman.  She had dyed hair that we all knew wasn't natural. She perched on a stool behind the counter and talked to everybody. Her boyfriend, who had a grey burt reynolds mustache was always puttering around stocking the shelves. He too was not a young man.

It was a family oriented small gas station.

Then she died. It all got a little weird after that.
Turns out, she was married, not to the boyfriend that we all knew, but to another man that lived somewhere else, and inherited the gas station, but was ticked at her for flaunting her boyfriend there. Okay, that is a bit odd. It made sense that the husband would just shut the doors and close up.

The gas station is built on a hill, so it has a full basement. The boyfriend lived there below. It makes sense he'd be kicked out of the small basement apartment. But as he was leaving is when they discovered that Lynn (sweet grandmotherly type) and the boyfriend (imagine Burt Reynolds with a grey mustache) were making and selling amature porn.  Yup. That provides me with varicose vein laden mental pics that I don't want to picture. I wouldn't know, but I have it on good authority that she was quite acrobatic despite the grandmotherly appearance.

The store sat closed for a few years. You could look through the glass doors and see dust settling on the food on the shelves.

Then it reopened. The husband had finally sold the store.  They reopened. I stopped in, because it was on my way nearly everywhere, and bought gas. I reached for a pack of crackers only to find that they were expired. They had re-opened without restocking the shelves. They claimed that they were waiting on the distributors to come back. The shelves were dusty and full of out of date junk food. That made me concerned about the gas I had just pumped, but it worked out.

I didn't go back for a while. They did a good business. I just didn't go back.

Then they put in the fancy pay at the pump pumps. So I stopped in. Worked well. What was really nice was that I could pump gas before they opened and pay a the pump in the wee hours of the morning when I wanted to hit the road earlier. So they became my early morning gas stop.

So that is why I stopped there for a long time, because they were the late night early morning gas stop.

Then the pay at the pumps started getting tricky. The last few times I've tried to pay at the pump (pulled in because I didn't want to get off the bike) and have to go in and sort it out with them to get my gas pump turned on and pay for gas.

Yesterday I pulled up. I swiped my card. The machine told me to come inside. I stepped inside. He told me how much I owed him. I had yet to pump anything, I had only been trying to pre-pay. He tried for a good five minutes to charge me for the person before. Not me. Not mine. He finally realized his error. Never apologized, but he did clear the screen. He wanted me to pre-pay inside. I didn't have cash. He wanted to go ahead  and run my card. Okay. How much did I want? 4.8 gallons.  No. He wanted me to tell him a dollar figure. Okay. But I wasn't the one with the calculator. I asked to borrow the calculator to see what 4.8 gallons or so of gas would cost. Nope that's not for customer use. He finally just told me to go use the credit card reader on the machine. Well, I had been trying that. He said it would work now that he'd reset it. Fair enough. I went back outside. Tried several times to get it to work.

Everybody has a bad day. This is about the third time I've went through this entire process.

Finally?

I pulled always disgruntled, with my blood boiling and my Valk still nearly dry and thirsty, thinking, "why do I still stop here?"

[Willow]

John, a helpful suggestion:

Use Mozilla Firefox.  It has a built in spell checker.  Otherwise you could type your longer posts in a true word processor and do the cut and paste operation to move it to the board.

A spell checker won't help with the grammar and syntax but will catch some of the spelling errors.  It will fail to catch words that are incorrectly spelled but good as another word.  It would, however, catch coutner and amerature.

Good fortune in your pursuit of excellence.

[hubcapsc]

 * I pulled aways disgruntled, with my blood boiling and my Valk still nearly dry and thirsty, thinking, "why do I still stop here?"

Really. Why do you? Whenever the pump tells me I have to go in and see the
manager, I move on to the next place.

My corner store is one of those family places, not open on Sunday, they don't sell beer. They don't have
pay at the pump, but they turn on the pump when they see me (or whatever other regular customer) show
up. They don't make pron in the basement (it is a slab building)...

I fear the day it changes hands and turns into your corner store.

The fluctuations in the gas business over the last few years have already caused them to stop selling
hi-test, so I can't put gas in the Mini there anymore...

-Mike

[R J]

That is a good question, why do ya stop there and go through all that hassle?

I learned some time back to go to the bigger shops, like Quik Trip and avoid the Infinite, Star and etc that belong to the dude who wants to control the gas industry.   Chavez I believe is his name.

[lee]

Everyone should carry a few plastic grocery bags with them.  When there is a problem getting the
pump to work, just put a bag over the handle and leave.

[NiteRiderF6]

I had a similar situation a while back... the "community" station that is a couple of "city blocks" from my house, except it was in a rural area changed hands a few years ago... In the past, I bought 100% of my gasoline there.... not much else... but all gas was purchased there for my 3 cages, 2 bikes, chain saw, lawn mower, weed eater and other implements of yard destruction... The guy who owned it was a one armed gentleman who had my complete admiration and respect due to the fact that he lost his arm in WW II and had gone onto become a major success in the locksmithing trade... there was nothing that he couldn't open or make a perfect (one that works) key for. He was at the "station" from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. nearly full time for over the 30 years that I had known him with the exception of times when he would need to take small trips to unlock something, which never took him long, to church or to a funeral of a friend or customer that he had once again outlived. I had known this man since I was a small child and he was always the same person... happy, jovial even, always fair with everyone and always quick to happily pump any lady's gasoline through his antiquated Texaco pumps that only worked most times due to some well placed bailing wire and black tape, as well as washing their windshield and checking any tire that looked "low" . Many people frequented his station and he sold untold thousands of gallons of gasoline, other oil products and good will over the years. Good following, I'd say.

Chevron "merged" with Texaco and "the company" wanted my friend to spend upwards of $1,000,000 on renovations, building, concrete, electronic updates and customer convenience (food) items that "could optimize" his marketing efforts on behalf of "the company". My friend laughed in their faces, sold his stock to a competing station and went home.

The company went on to build a automobile sales arena that would look better in most any other place than the Shady Grove community. They lost many customers due to the changes and the way that they had treated my friend Johnnie, who had been their faithful and dutiful servant for over forty years. I drive right by that station nearly everyday to buy my gasoline and other purchases at a more acceptable station. There are many to choose from, the people from Shady Grove need not support the monster station that was erected for the wrong reasons. I doubt that their gasoline sales through those electronic and computerized pumps that are overlooked by closed circuit TV have ever rivaled the amounts that were once delivered through those old Texaco pumps that endured for so long on the small hill that is the center of our community. I don't care what company delivers the gas that we buy, service still outsells technology.

Johnnie went on to enjoy his unencumbered life as a locksmith and even took up politics, several times elected to be the county supervisor here in our locale. He's happy, I'm happy for him and Chevron still suffers on. Such is life.

[3fan4life]

Everyone should carry a few plastic grocery bags with them.  When there is a problem getting the
pump to work, just put a bag over the handle and leave.

  GREAT IDEA!!!! I LOVE IT!!!! 

[hubcapsc]

 * Chevron "merged" with Texaco and "the company" wanted my friend to spend upwards of $1,000,000 on renovations, building, concrete, electronic updates and customer
 * convenience (food) items that "could optimize" his marketing efforts on behalf of "the company". My friend laughed in their faces...

Same thing happened a few years ago at my country corner store (Ralph's Store)... Ralph laughed in their faces, kept his old pumps and his no-beer, and
started selling Marathon gas. I guess that's who still comes, there's no longer a gas affiliation sign at all at Ralph's, it's just "Ralph's"...

When gas first went up to and arm and a leg a few years ago, Ralph had to set the pump at half price and put out a sign that told
people they owed double what the pump said... the dials on the old mechanical pumps topped out at $2-something...

-Mike