Dan "So this is 50" Pierce
AaronGas stations about to have a Y2K problem when prices exceed $9.99 9/10
Tom Harrington
Andrew@atomicbird @benaar @tjw I still remember gas stations who just painted a 1 in front of their price displays on the pumps. Late 90’s took care of the last of that.
@ii_infinitum @benaar @tjw I remember them setting the pumps to half of the price per gallon and then doubling that when people paid. (There were of course no automated payment systems then, always had to pay a person)
Rainer Tenhunen@benaar simple solution: switch to metric units and you can divide the prices by ~3.8
Kim Possible 
@benaar oh yeah. It had not occurred to me.
Baloo Uriza@benaar I'm old enough to remember when they struggled with $1 on mechanical pumps, and they fixed it by using a "1" sticker and changing the mechanism slightly.
Which is stupid when the correct answer was "stop selling gas in gallons and start using liters like normal people".
Mark Whybird@BalooUriza @benaar I’m old enough to remember George Bush (snr.)’s Gulf war in 1990 very suddenly pushing prices above $1/litre in remote parts of Australia for the first time, and fuel stations hitting that limit in their mechanical pumps for the first time. (In less remote areas, it peaked at around 80¢/litre at that time.)
@whybird That was around the time the US passed $1/gal. I have living childhood memory of 69.9¢/gal regular (leaded) gasoline, and 84.9¢/gal unleaded.
The two lowest prices I've ever paid for gas would be CA19.4¢/l in Vancouver, BC in the late 1990s, and (thanks to an idiot running the station incorrectly setting the pumps) US8.8¢/gal in Tulsa a decade ago (it would have been $8.888 if I used a Walmart discount card).
@BalooUriza @benaar All good; in general, it’s not a post from me if there aren’t at least three edits needed.
*Checks this reply three times before pressing send…*
@BalooUriza @benaar Love that discount story!
I’m reminded of that guy who couldn’t get his telco to understand that when they quoted “zero point 25 cents” or whatever it was for a cost that was not the same as quoting “$0.25”.
@whybird Also depending on where you bank and where you spend your money you might actually wind up with your bank account denominated in mils. As happened to me when I was running my own trucking company as a sole proprietor, and both PetroCanada and Pacific Pride were billing me in mils, so after I was done with that, my bank account always ended in an effectively unspendable 7₥ for years, since it's legal to round to the nearest cent on wire transactions here.
@BalooUriza @benaar I’ve not heard of mils used that way before. In AU, while you can use whatever you like in calculating the amounts, all billing, banking and electronic transactions round to the nearest cent, and all cash transactions round to the nearest 5¢, and this has been the case for a long time.
Here’s that telco case I mentioned: https://youtu.be/nUpZg-Ua5ao
The Most Frustrating Customer Service Call of All Time
@whybird There's rules for rounding but the choice whether or not to round is up to the seller and the buyer, with the tiebreaker being what's customary (4 down, 5 up; mils get rounded to the nearest cent, nothing else rounds). With Republicans eliminating the penny without implementing a plan, cash transactions are increasingly becoming Interesting here to say the least.
@BalooUriza @benaar That’s just the multiplier per kilobyte. The actual amount in question was $71+ vs. 71¢. He eventually wound up paying nothing and, importantly, getting Verizon, institutionally, to seem to understand the difference.
Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥
Casper 👻
Michael Cook@caspercdn @benaar Quarts would be easier. Litres would cause people’s heads to explode.
Honestly quarts probably would too.
@foobarsoft @caspercdn @benaar when I go to America I just say “floz” to rhyme with “floss” and go “what? what did I say?” 😝
Golden Bunny of Destiny 🕯@caspercdn @benaar There was at least one gas station in Memphis TN that did just that: switched the pumps from gallons to liters and priced accordingly
dxzdb
Reid
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@benaar no, it's fine. i remember when this happenned in the uk they just pasted up sticky "1" to the left of the price ticker.
Ned Holbrook@benaar Plus ça change… https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/nyregion/15four.html
aburka 🫣@aburka @benaar Why did that start? It’s unique to US petrol, not just petrol
(Oh and if we want to discuss “gas vs petrol” then I’m going to pivot into why we don’t measure energy in megajoules like we do with methane gas, and somehow got stuck with kilowatt-hours for some forms of energy, even mixing them on the same bill)
@whophd @benaar (I mean it's bad enough that "gas" is a liquid, but anyway)
supposedly it's because of a flat tax back in the 30s https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-do-gas-prices-always-have-9-10-of-a-cent-added-to-the-price/ar-AA1MQ8Rz
it is just on gas though? other goods never have fractional cents pricing. unless you're just talking about the general practice of pricing things at $9.99, is that uncommon in other places?
Druid
Demallien
Robert A. Hill@benaar I have bad news from the future: we will just move to $/quart
JohnOCFII@benaar @siracusa I was a senior in high school at first “real” part-time job at a full-service gas station when prices went up over 99 cents a gallon.(1980-1981 timeframe). We set the pump price to the price per 1/2 gallon, and then had to double the amount to charge the customers. Worst part was — at home I had a digital clock, and I’d look at the display, (say, 9:15 am) and immediately double it to think it was 18:30 … ;)
CrankyOldBugger 
@JohnOCFII @benaar @siracusa I can remember when it hit 99.9 per gallon. The solution was for the market to switch to metric instead.
Only a temporary solution, though, as it's now $1.80 per litre.
Only a temporary solution, though, as it's now $1.80 per litre.
packeteer@packeteer @crankyoldbugger @JohnOCFII @benaar @siracusa wow, I can see how ending the fuel levy indexation after the days of $1/litre helped not at all — we used to have much more expensive fuel than the USA but it does nothing except remove funding for roads
Wayne Robinson@benaar @chockenberry could switch to per Litre like a civilised nation.
Craig Hockenberry
Fan of Shared Truth & Empathy@benaar @CosmicTraveler I’m old enough to remember some gas station that had a permanent $1.xx sign because nobody imagined having to change more than the last two numbers.
RevK 
Coq
Bassano
Rupert Reynolds@benaar Those 9/10 can go! Nobody needs 5 significant figures in a fuel price.
Will the display show ”1001” instead? If it can't do a decimal point, I'm sure they can put a sticker on the sign :-)