> I don't know what the party line is to justify the gas attendant rules.
Blatant employment protectionism. Every time it comes up on a ballot the "statement in favor" is always primarily employment protectionism. The arguments are generally of the form "if we allowed self service, nobody would pay for full service, and those jobs would go away".
As with many similarly obnoxious laws: Portland votes for it, the rest of Oregon votes against it, and Portland wins.
I figure this will change soon enough, now that $15 minimum wage laws are becoming popular causes in this neck of the woods. The broken-window fallacy is about to get really expensive for Oregonians.
All they need is a good advertising campaign. Another poster put the cost of a dedicated pumping employee at a 3.3% of fuel served. That's 11-12 cents per gallon in Oregon. Consumers would be all for that, assuming they knew about it (and could be confident it would be passed on to them.)
Who actually lobbies for it? I can't imagine that gas station attendants themselves have much sway, and I don't see why station owners would want to keep it that way.
Is it just regular old people in Portland who honestly believe it is best, even without any lobbying or propaganda?
People aren't smart. They like full-service, and they know it'd disappear if it wasn't the law. What they don't realise is that the reason it'd disappear is that they don't like it enough to pay extra for it.
The stations themselves might not be against full-service, either (at least away from state borders.) It's an extra cost, true, but it's paid by all of their competitors, too, so it just drives prices up. Demand is pretty inelastic, so profits aren't much affected. This might change with electric and fuel-efficient cars becoming more common, but it's hard to think long-term when you're selling oil.
Alternatively, it could be that people do like full service enough to pay for this, but act irrationally at the pump, not the ballot box. I.e. people undervalue their own comfort and do things themselves because the idea of paying more seems so objectionable.
This has occurred to me with airlines as well - we relentlessly optimise for cheap flights, and then complain that we're crammed in to tiny seats while flight attendants hawk duty free goods to us. Maybe we'd actually be happier if the cheapest flights were actually 50% more expensive and nicer, even though that's not what we choose.
Cool idea. Reading your post I thought, "This is obviously wrong," but it's growing on me the more I think about it (making it the best kind of comment to read.)
I experience the same thing with charitable giving. While I think I give a reasonable-ish amount out of pocket compared to most people, I absolutely don't give enough to match my ideals - fundamentally, the money is there, in my pocket, and it's hard to part with. On the other hand, at the ballot box, I always vote for parties that tend more redistributive (and since I earn decently, likely to raise my taxes). It's a much easier decision to make when there's that degree of separation.
Shouldn't you vote for the party that's best for the less-well off, and not the one that most redistributive? (OK, if you are eg in the US, there's not that much choice in the first place.)
I live in the UK, which like the US has serious problems with income gaps and class mobility. When I say redistributive, I should clarify that I don't just mean 'here poor person, have some money', but more that I would aim towards a more Scandinavian-style economy, where more money/effort is spent on social programs.
There are a couple of petrol stations near me that have recently started offering optional attendant service at peak periods, for no extra charge. This has been some time coming, I must say; last time I saw attendant service, it was probably the mid 1980s, and that petrol station was famous for being the only place in town that offered it. But anyway - even if it's got rid of, it may yet come back.
(I have no idea what's caused this. My personal theory is that it improves throughput at busy periods; many UK petrol stations have closed over the past 10-15 years due to the wafer-thin profit margins so those that are left can often get quite busy. But that's just a guess.)
Laurent himself replied to that blog post saying the bug was resolved in RM v1.20. What's the difference between RM-3 and what that post describes? They read very similar to me.
