Oops. Wrote this one a couple of weeks ago, but never got it posted.

Yahoo! Finance has an article, titled “When Gas Stations Run Out of Gas“, which highlights some of the problems that gas stations are facing with the current prices. Quick summary: with prices this high, consumers are bargain shopping more, so profit margins are tight. When the margins are this tight, the percentage of credit card transactions that are taken by credit companies is large enough that it causes the stations to actually lose money per gallon of gasoline.

Other service stations with a higher volume of credit-card sales say their fees add up to an average of 10¢ or 12¢ a gallon. What’s worse, says Mike Convey, a gasoline salesman for Tampa-based J.H. Williams Oil, is that most consumers are now paying with credit cards because the price to fill the tank has gotten so high. About four years ago, approximately 25% of the business at his company’s 20 or so filling stations was done with credit cards. Now about 75% of their gasoline is sold on credit, pushing up his firm’s credit-card costs.

Emphasis mine.

I can’t help thinking that the writer of this article is blaming high gas prices for all of the increase in credit-cart usage at the pump when there may be other factors at work as well:

• Pay-at-the-Pump convenience. Similarly, as pay-at-the-pump became a standard option, more people would choose to use their debit/credit cards instead of cash simply for convenience.
• Pre-pay inconvenience. Not only is pay-at-the-pump more convenient, but the option of pumping the gas and then walking in to pay the bill has been taken from us at most gas stations. If you’re planning to use cash, you’d be walking into the store anyway, so the added inconvenience may seem minimal, but I, for one, am reluctant to pre-pay because I suck at estimating how much gasoline my tank will hold. What if I walk in and give the cashier $40 only to discover that my tank was only able to hold $34.87? It’s easier to use the credit card and just settle up with the credit card company when I get home.
• Increased debit card prevalence. Over the last few years, as the number of places that accept them has increased, more and more people are using debit cards more and more often. I’m not 100% certain that debit cards carry the same per-transaction fee for retailers, but it seems to me that they’re run through the same networks, so I think it’s likely.

• Cash back benefits. This one may not matter to retailers so much, because they may get the fee waived on cards that share their chain’s branding, but every time I go to the pump lately, I see a form to apply for a credit card.

  In some cases (BP, for example), the offer is for up to 10% cash back on fuel purchases for the first six months. I spent $55 on gasoline this morning to fill up one of our two cars. Assume we fill up the tank four times a month, that’s $220 a month, or $1,320 in six months (and that’s not counting the money we spend filling up our other car). One hundred and thirty two dollars given to me for spending money that I would’ve spent anyway is a pretty powerful incentive for me to use a credit card at the pump.

  While that’s hardly typical of most cards (and it only works at one type of station, where, as I said, the retailer may not feel the bite as badly anyway on a branded card) even a much smaller incentive would give you some small relief at the pump, and if you have the discipline to pay the card off in full every month, it’s effectively “free” money.

While it’s very fair to say that the increased credit card usage at the gas station is having an adverse effect on the stations, it’s not so fair to blame every bit of that increased usage on the increased gas prices.

From what I understand of the ruling so far, I’m pretty pleased with the outcome of Heller vs. DC.

If I come up with anything I feel compelled it, I will, but right now, I’m going to leave it up to others who will (and have) cover(ed) it better than I could.

Quick reviews of the movies I’ve seen this summer so far:

• Iron Man: Great Superhero movie, and I’m looking forward to the sequel. 8/10
• Kung Fu Panda: This one was very funny. I enjoyed it a lot, though it my have benefitted from the fact that it was the very first movie I ever saw at a Drive In Theater. 7/10
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Entertaining, but not as good as the previous movies in the series. Well, not as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade, anyway. I think it was better than Temple of Doom. 7/10
• The Incredible Hulk: Much better than the first Hulk movie, and I think I even liked it slightly more than I did Iron Man. 8.5/10
• Get Smart: Steve Carell is no Don Adams, but, then, who is? I really loved this one. To be fair, I found myself laughing at quite a few things not so much because they were funny but because they were references to the old show, which I loved. 9/10

Later this summer, I plan to see Wall-E, Hancock, Hellboy II, The Dark Knight^[a], and The X-Files: I Want To Believe. There are a few others that we may go see, depending on our schedules (and funds — movies are expensive!).

1. Though, unlike Hellboy II, I get less excited with every Dark Knight preview I see. What I’ve seen of Ledger’s Joker hasn’t filled me with a lot of confidence, sadly. [↩]

Since we got back from our trip, I’ve noticed a bunch of red and white signs labeling various items around Charleston in both English and Spanish. I mentioned that I was a bit confused about what they were and that it bothered me^[a].

This morning, I got an e-mail with the subject line “Here’s your sign”, which linked to a Charleston Daily Mail article that explained everything:

City artists Amy Williams and Chris Dutch hung up the signs, which translate the names of Charleston landmarks and common street scenes into Spanish, as a special exhibit for FestivALL.

The city’s fourth annual arts and culture festival starts next week, but the “Press 2 for Spanish” installation was unveiled last week as a prelude to the 10-day event.

My curiosity appeased, I was content, until I got to the end of the article. It seems that some of the signs were removed by city maintenance, because workers didn’t know the signs were officially authorized.

What does that tell you? It tells me that the bureaucracy in city government isn’t particularly efficient at letting its employees have information that they need. The artists had a somewhat… different… take.

The artists are working on getting them put back up, but the mishaps sort of prove the point Williams and Dutch were trying to make.

“There’s a whole world out there, and in it, people speak all kinds of languages,” the artists’ statement says. “Yet many Americans only know English.”

That might make some sense if the signs said on them (in Spanish only), “These signs were officially approved by the City of Charleston^[b],” but they say nothing of the sort. Instead, they say things like, “La Farola / Street Light”, which gives no indication whatsoever to maintenance workers in the city that they should leave the signs alone.

The workers in this case were not motivated by the fact that they didn’t know a language other than English, nor were they acting out of some hostility toward another culture. They were, as far as they knew, doing their jobs by removing signs that they thought were not officially permitted to be placed on city property.

I’m not arguing that the artists’ point is invalid. Many Americans do only known English, and while I don’t think we should be required to know more languages, a better understanding of other cultures and languages is not a bad goal. I just don’t think that the removal of some signs by maintenance workers has anything to do with their point at all.

1. The signs themselves didn’t bother me, just that I didn’t understand why they’d suddenly showed up, nor why the items they labelled seemed to be random — traffic signals, fountains, ice cream shops… [↩]
2. Though, even then, it wouldn’t really mean much — the workers would have no way of knowing that the statement was true, even if they could read it [↩]

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely of the husband and do not necessarily reflect the views of the management.

We’re back from our honeymoon vacation, and I have internet set up. Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of work to do in organizing the house (and I need to do some rewiring for the cable/internet), so I’ve only got the laptop online at the moment. My PC and Xbox 360 are at the front of the house, the cable modem and wireless router are at the rear — since my laptop is the only networked device that uses wireless, it’s the only one online right now (though, I bet I could get the Wii connected, now that I think about it).

I will try to do some posting as I can, but should have everything wired up and ready to go soon, at which point I’ll get back to regular posting^[a].

1. Irregular posting, as Irishladdy was so kind as to point out, may be the more accurate term. [↩]