Sign of the apocalypse: One in a series

I didn't know until now that not only are there no self-serve gas stations in New Jersey and Oregon, you can't pump your own gas. (I've even driven in Oregon and don't remember that; perhaps I didn't stop for gas there on that trip.) And now a proposal by New Jersey's governor to allow some self-service stations along the state's turnpike as an experiment to see whether gas prices would fall has met with so much resistance, he's backed off. The reactions from some citizens:

It's a rainy morning at the Thomas A. Edison Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Lines of idling cars and trucks stretch through a Sunoco station. But for Ardis De Los Santos, there's at least one thing to smile about - she doesn't have to pump her own gas.

She used to live in New York, where she had no choice. But a move across the Hudson River to Englewood, N.J., freed her from the hassle. She likes it that way. "It's not my cup of tea," she says of filling her tank. "It's the smell."

. . .

Critics of a shift to self-service say pumping their own gas would be especially hard on the elderly, could create a safety hazard as inexperienced motorists try to fill their tanks and cost many station attendants their jobs while doing nothing to lower prices.

. . .

One morning this week, the price for regular at the Sunoco Station at the Thomas A. Edison Service Area, was $2.87 a gallon. Even so, Amanda Darian, 18, didn't think it would be worth pumping her own gas, even if it saved her 5 cents a gallon.

"A nickel? Nah," says Darian, a student at Monmouth University in West Long Branch.

Even though she's going to have to work more this summer to pay her gas tab, she says, "I just don't want to get out" of the car. She has been to other states, and when it came time to fill up, "I didn't even know how."

Louis Rivera, 29, an attendant who has worked at the Sunoco station for three years, says self-service could put "a lot of people ... out of jobs."

"Even some men don't want to get that smell on their clothes," says Angela Fields.

I can understand the concern that many people would be out of work. But first of all, the proposal was a test, at just a few stations along one road. Certainly the economic impact of a few stations losing a part of their staffs would have been negligible. (One angle the story did not address was what station owners think about the possible cost savings in labor.)

Others said the experiment might pose a safety hazard for inexperienced motorists. But if teenage novice drivers in the other 48 states can read a "flammable" sign and operate a pump, "inexperienced motorists" certainly can. And how many of those inexperienced motorists have never operated a gas pump outside of New Jersey? Likely very, very few.

But "it's the smell," and "just don't want to get out of the car"? I suspect this was the actual reason most people opposed the proposal. They may as well have said, "I just got my nails done." Those excuses certainly say a lot about this country. The story above also pointed out that a proposal to raise the state's sales tax by a penny received just a fraction of the response this proposal received. Heck, the student in the above story said she'd prefer to pay 5 cents more per gallon to have someone else hold the pump handle for her. Woe is us.