Pluggers by Rick McKee for January 09, 2012

All for 14.9 cents a gallon. Bought a dollors worth at a time for the not so old ’27 Nash..

I’m a plugger for sure, loved the green stamps

Every fill-up could get you a plate or cup until you had a full dinner set. Everyone in town had the same dishes. With jelly jar drinking glasses.

What plugger never had jars for drinking glasses?

I furnished my first apartment with Green Stamps!

I actually remember green stamps – and gas being $.99 a gallon – seems like soooo long ago!!!

I actually still have some cereal bowls that I got in the early 70’s at the service station.

Gas pumps only had 3 digit displays and registered a max of $9.99. When gas “climbed” to .65 a gallon they started charging by the half-gallon and had to multiply the result by 2. Some of those good ‘ol boys down in Georgia had a hard time figgerin’ out what to charge y’all. (“Let’s see. $8.76 times 2… carry the 1…”)

Don’t forget the free maps and windshield washes.

and when you get 20 gallons for five buck and not 5 gallons for 20 bucks

i can remember gas lines during the two shortages in the 1970’s. the shortages were probably a conspiracy. I pushed my car with the engine off to save gas. lucky for me I had a Honda Civic .

Glasses with gas, dishes and dish towels in boxes of “Duz” laundry soap. “Duz does everything”. LOL

I worked part time in high school at a “service station” in the mid 50’s. I remember all of the above…..plus free air.

I remember driving my grandmothers 1969 Rambler American(yeah I’m a plugger)down the highway to Chattanooga from Rockwood and finding a gas station that had a gas war on.Gas was at that time 39.9 per gallon;this station was 20.9 per gallon.this was 1972.

about $.18/gal in Northern CA. in the 50s/60s….

Boy how times have changed

thesource: Conspiracy theories are so ubiquitous that it has made us forget that conspiracies do exist. The best documented (in court) was General Motors, Firestone, and Shell buying up transit companies, destroying street cars, and replacing them with their bus products.

I was working at the Vancouver Maritime Museum during the “Arab oil boycott”. There I saw Lloyd’s Shipping Gazette. More Persian Gulf was shipped from there to the US during the boycott than the previous year. Yet Canada could only get OPEC oil from Nigeria, Venezuela, and Indonesia – none Arab nor Persian Gulf. Oil field pumps were idle in the usual percentages in the US during this time. The running joke was that it would end when there was no more storage facilities in the US. Even mothballed naval ships were used for storage. Sure enough, when all that ran out, the “boycott” ended.

I worked part time at a gas station in the 50s too. In addition to all the previously listed free services we got to clean up the front floors of the cars we filled up with a whisk broom and dustpan.

My mom would look in her cupboard to see what she needed before we went out to get gas. My folks would use green stamps to buy stuff from a catalog for the house and Christmas.

Nobody ever does the math, like 3% inflation for 64 years is 663.1%, so gas then should be $49 cents, but it was less. For $3.39 gas up from $.149 is 22.75, and for 64 years, that’s 5% a year, a bit steep, but with all the depletion, demand, competition and world population, there is room for it to get harder, whereas growing crops would not get harder over the years, well except for soil dpeletion, . . . .

my last lot of petrol (gas) cost £1.29per litre, say 5 litres to the gallon – you work it out.

Oregon has a law that no one can pump their own gas. You go to a gas station there and there’s an attendant to pump it for you. I think every state should follow Oregon’s example. It would put people to work, that’s for sure.

TRIPLE Green Stamps on Tuesdays! Yep, every nice thing in our first home came from Green Stamps. I remember when Mr Plugger went down to the train station to pick up the chair I ordered from the Green Stamps catalog. It came in a carton, no UPS in those days. I also remember how much every one of those possessions meant to me. Not like these days when you walk out of a grocery store with a receipt for more than a house payment was back when. I swear, we appreciated every single thing more than we do now.

Am I the onliest one who misses those days,,I say nay nay

my dad while he was alive used to tell use what happened while he worked at a gas station.before him and any other could ask you what gas and how much. they had to check the oil, clean your windows, wipe down the edge of the wiper blades and a few other things.

Gas stations don’t even have attendants anymore – It’s all paid up front. I remember all the hand wringing going on when the news said gas may go up to $1.00 a Gal.!!!